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| Yeats |
An excitable friend, not close, who considers herself a political free spirit continues to bang her head on her writing table – metaphorical, of course – asking and re-asking, “When will the chickens come home to roost?”
She is referring to Connecticut chickens, the harmful results
of progressive Democrat policies gone awry.
Ideas and policies, she reminds me, both have consequences.
And eventually, Connecticut voters, battered by these whipsaw consequences,
will retaliate at the polls, she supposes, and change destructive habits.
“But when?” she asks, a note of impatience in her voice. “Is
it not obvious that the Democrat Party in the state has been for three decades
or more the party of the status quo,
while the Republican Party is now presenting itself as an agent of change?"
The Democrat Party, she argues persuasively, has been at the
General Assembly helm guiding the ship of state towards treacherous waters for roughly
the last half century, give or take one or two insignificant Republican Party
interventions.
Two Republican governors, John Rowland, before he was
arrested and sent to prison twice, and his successor, Jodi Rell, were
singularly unable to reset the state’s course because, in a republican (small
“r”) system of government, the governor proposes budgets but the legislature
disposes of them. It is the legislative branch that shapes budgets and, through
them, the future of the state.
“And here we are!”—my friend says, exclamation point!
Her letters – my friend writes longhand and sends her sometimes
frantic notes by snail-mail – have been swarming with exclamation points during
the administrations of the last two Democrat governors, Malloy and Ned Lamont.
My friend is of Irish decent and used to the blessings and
curses of her forbearers: “God bless’ye, and the Devil take’ye.” Something in
the Irish mind loves concisions, i.e. aphorisms, particularly when they are
salted with humor. Humor is the whiplash in an aphorism that forces the mind’s
attendance upon it.
My friend will not concede that former President Donald
Trump, like Jonah’s whale, has swallowed her Republican Party. And she is
refreshingly suspicious of what she calls “savior politicians”: that is, small,
boisterous men too big for their britches.
Former Republican Party Senator Lowell Weicker, the
destructor elect and titular head of the Republican Party in Connecticut until
he was dumped by woke Republicans, was one of these.
Running for Governor of Connecticut, former U.S. Senator Weicker,
summarily dismissed by Republicans in a re-election bid featuring then Democrat
Attorney General Joe Lieberman, assembled his own party, A Connecticut Party! The
exclamation point was not lost on my friend, who wrote me at the time: “This! Party! Will! Not! Survive! Weicker’s!
Impudence!”
She was right.
Declining to run again, the “Father of Connecticut’s Income
Tax” passed the “A Connecticut Party!” baton to his Lieutenant Governor, Eunice
Groark, who was unable to garner no more than 19 percent of the vote in a follow-up
election attempt, and the party was mothballed. Groark was not Weicker, said
Solomonic commentators later on, without noting that this was her chief
saving grace.
“The good thing about politics here in the US of A is that
voters will not suffer the same fools to represent them forever,” my friend
later wrote me. “Revolution is the only answer to autocratic tyranny. We are
fortunate in the United States to be able to resort to means of resistance that
do not require lovers of liberty to bathe in the blood of tyrants.”
My friend’s views may or may or may not represent majority
opinion in the upcoming elections but, as she might say, “And here we are!”
Will Blumenthal’s
Republican Opponents Take The Bull By The Horns?
Asked in a radio interview why she thought the upcoming 2022
off-year elections might be transformative, former Republican Leader in the State
House of Representatives Themis Klarides said that people “were irritated.”
Klarides is one of three Republicans challenging U.S.
Senator Dick Blumenthal, whose disapproval rating has dipped to 43 percent. Democrat President Joe
Biden’s disapproval rating, six months before the November elections, remains
parked at a perilous 40 percent.
What are the irritants?
The US southern border is still bleeding illegal immigrants,
and a visit to the border by Vice President Kamala Harris has not stemmed the
flow.
The War on
Ukraine, not in Ukraine, is yet unresolved, but
it does not take a George Patton to understand that Ukraine’s defensive posture
will not forever forestall Russian President’s Vladimir Putin’s thus far
successful bombing and battering of Ukraine’s assets. Mariupol, along Ukraine’s
Black Sea coast has been reduced to a mound of rubble. Civilian mass graves are
everywhere in Ukraine. Putin, who annexed Crimea during former President Barack
Obama’s “lead from behind” administration, now has his annexing eyes set on the
Donbas region of Ukraine. A quick course in War 101 might persuade some few phony
American diplomats that military successes cannot be reversed through
diplomatic means. Biden thinks otherwise.
Inflation, accurately defined as “too many dollars chasing
too few goods,” has the American consumer and taxpayer by the throat. Connecticut,
over-reliant on the financial industry, cannot escape the coming recession
pandemic. In the recent past, it has taken Connecticut about ten years to recover
jobs lost during recessions.
CNBC
reported moments ago, “JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says
he is preparing the biggest U.S. bank for an economic hurricane on the horizon
and advised investors to do the same.” Quantitative Tightening, severe
reductions in federal bond buying, is inevitable. “We’ve never had QT like
this, so you’re looking at something you could be writing history
books on for 50 years… [Central banks] “don’t have a choice because there’s too
much liquidity in the system. They have to remove some of the liquidity to stop
the speculation, reduce home prices and stuff like that.”
The way out of the dark forest is the way into it – in
reverse. Stop spending money, reduce costly regulations, allow the principle of subsidiarity to
flourish everywhere in the state, and leave monetary assets in the pocket of
non-politicians, who are better able than greedy tax gatherers to creatively disperse
their own money. To put it in bawdy terms: Stop screwing everybody over with
your honeyed, impoverishing tongues! Give us a break, will’ya! Exclamation
point!
