Democrats Demagogue Boughton

“The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning”-- Adlai Stevenson

In her most recent press release, one can almost see state Democratic Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo ticking off the “made in Washington” campaign talking points:

Boughton, “war on women,” check.

Boughton,” anti-gay,” check.

Boughton, “Tea Party,” check.

Boughton, “extremist,” check.

A busy demagogue, Ms. DiNardo usually is able to mold her mud pies into brief media bites at a moment’s notice. Here is the core of her media release:

“Mark Boughton needs to let Connecticut know why he is so close to such a dangerous extremist and if he agrees with Senator McLachlan’s agenda. Does Mark Boughton want to force ultrasounds on pregnant women? Does he support McLachlan’s anti-gay views and Tea Party agenda?”

The “dangerous extremist” whom Mr. Boughton is “close to” would be State Senator Mike McLachlan. Apparently, in Ms. DiNardo’s world, extremism is catchy, like the flu. One has only to be “close to” a retrograde senator like Mr. McLachlan to be infected with the affliction of extremism. 

In current Democratic demagoguery, “an extremist” is anyone whose positions on a narrow range of “social issues” do not correspond with those of Ms. DiNardo and other seeming “moderate” social engineers who want to change the nature of marriage, economics, constitutional prescriptions, religious prescriptions and the always delicate balance between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government in the United States.

The Democratic Party in Connecticut has over the past couple of years abolished the death penalty for multiple murderers shortly after two vicious murderers, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, had slaughtered the Petit family in Cheshire, and only a few months before Adam Lanza had murdered his mother, six faculty members and twenty school children at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Mr. Lanza committed suicide upon the arrival at the school of first responders but, had he been taken alive, Mr. Lanza could not have been executed for mass murder in Connecticut, thanks to a bill produced in the General Assembly that ended capital punishment for all future felony murders, however horrific.

Republicans voted against abolition. Democrats, in voting for abolition, flouted their seeming high minded courage by exempting from their abolition bill the ten convicted murderers awaiting execution on death row. This exemption, a clear violation of the “natural law” underpinning all jurisprudence – which holds that in the absence of a proscriptive law there can be no punishment – is likely to be found unconstitutional by any appellate judge who has a nodding acquaintance with the Code of Hammurabi, the Magna Carta or the U.S. Constitution. It would have been politically inconvenient at the time for Democrats to reverse so many very expensive court decisions relating to the “Death Row 10.” The abolition measure, universally embraced by Democrats, we are to assume, is neither a “social issue” nor is it dangerous to the public weal. But Mr. McLaughlin IS a dangerous extremist and must be publicly shamed and demagogued by “non-extremist” Democrats who voted to abolish the death penalty for cop killers, terrorists and mass murderers.

All laws affect society, and there is not a piece of legislation created by any legislative body in the United States in the last 238 years that has no social repercussions. The term “social issue,” especially when employed in campaigns by demagogic partisans, is a false category.

Really, one wonders how many of Mr. McLachlan’s Democratic colleagues in the General Assembly – law makers all, artificers of social legislation -- feel comfortable with Ms. DiNardo’s estimation of him as a “dangerous extremist?” Has anyone taken a poll?

Do Democrats in the General Assembly who find themselves in agreement with Ms. DiNardo’s demagogic assessment of Mr. McLaughlin believe that the Senator’s imperfections have been transferred to Mr. Boughton through a process of osmosis? If Mr. Boughton has been tainted by his proximity to Mr. McLaughlin, what of the members of the General Assembly who were “close” to Mr. McLaughin as they toiled together in the same body to hammer out various laws? Will the pox that has spread so rapidly from Mr. McLaughlin to Mr. Boughton through mere association also affect General Assembly Democrats who worked cheek by jowl with Mr. McLaughlin? Have Governor Dannel Malloy and leading members of the General Assembly been polluted by their close proximity to former Speaker of the House Chris Donovan, some of whose political associates have been convicted of crimes and sentenced to prison?

This is mud-slinging of a high order. Why, if Mrs. DiNardo could order up capital punishment for Tea Party members in her state, her rhetoric suggests she might go for it. But her party has abolished capital punishment for mass murderers, and it would be politically indelicate to send to the death chamber what one Tea Party organizer called “Governor Dannel Malloy’s neighbors” after having abolished capital punishment for Connecticut’s future Lanzas.