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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