By Chris Powell
Suppose Donald Trump, campaigning for president, cited Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy’s support for federalizing a right to late-term abortion and said the senator’s pandering to the abortion industry was meant “to kill more kids in order to make more profits for Planned Parenthood.”
There would be outrage from the political left, including news organizations in Connecticut. The people expressing outrage would argue that abortion is best left to those whose rights are most affected, pregnant women. (Or make that “pregnant persons,” the politically correct term increasingly in use among state news organizations, which, without being forthright with their audience, seem to have decided that men can bear children.) Those expressing outrage would fairly call Trump a disgraceful demagogue.
But last week Murphy, campaigning for re-election, condemned Trump for telling the National Rifle Association that if he is returned to the presidency he will support repeal of recent federal gun laws. On social media Murphy wrote: “Trump’s goal is to kill more kids in order to make more profits for the gun industry. Plain and simple.”
Murphy’s wild accusation that Trump is pursuing child murder for money elicited no objections in Connecticut that the gun issue should be left to the people whose rights are most affected, gun owners. In any case, gun rights are explicit in the federal and state Constitutions, unlike abortion rights, which even a pro-abortion Supreme Court justice acknowledged could be only inferred, and only by searching the Constitution’s “penumbras” and “emanations.”
Indeed, Murphy’s demagoguery got little notice from Connecticut news organizations. Was it because those news organizations are steadily weakening and less able to criticize those in power, or because they are less inclined to criticize when those holding power are politically correct?
Whichever it is, P.C. demagoguery seems to have a clear field in the state.
SLEEPWALKING TOWARD WW3: Also escaping much notice in Connecticut the other day was the support given by the state’s senior U.S. senator, Richard Blumenthal, to Ukraine’s use of U.S. weapons to strike certain targets deep inside Russia. Thus Blumenthal joined the many other members of Congress who are sleepwalking this country toward World War III.
Ukraine’s war with Russia was prompted by U.S. meddling in the politics of a country on Russia’s border. That meddling assisted the overthrow of a regime friendly to Russia, and went on to try to incorporate Ukraine into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Russian President Vladimir Putin repeatedly warned he would not permit that. The United States disregarded his warnings, though Putin was demanding in Ukraine only a much smaller buffer against powerful military adversaries than the hemispheric buffer the United States has claimed for two centuries under the Monroe Doctrine.
Ukraine is divided ethnically between Ukrainians and Russians. Now Russia has occupied most of the Russian-speaking zone and last week there were reports that Putin is ready to make peace along the current lines of control.
This possibility should be seized via a ceasefire and urgent negotiations, for Russia is not likely to be dislodged from Russian-speaking territory without a much larger war, which the United States and NATO are not prepared to wage and isn’t worth risking.
Blumenthal would serve Connecticut better if he acknowledged that Russia’s tyrannical form of government doesn’t justify the provocation the United States committed in Ukraine, a provocation that long had been advised against by foreign policy experts who understand that neutral buffer zones between great powers help keep the peace.
OLD JOKE, NEW JOKE: Everyone knows the old joke about the man who murdered his parents and then asked the court for mercy because he had become an orphan.
But similar nonsense was taken seriously last week when Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers published an essay by a leader of the campaign to extend state government medical insurance to illegal immigrants. The writer argued that his father in particular deserves such insurance because he recently had a heart attack that may have been caused by the stress of being an illegal immigrant for 34 years.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 