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| Jefferson |
The title of the story in a Hartford paper -- buried on page
seven, where news goes to die -- may be troublesome to many in Connecticut: “Biden win could mean less defense spending
for state.”
The defense industry in Connecticut has been a vibrant part
of the state’s economy and, consequently, a money producer for the state budget
since the American Revolution. Then and now, Connecticut, bursting at the seams
with defense related manufacturers such as Sikorsky and Pratt&Whitey and Raytheon
Technologies, formerly United Technologies, remains “The Provision State.”
U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, fresh from his Stakhanovite effort to deep-six Judge
Amy Coney Barrett’s elevation to the U.S. Supreme Court, remains unruffled.
He’s visited this treacherous political turf many times during his lengthy
political career.
“I envision a serious skeptical scrutiny of our defense
budget that will eliminate some of the waste or less effective programs,” said
a phlegmatic Blumenthal..
Military procurement during the eight years of the
Obama/Biden administration was considerably reduced so that national Democrats
might shuttle Pentagon dollars into inflated and, conservatives at the time
insisted, socially destructive social programs. A “lead from behind president” pursuing
a “lead from behind foreign policy” certainly had no need of military
procurements.
The story’s lede reads: “Record defense spending, which has been
a durable support for Connecticut manufacturers, could begin to decline if Joe
Biden is elected President and diverts Pentagon money to COVID-19 recovery
efforts and restoring the economy.”
Among progressive Democrats, the way to restore a crippled
economy is to increase taxes, crippling it further, and then redistribute entrepreneurial
capital to “fix” the problems they have created.
Judging from recent polling data, which shows President Donald
Trump lagging 5 to 8 percentage points behind former Vice President Joe Biden,
it appears the country may have a new president following the elections, as
well as a new Vice President in Kamala Harris, whose progressive voting record
is stronger than that of socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
Clamoring in the wings are social radicals such as Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, the Trotsky of the New Green Deal Democrat Party. The chief underlying
supposition among anti-Trumpists at the still revered New York Times is that
Biden will be moderate and pragmatic enough to fend off the grosser political pretentions
of leftists born with knives in their brains. And, of course, the Democrat
Party platform, which had received the imprimatur of Sanders and other American
disturbers of the peace, will quickly and painlessly be consigned to the
dustbin of history.
Other assumptions are that, dog whistling having fallen out
of fashion, ANTIFA will refrain from tossing Molotov Cocktails at police stations;
statues of Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington will at last be safe from graffiti
artists who have parked their brains in the Black Lives Matter movement; Columbus statues
will have been decapitated enough; tax monies will be shifted from an outdated “cold
warrior” military war machine to urban social programs; bright, new progressive
activists will be added to the U.S. Supreme Court as directed by New York
Senator Chuck Schumer; the electoral college that stands as an obstacle in the
way of political dominance by large east and west coast cities will be
abolished, assuring a permanent Democrat Party presence in Washington DC, somewhat
like that enjoyed by Democrats in Connecticut; greedy insurance companies will
be replaced by empathetic Democrat politicians in DC who know far more about insurance
coverage than insurance writers in Connecticut whose jobs will be replaced by political
hucksters such as U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal; and sporting rifles, which have
caused such social havoc in large cities across the nation, will quickly disappear
like frost touched by a morning sun.
And finally, the Little Sisters of the Poor will get their richly
deserved comeuppance. No one in the new administration or among future court
packers, we may be sure, will ever quote from Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Ursuline nuns in New Orleans.
Upon the purchase by Jefferson of the Louisiana Territory from a cash strapped Napoleon,
the nuns feared they would lose their independence under a new United States
administration. Jefferson’s letter is printed here unedited in its entirety:
From
Thomas Jefferson to Ursuline Nuns of New Orleans, 13 July 1804
13 July 1804
To the Soeur Therese
de St. Xavier farjon Superior, and the Nuns of the order of St. Ursula at New
Orleans
I have received, holy
sisters, the letter you have written me wherein you express anxiety for the
property vested in your institution by the former governments of Louisiana. The
principles of the constitution and government of the United States are a sure
guarantee to you that it will be preserved to you sacred and inviolate, and
that your institution will be permitted to govern itself according to its own
voluntary rules, without interference from the civil authority. Whatever
diversity of shade may appear in the religious opinions of our fellow citizens,
the charitable objects of your institution cannot be indifferent to any; and
it’s furtherance of the wholesome purposes of society, by training up its
younger members in the way they should go, cannot fail to ensure it the
patronage of the government it is under. Be assured it will meet all the
protection which my office can give it.
I salute you, holy
sisters, with friendship & respect.
Th: Jefferson
In respect of
religious constitutional rights, none of the members of Connecticut’s all
Democrat US Congressional Delegation are Jeffersonians.
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