“The difference between the right word and the wrong word is the difference between a lightning bolt and a lightning bug” -- Mark Twain
Everyone in Connecticut, perhaps including political
writers, should know by this time nearly everything they were afraid to ask
about Maine Democrat U.S. Senatorial prospect Graham Platner.
Thomas Feeney in the Washington Examiner has provided us
with a shortened version of Platner’s resume. Leveling a criticism at what is
still amusingly called The Mainstream Media, Feeney writes: “There is also no
excuse for not looking at the candidate’s social media profile. Clearly, the
Democrats missed what one news outlet characterized as “a slew of horrifying
posts made on Reddit [in which he disparaged] women, rape victims, minorities,
veterans, cops and working-class voters. Moreover, might it not have seemed
off-putting to voters that the candidate sent sexual text messages to numerous
women while he was married, as reported nationally? Finally, did the party know
about or just expect the electorate to ignore the decade he maintained an
account on “a seedy hookup app” called Kik, even while he was married? Keep in
mind, this spurred a senator, in the candidate’s own party, to challenge the
candidate to prove he did not send sexual images to minors via this
application. In other words, there’s a lot of populist appeal in Platner’s
spiel that works well in a time of discontent with elites.”
Platner’s likely Republican senatorial opponent, Susan
Collins, is the only U.S. Republican senator in all of New England, which
produced during Barry Goldwater’s presidential run the following Goldwaterism:
“If you knock off New England and California, you’ve got a pretty good country.”
Commentator Clarence Page remains unabashed by Platner’s
gaudy self-presentation. “He sounds,” Page enthused recently, “like a regular
guy. He’s a Marine veteran who did four tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and he owns a small oyster farm. And in keeping with these times, he is
wrestling with scandal, especially as the GOP and other media snoops dig into
his old social media posts, in which he made comments about women and rape
which many found offensive. In now-deleted posts, he also variously identified
himself as a communist and a socialist and opined that ‘an armed working class
is a requirement for economic justice.’”
Connecticut’s two U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris
Murphy, have yet to denounce Platner’s candidacy on the grounds of moral and
political turpitude.
These two may be betting that the political memory of the
average New England voter is as short as the light shed by a lightning bug. We
may surmise from their stinging remarks on reprobated President Donald Trump
that their moral strictures are in good odor.
We can tell from his unshaven appearance that Murphy, manlier
and less boyish with an unshaven lumberjack’s chin, had recently liberated
himself from his 20 year marriage from a wife who had stood by him through the
thick and thin of his political journey. Citing a mutual and amicable decision
to part ways while continuing to co-parent their two teenage sons, Owen and
Rider, Murphy and his wife, Cathy Holahan, announced their separation in
November 2024. Ms. Holahan has yet to
announce the publication of her memoir.
The overriding political problem in all of New England is that the Democrat Party, a ship of socialist fools once rooted in American liberalism, has meandered far from its fructifying roots and boasts no standard-bearers who are willing fervently to set their faces against a budding socialism -- The Road to Serfdom brilliantly presented by Friedrich Hayek in 1944. Hayek was a classical liberal, also the author of another seminal book, The Constitution of Liberty, the concluding chapter of which is titled “Why I am not a Conservative.
The newest lights of the 21st century northeastern Democrat Party are, almost all of them, socialists or socialist pretenders. Vermont’s U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders is a tub-thumping socialist, as is newly installed Mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani. These two have opened a campaign against billionaires. Sanders gave up inveighing against millionaires when he became a millionaire, and Mamdani was born to wealth the way medieval kings were born to the purple. Our post-modern St. Francis does not bid farewell to his own wealth and appear before his bishop naked so as to enter a life of renunciation with a clear conscience. Mamdani has declared that the state, not buyers and sellers in the U.S. free market, should “own the means of production,” which places him squarely in the camp of the socialist/communist saints of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Socialists in Connecticut who prefer tax credits to tax cuts are having a rough time just now explaining to their constituents the difference between the two asset-grabs.
A tax cut leaves private assets in the hands of those who have struggled to earn them. A tax credit is an unnecessary seizure of private wealth by a solicitous socialist state that then distributes private assets to that portion of the public responsible for the reelection prospects of socialists. It is an attack not only on assets but on the liberties underlying American democracy.
The post-modern Democrat Party in the northeast has become entangled in a foreign wilderness of envy, malice and political bunkum. If U.S. Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, the birthplace of the United States, sounds like a forlorn prophet crying in the wilderness, it is because he is a prophet unloved in his own party. The way out of a wilderness is the way in – in reverse.
As we approach the 250th
anniversary of the birth of the American Republic, among the oldest in history,
it might be well to remember the curse and blessing of James Madison,
considered by many scholars to be the father of the U.S. Constitution: “There
are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual
and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden
usurpations.”
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