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| Looney |
Martin Looney, President Pro Tem of the State Senate, and Governor Ned Lamont are engaged in a battle of metaphors.
Lamont pulled his support for the Transportation and Climate
Initiative (TCI) on Tuesday, and then, receiving some pushback from
Green New Dealers in Connecticut, added an important codicil.
Lamont, the CTExaminer tells us, attempted to
walk back his comments the following day, “saying he would sign the bill if
lawmakers passed TCI this session,” at which point Looney offered a telling
metaphor, after announcing that the TCI legislation would “obviously not” be
introduced in the Senate, over which Looney presides as a legislative
gatekeeper.
Looney told reporters, “The operative statement is the one he gave
yesterday,” withdrawing his support for TCI legislation. “This is of course a
gubernatorial initiative. Without the governor advocating for this, pushing for
it, it clearly can’t happen, because with an issue like this, you can’t lead
from the rear.”
That expression, “lead from the rear” points backwards to
the administration of “lead from behind” President Barack Obama, whose foreign
policy some found anemic, but not so anemic as to cause Obama to deliver
Afghanistan to a bunch of Sunni Islamic enthusiasts who want to extirpate Shia Muslims, imprison women in burkas, drive them from schools and the workplace,
without so much as a murmur of disapproval from women’s rights groups in
Connecticut, and spread as much chaos as possible during the administration of
President Biden, who has not yet – everyone should cross their fingers –
surrendered Taiwan to Chinese Communists or Ukraine to Russian Communists.
In essence, despite Lamont’s demurral, Looney was saying that
TCI, which would impose taxes and other charges on companies that did not respond
positively to TCI impositions, could not succeed in Connecticut without
vigorous support from Lamont.
Looney is a progressive, the support of TCI has become a
litmus test for progressives attempting to weed out Democrats insufficiently
supportive of the global war on fossil fuel, and Lamont is here throwing the
proverbial wrench in the TCI rhetorical machinery.
Lamont has retreated behind what he regards as a prudent and
pragmatic policy, but Looney evidently believes that the Governor should be
marching into history with TIC's wings on his heels, while the Coronavirus crisis and
Lamont’s extraordinary, extra-constitutional powers are yet with us.
Democrats have always taken seriously former Obama advisor Rahm
Emanuel's advice – “never let a crisis go to waste.”
Speaking to ABC’s This
Week on Sunday, Emanuel reprised his 2008 catchphrase. “Never allow
a crisis to go to waste,” he spouted. “Start planning for the future. This [the
Coronavirus hobgoblin] has to be the last pandemic that creates an economic
depression. We're going to have more pandemics, but this has to be the last
economic depression.”
Looney, no doubt, would quibble with the expression “economic
depression.” How on earth can the premature elimination of fossil fuels by
governmental edict, the banning of fracking on federal land, the repeal of the
fabled Canada-US oil sands gas pipeline, the piling up of the national debt
through improvident – and apparently endless – taxing and spending, the
issuance of funny money to defer taxation temporarily to pay for the wild and ungovernable
Biden-Bernie Sanders spending spree, the increases in energy costs brought
about by federal support induced worker shortages and a consequent increase in
both the cost of labor and the crisis Emanuel finds indispensable for exponential growth in
government – how can any or all of this possibly lead to an economic
depression? The gross federal debt is only $28 trillion dollars. Connecticut's equivalent debt is $68 billion.
In 1999, the Bill Clinton White House boasted “that the
Office of Management and Budget and the Department of the Treasury have
released figures showing the largest budget surplus and the largest pay-down of
debt in history. The President urged Congress to keep our nation on course by
passing his budget plan that protects Social Security, pays down the debt, and
meets the nation's priorities in the areas of education, health care, crime,
and the environment.”
Clinton, a John F. Kennedy liberal, may have been the last economically
astute Democrat to have worried over-much about debt and national insolvency.
The Biden communication conglomerate is still insisting that
we are not in the midst of a recession, even though the costs of goods and
services have exponentially increased, worker shortages have cropped up everywhere,
and the Feds are printing more money. The classic definition of a recession is:
too many dollars chasing too few goods. And haven’t we passed that barrier some
time ago?
Looney may plead that he is not an economist, but rather a
lawyer free to engage in progressive impossibilities. But then, the essence of
postmodern progressivism is to increase problems by forcing through the legislative pipeline solutions that worsen
the problems – and don’t let them go to waste! If on this one point alone,
Looney is Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, then Lamont may be Senator Joe Manchin of
West Virginia, the implacable enemy of progressive fabulists.
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