Blumenthal, an abortion extremist, is less
worried about inflation – assuming he can properly define it – than the
diminishing returns of Big Abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood, an
organization concerned chiefly with de-planning parenthood and providing
campaign funding to Blumenthal and other of its politically supportive
proponents. The market for abortion in the United States is somewhat depressed,
largely owing to the ease of acquiring abortion pills, now available on line.
During one of his campaign debates with Republican challenger Linda
McMahon, Blumenthal was stumped when he was asked to define a profit.
Recently, Blumenthal wandered, so he says, into a communist
mare’s nest in New Haven to gather votes from union members and, when called on
it, claimed unconvincingly that he did not know he was consorting with members
of Connecticut’s longstanding Communist Party.
Joelle Fishman -- whose husband Art
Perlo, chair of the Economics Commission of the Communist Party USA, is
the son of late Soviet spy Victor Perlo -- has led the Communist Party in New
Haven for many more years than Blumenthal has been U.S. Senator and Attorney
General in Connecticut. Unlike the conveniently semi-conscious Blumenthal, Fishman
knows who she is, where she is, and what she is. A courageous and outspoken
Communist, Fishman has never been in the habit of hiding her Marxist/Leninist
light under a bushel basket.
The seventy-six year old Fishman has lived in New Haven
since 1968, and from 1973 to 1982, she was the Communist Party candidate for
Connecticut's Third Congressional District, dominated since 1991 by U.S.
Representative Rosa Delauro.
Every leading Democrat and union honcho in the southern part
of Connecticut knows Fishman and her train of fellow communist associates. Those who praise her resourcefulness and rigorous
adherence to communist doctrine, however ruinous, can hardly be accused of
McCarthyism in identifying as a “communist” a woman who has publically and proudly
identified herself as such for nearly half a century.
Blumenthal, some are beginning to catch on, has more turns
in his course than a slinky. People are beginning to wonder whether he knows
what a fetus is, what a profit is, what a communist is, what a Vietnam vet is,
or what “is” is.
Blumenthal also has been too much in the habit of painting
himself with the blood of innocents in his half-mad pursuit of votes. Remember
Ahab?
Is Biden the new
Trump?
It has been pretty obvious for some time that Democrats in
the post-Trump era – President Donald Trump vacated the White House on January
20, 2021 at 10:33 – are still suffering from Post-Traumatic Trump Syndrome
(PTTS). Apparently, the condition is communicable.
Time Magazine celebrated Trump’s leave-taking shortly after
the event with the following headline: “Donald Trump Leaves The Presidency With A
Whimper.” However, among Democrats who find it politically convenient
to continue beating the anti-Trump tocsin, it is as if Trump had never left
office.
During the Roman imperium, the Roman Senate was in the
habit, after tyrants had been defanged, of disposing of their after-effects.
Statues and other records of them were effaced. The tyrant’s name and presence
was edited out of official documents. Not only was he forgotten, his
fingerprints were removed from the historical memory of Rome. And after a year
or so, it went with the tyrant the way it did with the gigolo following the collapse of Austria in World War I:
I 'm just a gigolo,
and everywhere I go,
People know the part I'm playin'.
Pay for every dance, sellin' each romance,
Ooohh what they're sayin'.
There will come a day, when youth will pass away,
What will they say about me?
When the end comes I know, there was just a gigolo
Life goes on without me.
Life, of course, has gone on without Trump in the White
House, now occupied by a President who seems determined to efface every scent
of the man. The effacement has been especially noticeable at the southern
border of the United States, which has, under the Biden administration, been
effaced.
“Wouldn’t it be easier,” my Cynic asked me the other day, “to simply allow Mexico to annex
the United States? And, of course, under that arrangement, it might be possible
to do away with an incompetent and very expensive Washington DC federal
apparatus. Who would object to any of this? We would be able to return the
whole business to the swamp, delighting conservatives. Progressives would
rejoice because south of the border politics is always several shades more
progressive than that peddled by Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and her Squad. Schumer, Pelosi and Blumenthal can be expected to settle with a government run by south of the invisible border
Caudillos. Possibly, we might retain regional (state) governments, as a decorative element. Sometimes,
surrender is the better part of valor.”
He was, of course, joking – but still…
If Republicans were smart – big “if – Biden would become the
new Trump in the 2022 off year elections, and never mind that neither President
Biden nor non-President Trump will be on the ballot.
Then too, there is this: The Democrat Party is in danger of
being nudged further from America's vital center by radical leftists, and the more often the remaining John F.
Kennedy liberals in the party, now few in number, curtsey before postmodern
progressives, the more off-center the party will seem to be in the view of
Democrat centrists and unaffiliated voters. Policies that appeal to leftists in
the Democrat Party necessarily alienate a broader centrist Democrat voting base.
Joe Manchin, the former Governor of West Virginia and its
Senior Senator since 2010, is fighting a rear guard battle against disintegrative
postmodern progressive forces within his party -- and he is losing the battle.
A party that has lost its ability to address itself to broad
general interests is doomed to become a no-account party brimming, as Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”
has it, with "passionate intensity.”
Politicians generally prefer to bathe in the blood of
innocents in order, shabbily, to convince voters to asperse them with votes,
democracy’s equivalent of holy water.
But the Yeats poem should be read on every campaign
political stump just before leftist politicians, full of a passionate intensity
and wading in the blood of innocents, let loose their campaign thunderbolt’s:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
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