Corey to Murphy: Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are…

Republican Matt Corey, running this year against U.S. Junior Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, is not a household name. Murphy, on the other hand, has managed to keep his name fresh and prominent before Connecticut’s electorate since 2013, his first year in office. Murphy has from 2019-2024 accumulated $2,641,556 from presumably greedy top industry moneybags and a more modest $92,516 from sumptuously endowed Yale University, according to Open Secrets.

Suffering from a high cumulative inflation rate, high interest rates – responsible, many economists acknowledge, for the shortage of housing -- the high cost of food and other necessities such as energy, and a busy-body Democrat President that has violated the traditional “everyone is a king in his own home” stricture, Corey no doubt is hoping that these impositions will weigh heavily on voters in his upcoming campaign. The Biden- Harris administration, smitten by EVs, the necessary components of which are made in China, wants to refashion cars in the driveways of average Americans, eliminate gas powered stoves and reduce the efficacy of water heaters, washers and dryers, before existential environmental extinction polishes everyone off.

Critics of such autocratic central government interventions are airily dismissed as backward troglodytes hesitant to take a step into a future plotted by experts and academic utopianists armed with PHDs from unaffordable Ivy League universities, the same universities that find it humiliating to rid their own campuses of subversive anti-Semitic Hamas supporters.

In a Hartford Courant story last April, “U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy holds major money advantage: $9 million in campaign coffers. Critics say it’s overkill,” Murphy told the paper’s reporter, “I think I’ll probably run a race very much like the race I ran in 2018: focused on the work I’ve done and not likely focused on my opponent.”

Ballotopedia tells us that Murphy sits on the following senatorial committees: Senate Committee on Appropriations; Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies; Committee on Foreign Relations; Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions; and an assortment of subcommittees.

Corey has for weeks been chiding Murphy to agree to a series of debates, presumably on the assumption that long time representatives in a democracy should be prepared to give an accounting of themselves to their constituents.  Murphy is no political saint, nor is he Caesar’s wife, supposedly beyond reproach during the Roman imperium.

Kamala Harris has gone 64 days as the presumptive, and now, official Democratic nominee for president without holding an official press conference. Although she recently agreed to be questioned by a standard friendly and inoffensive interviewer, Harris intends to enter the White House with sealed lips, and there is no indication they will be unsealed by an importunate media during her possibly eight year reign in office.

It seems pretty obvious that all incumbent Democrats up for reelection this year have stolen a page from Hillary Clinton’s campaign playbook – not just the suddenly camera shy Murphy. The unexamined greed for power and glory among Connecticut Democrats knows no bounds. Money is power, we all acknowledge. But the power of incumbency, universally tolerated by Connecticut’s news media, is also convertible to campaign cash and face time on television, as indicated by the figures cited above.

The media used to pride itself as a political leveling instrument. Corey has seen its darker face.

Four days ago, Corey posted on Facebook, “Anybody in CT media ever going to ask Senator Chris Murphy about his friends and their drone attacks or should we just wait until the debate?  Oh, that’s right…Nobody in CT media is willing to hold Murphy accountable with a debate before early voting starts.”

Former Secretary of State in the Barack Obama administration Hillary Clinton has weighed in on the subject of Vice President Kamala Harris obdurate silence. Clinton recently was asked by podcaster Kara Swisher whether she though Democrat Party candidate for President Harris should more often offer herself to media scrutiny to clarify her policy issues. Clinton answered that media avoidance on the part of Harris was not a problem.

"She does not have to do it, Kara,” said Clinton. “I'm going to just cut to the chase… In fact, she's put out policies on her campaign website. Anybody who's truly interested can go and read about them. She referenced policies. She actually doesn't just have policies and concepts. She has plans about what to do… I think it's, um, you know, it's a double standard and it's a double standard that is partly because they are still getting to know her. But also because they're still grappling with the idea like, ‘Oh, am I really going to vote for a woman to be president and commander in chief?’"

Clinton then offered the following advice to the Trump-adverse media: “They careen from one outrage to the next… I don’t understand why it’s so difficult for the press to have a consistent narrative about how dangerous Trump is. You know, the late great journalist Harry Evans one time said that journalists should, you know, really try to achieve objectivity, and by that, he said, I mean they should cover the object. Well, the object in this case is Donald Trump. His demagoguery, his danger to our country and the world. And stick with it."

That is, in a nutshell, the campaign posture of every authoritarian politician on the planet who seeks to render their abysmal policies acceptable: Wrap yourself, prior to election, in a word salad of invisibility and use a friendly media to savage your opponent.  Venezuela dictator Nicolás Maduro, who jails his political opponents, is a master of the art.

“If you want a picture of the future,” George Orwell wrote in his novel 1984, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”