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| Blumenthal and DeLauro |
To impeach or not to impeach? That is the question?
Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi has
said no. And US Representative Rosa DeLauro, congresswoman for life in the
impregnable 3rd District in New Haven County, last held by a Republican 36
years ago, has seconded the motion. DeLauro has occupied her seat, unruffled by
Republican challengers, for 28 years.
DeLauro is married to Stan Greenberg, a pollster and
consultant whose opinions on things Democrat are held in high esteem by Democrats
DeLauro invites to their plush digs in Washington DC. Who says you can’t enrich
yourself supping at the public trough?
Greenberg wrote in the Atlantic in 1998, the year the US House impeached
President Bill Clinton, that the Republican Party was on the point of collapse
because it had been, “trapped by the history it has created… Conservative
parties became ascendant because voters scorned the center-left, liberal, and
socialist parties that could not manage the transition to a modern
post-industrial society.”
In a more recent piece in Politico, “Democrats Are Veering Left: It Might Just
Work,” Greenberg opposes Greenberg’s earlier view: “’Candidates
who look like they are cautious, modulating, have their foot on the brake, are
missing the moment,’ said veteran Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, who is
coming out later this summer with a book on how both parties have been
refashioned in the Trump era.
Politico tells us, “The moment, according to Greenberg's
polling and focus-group work, has left voters of all stripes clamoring for
disruption. Cultural and ideological currents in society—more profound than any
given day's Trump uproars—are giving progressives a better opportunity than
they have had in decades to play offense.”
What better way to play offense than by being offensively
disruptive – the more disruptive the better? And what better way to disrupt
than by dangling over the head of Trump a richly deserved Damoclean Sword of
impeachment? If presidents could be impeached for bad manners, the guy would be
gone tomorrow.
Do not impeach, says wife DeLauro, echoing Pelosi. It is one
thing to impeach, an effort that cannot be successful since Republicans control
the Senate – for the time being -- and quite another thing to talk-up
impeachment. The arrow must not leave the quiver because, if it is shot, it
cannot hit the target, and failure in politics can never be regarded as a
measure of success. Historians so not wink at failed coup d’états. But the possibility
of impeachment, if not unsuccessfully waged, is a potent campaign weapon.
Then too, Trump may always be relied upon to snatch defeat
from the jaws of victory, by twittering a point to death. The truth is neither
he nor anyone in his administration had colluded with Vladimir Putin’s spooks
to deprive Hillary Clinton of the presidency. So saith the Delphic Oracle of
impeachment, special prosecutor Robert Mueller, in his much thumbed magnum
opus. The collusion horse is a dead horse, and the obstruction of justice horse
is limping badly. A prequel to the fanciful collusion narrative, now under
investigation by John Durham may
send both horses to the glue factory.
Durham cannot be as easily dismissed by Connecticut’s U.S.
Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy as were Supreme Court justice
nominees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Durham, who bagged crooked cops in
Boston and sent former Connecticut Governor John Rowland to the hoosegow for
the second time, was recommended for the position of U.S. Attorney for the District
of Connecticut by both senators, and Blumenthal was
effusive in his praise of Durham: “I know John Durham well, having
known and worked with him over many years. He is a no-nonsense, fierce, fair
career prosecutor. He knows what it means to try some of the toughest cases
against career criminals. He knows what it means to try to stop the opioid
crisis in this country. He knows what organized crime does to the fabric of our
society. He is exactly the kind of person we should have in this position.”
In the meantime, DeLauro and Pelosi are risking the enmity
of the four horsewomen of the Democrat political apocalypse, the so called “Squad”:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York,
Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of
Michigan. These four are of less consequence in the long run than the lurch to
the left of the Democrat Party. The sudden move towards radical progressivism
now on stage at the Democrat presidential primaries has left moderate Democrats
and many unaffiliateds stranded on an Island occupied by ancient has-beens such
as Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Rosa DeLauro, all of whom are replaceable – in the
long run.
In the short run, radical progressives have been put on a
short tether. But it will not be long here in Connecticut, the canary in the
progressive minefield, before Blumenthal and Murphy feel comfortable enough to
wink at the destruction of the state’s insurance industry and the utter destruction
of the nation’s smelly capitalist orthodoxies under the hammer blows of Ocasio-Cortez’s
Green New Deal. It’s only a matter of time.
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