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Coventry RTC Keynote


We are coming together this evening to say a few words about Abraham Lincoln, the father of the modern Republican Party. I also want to touch on the dangerously inept Biden administration and the political prospects for Connecticut Republicans in the 2022 off-year presidential elections. But first things first: Lincoln, then Biden, then Connecticut politics.

Lincoln

In the matter of Slavery, Jim Crow and Civil Rights legislation, The Republican Party has nothing to apologize for. Since Lincoln was the president who abolished slavery following a bloody Civil War he prosecuted successfully in due course, one hopes that Lincoln statues across the nation will be relatively safe from vandals who have assaulted Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

Of course, in the postmodern world, one never knows. Such is the vile passion of self-affirming malcontents that we should not be surprised if in the near future they lay violent hands on the statues of Fredrick Douglas, the ex-slave and pamphleteer who had done far more to end systemic racism in the United States than, say, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York or Nancy Pelosi of California, the two Democrat leaders in the U.S. Congress.

Before Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address, he shared his pending remarks with Douglas. Portions of that speech were later engraved – by a woman artist, as it happened – on the north wall of the Lincoln Memorial. Even today, they startle:

Fondly do we hope -- fervently do we pray -- that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'”

Forty one days after Lincoln said these words, he was assassinated by insurrectionist John Wilkes Booth who, most modern scholars believe, was in attendance at the inaugural.

Douglas, we may be sure, approved of Lincoln’s just and severe language. And it should be recalled that the Reverend Martin Luther King chose this honored spot, the Lincoln memorial, to deliver his “I Have a Dream Speech.”

But little today meets the approval of historical anarchists. I can only conjecture that the historical and cultural anarchists of the silly postmodern period may be God’s judgment on an unheeding American population too full of politically ignorant billionaires, academics -- who always say more than they know and know far less than they say -- and politicians who love to stroke the beast that soon, by the grace of God, may destroy them. Sensible people pray that 2022 will see the end of this nonsense.

But perhaps I am too optimistic.

The Importance of Being Biden

Joe Biden – for 36 years a U.S. Senator representing Delaware in what has been called the greatest deliberative body on earth, for 8 years Vice President in the administration of earth-healer President Barack Obama -- became President following the four year incursion of Donald Trump, whom Democrats twice attempted unsuccessfully to convict on charges brought by Pelosi’s House. The attempt flopped, as leading Democrats knew it would, but they made good press copy – until now.

The truth often lies, barely breathing, under a weight of false narratives. John Durham, the United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut from February 2018 to February 2021, is a masterful prosecutor and, for those who in the past have felt his sting – corrupt Boston police officers and mob figures, among others, including former Governor John Rowland -- Durham has been also an almost invisible scourge. He does tend to get his man, quietly and without much fuss.

The Durham prosecution is still unfolding, more slowly than some would wish. But Durham is not a data producer for partisan politicians. He is a fearless, plodding prosecutor, one of the best in the business. As Special Counsel for the Department of Justice appointed to investigate the origins of the FBI's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections, he represents a real and present danger to Democrats still clinging to the tattered outworn narratives concerning collusion between then President Donald Trump and anti-democratic Russian menace Vladimir Putin.

Though Biden campaigned as a moderate Democrat, a fast disappearing political species, he has governed now for more than a year as a Bernie Sanders Democrat. U.S. Senator Sanders, a Vermont socialist, is not a moderate Democrat in the fashion of President John Kennedy or, coming closer to home, former Governor Ella Grasso, both of whom were liberals, not postmodern progressives.

In the last few decades, beginning with Obama, the Democrat Party has undergone not merely a face lift but a personality change. If the Democrat Party of Kennedy and Grasso was an apple, the Democrat Party of Biden and President Pro Tem of Connecticut’s General Assembly Martin Looney is an orange. And apples, we know, are not oranges. Polls indicate that most Democrat voters, in-state and nationally, and a large portion of unaffiliateds, are beginning to get it.

Virtually all the polls show, that most people are – despite the frothy approbation of the state’s media – resistant to the kinds of changes that float, rootless, in the fevered imagination of extreme progressives and Sanders socialists.

The Democrats themselves – Biden himself – has said he does not want categorical, revolutionary or radical change. Instead, he wants to work with Republicans in a bi-partisan manner to effect a gradual, non-alarming change that will increase the public good of the vast majority of Americans – just like Kennedy, just like Grasso. Upholding this false front is becoming an embarrassment to those in the Democrat Party who do not wish to upend the governing principles upon which this country was founded.

Who will represent the state Republican Party in contested races will be decided on the Republican Party primary threshing floor this August, three months before votes are to be cast in the 2022 elections. So far, there are five announced contenders: John Flynn, a former portfolio manager; Robert Hyde, a Simsbury landscaper; Leora Levy, an accomplished commodities trader; Themis Klarides, former Republican State House leader; and Peter Lumaj, an immigration attorney and real estate investor.

Blumenthal, the news media is now telling us, has an almost insuperable advantage over his Republican Party opponents. Registered Republicans are still outnumbered by registered Democrats in Connecticut by a two to one margin, and Blumenthal already has assembled a campaign war chest of $6.9 million, according to a Hartford Courant report. What ever happened, campaign reformers may well ask, to the notion that the money playing field among incumbents and challengers should be level?

