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| Nancy Pelosi |
Your mother used to tell you, whenever you slipped out of
your groove, “Watch your manners!” And Bill Buckley reminds us that the trouble
with bad manners is that they sometime lead to murder.
Manners have taken a beating in modern times. Some, mostly
bad mannered Democrats, will place the devolution of manners on Trump alone,
but the death of manners has been a long time coming. Good manners have died the death of a thousand cuts.
Twice Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi and President
Donald Trump have been kicking each other in the shins for the entirety of the
Trump administration. Now Trump has fallen ill with Coronavirus, which looms
large in the Democrat imagination, right up there with the Black Death. Pelosi,
about whom her daughter once said “She’ll cut your throat, and you won’t even
know you’re bleeding,” has invited us all to pray for the President’s health,
according to an Associated Press story.
What curses the lady may have uttered in private is, of
course, a matter between herself, her conscience and her God, but people who
pay attention to Pelosi’s solicitudes will have noticed that the lady added to
her prayer what the lawyers would call a codicil, caught in the title of the AP
story: “Nancy
Pelosi says she’s praying for Trump and hopes COVID-19 infection might be
‘learning experience.’”
“This is tragic. It is very
sad. Let us all pray for the President’s health,” Pelosi
said on MSNBC. Though she had been at arm’s length from the president both
ideological and socially, Pelosi said she had been tested for Coronavirus “from a sense of
caution” and was awaiting the results of her test.
Despite the planted axiom, it
is unlikely Pelosi could have contracted Coronavirus from
personal contact with Trump. In a spirit of Christian charity and good manners,
let us pray that her tests will prove negative.
Pelosi, political
considerations arising in her breast, could not forbear a warning that it was
Trump’s “brazen behavior” that allowed “something like this to happen.”
“Brazen behavior” is, of
course, a reference to Trump’s disinclination to being masked on all public occasions. Democrat
presidential nominee Joe Biden, who has hunkered down and avoided clamorous rallies
since his nomination, is not similarly afflicted with brazenness.
And Governor Ned Lamont,
Connecticut’s Coronavirus Czar, is the very opposite of brazen, as understood
by Pelosi. One can easily imagine him wearing a mask in the shower. Among
Democrat politicians in Connecticut, mask wearing has become a ritualistic
virtue on a par, in former days, with abortion denunciations.
Lamont has threatened nutmeggers
with substantial fines should they go unmasked in public, imposed
self-quarantine on travelers entering Connecticut from Coronavirus afflicted
states, which all but destroyed business at Bradley International Airport, closed
all schools in Connecticut – although school closure is still a work in
progress – cut the clientele of restaurants in the state by half, and reduced
job production in Connecticut by 33 percent in the last reported quarter.
But Lamont religiously wears
his mask on public occasions when watchful reporters are present. To be seen in
public without a mask is, for Democrat politicians, a viler crime than to be
seen exhorting taxes from Connecticut’s tax beleaguered public, or condemning
African American children in cities to an inferior education by opposing successful
charter schools, or perversely refusing to acknowledge the connection between
coronavirus policies and the state’s economic nose dive.
“Connecticut’s
economy shrank by nearly one-third in the spring as businesses closed during
the worst of the coronavirus” a headline in a Hartford paper screeched as October opened.
“Screeched” may be the wrong
word -- well then, “whispered.” One does not expect to find the “one-third”
figure featured prominently in media releases issued by Czar Lamont, whose
plenary powers, recently extended for an additional five months by a rump
legislature dominated by Democrats, allows the governor to adjust economic
factors at will, introducing the demon of uncertainty into the state’s
faltering economy. Connecticut
journalism, sycophantic as usual towards Democrat progressives and the party in
power, is roughly 10 percent thought and 90 percent repetition, and damaging figures of this kind will not be repeated in future stories.
Trump has conceded a point on
mask wearing to his critics. “I get it,” the President wrote in a tweet
remarkably free of invective. It is doubtful whether the mask wearing Lamont
yet “gets” the connection between his state’s faltering economy and his own
plenary edicts.
A recent business survey
undertaken by the Connecticut Business and Industry Association (CBIA)
shows only one-fourth of the 6,600 firms surveyed expect to see growth in sales
in the next year. Two thirds, according to a Hartford paper, “said they foresee a drop in orders and sales
this year because of COVID-19 disruptions and fewer than half expect a return
to profit this year. The CBIA called that a ‘historic low’ in its annual
survey.”
But the eupeptic Lamont senses a bottom beneath this bottom. Asked
about the survey results, Lamont enthused, “… the economy will never come back
if public health is not front and center. The business community, he said,
"knows we’re still in a COVID economy and they’re somewhat hesitant.”
Actually, they are hesitant to remain closed in accordance with
Lamont’s shifty dictates.
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