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Plunkitt’s Connecticut


Former West Haven State lawmaker Michael DiMassa is only the latest Connecticut politician to have been caught with his paws in the cookie jar. Apparently, DiMassa never made the acquaintance of George Washington Plunkitt, a New York Tammany Hall leader, who said way back when “honest graft” was a staple of American politics, “The politician who steals is worse than a thief. He is a fool. With all the grand opportunities around for the man with political pull, there’s no excuse for stealin’ a cent.”

Sadly true – even today, perhaps especially today, when some honest grafter politicians are lawyers acquainted with all the legal snares.

Both Speaker of the US House Nancy Pelosi and US. Representative Rosa DeLauro are millionairessess several times over. Pelosi and DeLauro have spent much of their lives in politics making money and steering business to their husbands. Others in the U.S. Congress have become millionaires by playing the stock market on the side – all legal and allowable pursuits, CBS News reported in 2012.

If you are a post Tammany Hall American politician, grand opportunistic temptations are plentiful and, if you are not a fool, there’s no excuse for stealin’ a cent.

General Ulysses Grant, who won the Civil War and later became President, retired from the presidency poor. Were it not for some assistance from Mark Twain, Grant might have died burdened with debt in a pauper’s grave. Grant recovered from debt by completing, just before he died, a splendid biography and account of the Civil War, much more valuable to historians than any of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s tendentious productions.

No one told inept West Haven state lawmaker Michael DiMassa about the grand legal opportunities by which politicians enter the profession poor, serve a few decades in office, and emerge multi-millionaires.Young and foolish, he was impatient or, some news stories indicate, perhaps a victim of a gambling neurosis.

In the past few decades, Connecticut has become a prime gambling oasis. If gambling were still illegal, as was the case in the bad old mob days of Anthony "Tony" Volpe, the last gangster to control greater Hartford's once-booming, now-moribund gambling and extortion rackets, the FBI probably would have collared quite a few Connecticut political gangsters by now. But, of course, gambling in Connecticut, now controlled by upstanding politicians, is perfectly legal --provided they are given a rake-off of the proceeds -- although the General Assembly continues to wrestle with associated “problems.” The Democrat dominated body, with winks and nods from Governor Ned Lamont, recently has expanded gambling opportunities. However, it has, at the same time, made strenuous efforts to mitigate gambling addiction. DiMassa may have fallen through the cracks.

Legalized gambling has put Volpe and other mob activists out of business. Some legislators hope to do the same with once illegal marijuana. At some point in the not too distant future, enterprising politicians may want to capture the market in “legalized” prostitution. Taxing formerly illegal and immoral activity has become a profitable means of filling state treasuries emptied by politicians addicted to spending.

Once the previously illegal mob has become a legal mob, illegal mobsters may be driven overseas, along with American corporations that have transformed China from a Marxist to a capitalist-loving, state controlled fascist operation.

On the grand scale of things, DiMassa is a minnow. The large fish – President Joe Biden’s wayward son Hunter, for instance, his daddy’s breadbasket and now an artiste --  usually shake the hook. Inhumane clods such as Maximum Leader Xi Jinping fall into the tender arms of presidential diplomats, while the DiMassas of the world fall into the ragged jaws of a politically compromised FBI. And the world marches on.

Even corruption has lost its sting. Political chatterers are wondering whether DiMassa’s peculations will cause other Democrats in West Haven to founder at the polls.

This likely will not happen. The Democrat juggernaut in Connecticut does not march forward in moral bedroom slippers. Numbers matter in politics, and the loyal opposition has been skunked by Democrats for two reasons: it is loyal to the established power, and it does not know how to campaign for office. The Republican Party is also broke because, out of power for decades, it has not been able to wrest money from the captains of industry who so willingly put their necks into nooses held out to them by the kind of revolutionists who once boasted that bourgeois capitalists would give to their proletarian hangmen the rope necessary for mass hangings.

That rope is being woven even now by so called “tribunes of the people” in Connecticut and the nation who quake at the prospect that contrarian opinion might invade their inner sanctums. Joseph Pulitzer, after whom the Pulitzer Prize is named, used to say that “a newspaper should have no friends,” a dictum long  abandoned in favor of a sickening complicity with the reigning power.

And what of Thomas Jefferson? Booted off the Connecticut Democrat Party's "Jefferson, Jackson, Bailey" marquee years ago, Jefferson claimed that if liberty in the future were to be lost and only a truly free press were to remain, he would not doubt that the American Republic would be quickly reconstituted. But then Jefferson was, our postmodern anti-democrat cancel-history community keeps telling us, an outmoded simpleton who owned slaves.

Perhaps they are right.




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