Advised that Klarides planned to run against him, Blumenthal summed up his campaign strategy in a single line: “My focus is on doing my job and working for the people of Connecticut. There will be plenty of time for politics later in the year.’’

Indeed -- the later the better. Blumenthal’s most powerful campaign weapon against a competent opponent is to martial his advantages and refuse to engage. Flight from his critics has always been for Blumenthal the better part of valor.

What we will not hear shouted from the rooftops by politicians and their supportive power brokers during political campaigns is nearly as important as the usual generic messaging – “I am focused on doing my job and working for the people of Connecticut.”

Are ye’now?

Republican Prospects

The traditional, time honored beef against Republicans is that they are all millionaire money brokers – somewhat like Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi – blithely unconcerned with the middle class, an oppressed group always left struggling to pick up an ever increasing governmental tab.

None of this is any longer true. The millionaires and billionaires who plow political paths in the United States are now investing heavily in the Democrat Party. According to IRS Data, Democrats have now become the party of the wealthy, a turnabout when it was the party of the poor and middle class decades ago when Camelot had been dangled before us by President John Kennedy.

“In 1993, the last time a president asked Congress to vote in a significant tax hike,” Bloomberg reports, “the typical congressional district represented by a Republican was 14% richer than the typical Democratic district, according to household income data from the Census Bureau. By 2020, those districts were 13% poorer… Democrats now represent 65% of taxpayers with a household income of $500,000 or more, according to pre-pandemic Internal Revenue Service statistics.” Both Blumenthal and Lamont live in splendor in Greenwich, and wealthy towns such as West Hartford have become progressive Democrat bastions of power.

Governor Ned Lamont, Rosa DeLauro and Jim Himes are all millionaires several times over. Klarides, it is true, recently improved her bottom line by marrying well. But Blumenthal, the 5th richest Senator in the U.S. Congress, has been well married for decades to the daughter of Peter Malkin, rich in Big Apple properties. The Malkin family owns the Empire State Building among other precious real estate ventures.

The face of the postmodern Democrat Party in Connecticut will be represented on the upcoming 2022 ballot by Dick Blumenthal, the “Senator from Planned Parenthood”, and Governor Ned Lamont, the Coronavirus slayer who has been, some investigative journalists now tell us, inattentive to alleged corruption in his own administration. FBI hounds are now on the hunt.

Everyone should look carefully at the negative space in our Blumenthal infatuated media.  Klarides’ wealth will not figure on Blumenthal’s campaign scratch card, because Blumenthal is redundantly rich. The same will hold true in Levy’s campaign.

When mention is made of Biden’s bumbling administration, Blumenthal will fly from the damning data: the unnecessary surrender of Afghanistan to the terrorist Taliban; the porous southern border of the United States, a virtual open door through which have passed hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens, South American drug networks and “Made in China” fentanyl, an urban kid killer. Blumenthal’s lies and evasions about his purported service in Vietnam will not fill the pages of Connecticut press for days on end. That whole episode is already old-hat.

Also old-hat is Hunter Biden’s odd and profitable business relations in Ukraine, (now in the process of being dismembered by Stalin protégé Vladimir Putin), and China, whose fascist President, Xi Jinping, having uprooted the last vestiges of democracy in Hong Kong, now has his eyes set on Taiwan. Hunter Biden’s name is, for obvious reasons, not on the gotcha lists of any of the all Democrat members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation.

There will be no mention in Blumenthal’s campaign handouts of raging inflation – correctly defined as too many dollars chasing too few goods. The reason there are too many dollars is that Biden has printed, borrowed and wrested from taxpayers too many dollars. These will be distributed in Connecticut as vote tokens. One of the reasons there are too few goods is that the Biden administration and “go along to get along” governors across the nation have driven businesses out of business for two years and paid workers to abandon the free market in favor of government largess. Result: Biden’s government is flush with campaign “walking around money” traditionally used to purchase votes, and the middle class is daily growing poorer because the drop in the value of their inflated money is greater than any salary gains.

I’m coming to the end of my 20 minutes, so let me close by pointing to an Orwellian tinged absurdity. RT advertises itself as “the first Russian 24/7 English-language international news channel which brings the Russian view on global news.”

At the end of January, RT reported in a story titled US calls on arch-rival for help against Russia that American “Secretary of State Antony Blinken” -- where the Hell is Winken and Nod? – “phoned his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, to request his aid countering what the American official called ‘Russian aggression’ toward Ukraine. According to Chinese state media, Wang instead urged Blinken to cease ‘interference’ in China’s affairs and to respect Moscow’s legitimate security concerns.’”

Nice! Biden intention was to call on China, which has exported Coronavirus to the United States, stolen proprietary U.S. business information, and now has its eyes set on destroying Taiwan, having already rolled over and flattened democratic Hong Kong, to help him thwart Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Yes, you may laugh.

Thank you for your thoughtful patience. If there are any questions on any matter at all, I’ll try to answer them.


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