Blumenthal, Benghazi And The Difference It Makes

Dick Blumenthal, the nation’s first full time consumer protection senator, has now weighed in on merchants who “may be selling lower quality items produced specifically for outlet stores without properly informing consumers,” according to a Philadelphia television station.

The Senator has asked the Federal Trade Commission to examine claims that merchants have misled consumers in their ads. “There’s a lot of evidence,” Blumenthal breathlessly told the television consumer protection watchdog in Philadelphia, “that people shopping at outlet malls or at outlet establishments have no idea that goods and merchandise are made specifically for outlet malls.”

Naturally, preventive legislation is needed.

On foreign policy issues of national importance, Benghazi for instance, the senator has been less voluble. But that is because Mr. Blumenthal is not interested in regulating foreign affairs – just outlet malls. In fact, political consumers may be unaware that U.S. Congresspersons generally are uninterested in regulating foreign policy or budgets or administration officials who deprive Congress of the data the greatest deliberative body on earth needs to satisfy its Constitutional obligations or, of equal importance, its own ungovernable appetite for regulating everything that moves and breathes outside Congressional precincts. Mr. Blumenthal’s own Congressional site carries only a brief pro forma, seven line expression of “outrage and sadness” issued the day after the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.

And you thought you sent your senator to Washington to hold responsible high administration officials who failed to protect or come to the aid of an ambassador to Libya murdered by – dare it be said? – Islamic terrorists.

Silly you.

In High School, your civics text – if you had the advantage of a civics text – mentioned a division of powers as a check on presidential presumption. The Constitution, an ancient but never-the-less useful document dating from 1787, invests the President with war powers and assigns to Congress auxiliary powers that also shape foreign policy. Constitutionally, Congress is the voice of conscience perched on the shoulder of any president who has Napoleonic ambitions.

Chris Stevens, the ambassador murdered in Libya by Islamic terrorists, was the personal representative of the President of the United States, as are all ambassadors.

Following the murder of the personal representative of President Barack Obama and the brave military personnel who came to his aid -- Sean Smith and two Navy Seals, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, all slaughtered by militant Al-Qaida connected terrorists -- members of the administration fanned out to spread the lie that those who led the assault on the annex in Benghazi were “protestors” agitated by a film that had insulted, peace be upon him, the prophet Muhammad.

Persistent investigations by oversight Congressional committees and a cache of e-mails  secured by Judicial Watch on a Freedom of Information demand has now shown that the Obama/Rice stage show was an elaborate pantomime designed to convey the message during a presidential campaign that Mr. Obama had dealt a death blow to Al-Qaida. As such, the deception was much more wicked – and deadly – than the ads that recently have excited the interest of Mr. Blumenthal.

Among the 41 documents pried loose from the Obama administration, is an e-mail from deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes that presents to then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice four goals that were to be accomplished during Ms. Rice’s numerous television appearances days after militant Islamic terrorists murdered the ambassador and other Americans in Benghazi.

According to the e-mail, Ms. Rice was to: “… convey that the United States is doing everything that we can to protect our people and facilities abroad; To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy; To show that we will be resolute in bringing people who harm Americans to justice, and standing steadfast through these protests; To reinforce the President and Administration’s strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges.”

Only the last goal had been accomplished – temporarily – in the weeks following the terrorist attack. The attack on the U.S. Consulate did not arise from a spontaneous protest; it was not rooted in an internet video; the successful assault did point to a broader policy failure; the United States was and remains irresolute in bringing to justice people who harm Americans, particularly if they are associated with the Obama administration; and Mr. Obama’s strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges – in Libya, Syria, Egypt, Iran and, most recently, Russia -- is very much in question.

Mr. Blumenthal, however, appears to be blithely unconcerned with the foreign policy mishaps of the Obama administration, preferring to focus his attention on misleading representations issued by Mall vendors. Unless he refocuses his attention pronto, history will hit him like a speeding passenger train. Mr. Blumenthal lately has devoted some of his attention to passenger trains.

