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Looney vs. Lamont

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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