Cloutless Connecticut

Seniority equals clout in the U.S. Congress. New Senators and House members entering the portals of the U.S. Capitol are expected to be seen and not heard for their first year or so in office. Both Connecticut’s U.S. Senators are new arrivals.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, who appears to be having a problem shedding his past as Connecticut’s Attorney General, the state’s litigator-in-chief and consumer advocate, passed his first year blinking as the world slid chaotically by. With a couple of years in the Senate under his belt, Mr. Blumenthal may now be prepared to open his beak and sing a song.

Political watchers in his state are hoping the melody will not be freighted with bills he wished he had been able to enact as attorney general. The state’s soon to be Senior Senator, after a scant two years in Congress, has not favored his favorite newspapers with exhaustive opinions on a raft of recent nettlesome issues, including the destruction of the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, the murder of Libyan Ambassador Chris Stevens and other Americans, the growing U.S. deficit, the recent bombing by Israel of Hamas military emplacements in Gaza, an ordeal followed by an uneasy “peace” brokered by Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalist who often has expressed his contempt of the West, hates Israel and wants to turn Egypt into a Salafist state, as well as other issues of moment much in the media. Perhaps after his year of sequestration Connecticut’s senior senator will be more forthcoming on, to mention just one pressure point, the economic collapse of Europe.

On the EuroZone dead zone, Reuters recently reported:

 

“Those two quarters of contraction put the euro zone's 9.4 trillion euro ($12 trillion) economy back into recession, although Italy and Spain have been contracting for a year already and Greece is suffering an outright depression.”

Connecticut’s newest U.S. Senator-elect, progressive Chris Murphy, will be forced by protocol to bite his cloutless tongue for about a year, after which the world will doubtless be his oyster.

Political science professor at the University of Connecticut Ron Schurin notes in a news story:

 

“In the next Congress, the senior senator will be Democrat Richard Blumenthal, elected to the Senate only two years ago. And its junior senator, also a Democrat, will be Chris Murphy, who is newly elected to the Senate. It's the least senior Senate delegation of any state.”

In a news conference following the recent elections,Governor Dannel Malloy noted that Connecticut’s economic future is tied inextricably to Europe’s fate. If Congress fails to reset the debt ceiling, the governor said, “with the weakness that Europe is currently demonstrating, we will see a worldwide depression.”

Republicans were perhaps thankful that the governor did not attempt to pin Connecticut’s growing post Malloy tax increase recession on Andrew Roraback, falsely reputed by his Democratic opponent, Congressman-elect Murphy, to be a Tea Party enthusiast.

 

“If we go off that cliff,” Mr. Malloy warned, “honestly, it is unthinkable." France, which elected in François Gérard Georges Nicolas Hollande (pronounced O-lend) its first socialist president since François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand, the governor pointed out, is "our No. 1 trade partner."

Entering office as a snorting socialist bull, M. Hollande promised to tax rich millionaires at a 75 percent rate, but moderated his ambition somewhat, it is assumed by some fantasists in Connecticut, after having received a communique written in French from M. Malloy indicating that he, a la Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, would be waiting at the border of Connecticut with a net to snag and relocate to Greenwich, CT French millionaire expats as they fled M. Hollande’s Bastille with their pants on fire.

Pointing out that he took over a state in financial distress during the Bush-Obama recession, Malloy said he accepted the challenge to turn the economy around.

Mr. Malloy vowed to "reshape my state -- I want to make it a better and stronger state."

To this end, Mr. Malloy told 300 credulous businessmen and women gathered at Fairfield University, he has given millions of tax dollars to a series of companies far richer than any single millionaire politician in Greenwich, with the possible exception of Mr. Blumenthal.

Such is Connecticut’s Crony capitalist future. Unlike the French in the days of Danton and Robespierre, American progressives do not lead the rich trembling in tumbrels to the guillotine; we shower upon them tax dollars wrested from the petite bourgeoisie.