I’m betting that the Concord Monitor is wiping its brow going “Whew! Glad we disabled our “riff-raff commenting program a few months ago.” We can’t let ANYONE dissent from Our Narrative and our SpoxTwit, Katy Burns.
Boy, I can’t tell if she’s giddy or highly distraught that former Speaker of the NH House Bill O’Brien is running for US Senate. I really can’t tell the difference from her prose in her latest column. Under “Triggered” in the dictionary is her face. She fits the Concord Monitor well.
Oh, to that Loki reference: while purported to assist the other Norse gods, he also has a malevolent side and is a shapeshifter. She seems to fit this as well.
She, in her heart of hearts, believes that politics should be genteel, that everybody should be kumbaya with everyone else and that there should be nothing but consensus on all issues (and if you have read her columns, that would mean that you WILL like Progressive stances, their votes on bills, that bills should only lead to the Progressive “Valhalla” (hey, far better than Olympus, eh?). Frankly, as long-time readers know, Progressive policies only lead to Purgatory – to which Burns is wishing to speed. Why do I say that?
While she preaches civility, her latest column (listed below) is certainly not genteel when it comes to the news that Bill O’Brien is running for US Senate. She’s taking the tack that O’Brien is but Chaos and can do no right. This shows a rather lightweight view of what actually goes on in politics as well as the Progressive mindset that only Progressives (and Republicans that are useful idiots for them) should Rule. It is supposed to be the natural state of things along with History following the Arc of Justice and Utopia and all other various forms of socialist mishmash. She also makes it clear that she’s “in the collective side of all who would prefer cooperative harmony on our political scene“. So while having a personal animus against O’Brien in general (as the epitome of what a Conservative wants: smaller government, less expensive govt, less intrusive, and “heavens to Mergatroid!”: devolving Power out of Concord and back to the towns and The People). From reading her columns for quite some time, “Live Free or Die” is just a sad mixup of letters that should be retired (like NH Congressman Chris Pappas (D)!)
(H/T: Concord Monitor)
Her entire column with a few bon mots of fisking commentary added (emphasis mine, reformatted):
Katy Burns: Oh, lucky us! Bill O’Brien’s back!
While meant sarcastically, I think she’s trying more for that ole’ Texan curse of “Bless your heart”. Dismayed much, Katy? Upset that your apple cart is going to have a bumpy ride? If this is what you think NOW at the start of his campaign, what pharmaceuticals are you going to need if he wins the primary and the general elections?
Last week Eris – the Greek goddess of strife, discord and chaos – looked down on our happy little state and decided for Herself that, well, matters are running too smoothly. Sure, one political party holds the State House and another the governor’s office, but they seem to be civil. Even cooperative on some things.
“Happy little state” – what planet is she on, politically speaking? NO one is happy – neither the Republicans (who were shut out completely) nor the Democrats (who, after running roughshod against “Live Free or Die” ethos of NH, are getting their bestest desires deflated with veto after veto – and some of the veto messages are amusing, I must say). No, the State of Political NH is not as she says – she’s just trying to do a stylistic set up so as to hammer O’Brien.
Oh wait, instead of calming the waters, isn’t she slowly morphing in the Greek goddess in a literary style? First, ameliorate and then dismember. Dismembering coming up?
Aha!, She said to Herself. I’ll bring back Bill O’Brien!
Yes, dear die-hard fans of Granite State politics. O’Brien, the sage of Mont Vernon and general thorn in the collective side of all who would prefer cooperative harmony on our political scene, has announced that he’s re-emerging from wherever he’s been for the last few placid years.
Collective, cooperation, placidity. In other words, a sham of a place created so has to paint O’Brien as the Barbarian at the Gate. Well, some of us were quite happy (GraniteGrok had endorsed him for the Speakership – I can only GUESS what she thinks of us – especially since we’ve now passed the FishWrap in the Alexa standings) as we all knew that Concord needed a good shaking up. More on this later.
He’s planning to run for the U.S. Senate against Senator Jeanne Shaheen. He wants to bring his talents to Washington!
And so he came out of retirement with all guns blazing. “She has become extreme. She is controlled by – in fact, she is – the swamp.” As evidence of her swampiness, he claimed our two-term senator promotes socialism. And he pledged to help our president wall off our country’s southern border. Fortress America!
Oh, lucky us – she’s made it clear that Jeanne Shaheen is the “There can only be ONE!” (let’s see if she gets that reference) that is allowed her position. So Katy, how does “Live Free or Die” comport with Socialism. Doesn’t socialism TAKE Freedom away from individuals? I’ve never met anyone who formerly lived in socialist countries ever praise them. In fact, they found them to be complete “misery-holes” where the only happy ones were the elites. Look at the former Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc countries, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela – formerly ok to rich countries devastated by polities all based on wrong-headed notions of basic human behavior.
Or is that a reason why the Concord Monitor doesn’t report on them, Katy? To show us actual conditions on the ground? Preferring wispy, cotton-cushioned of utopias in theory to be that turned out to be hell-holes in practice? Katy simply dismisses, with her line of “two-term senator promotes socialism”, that it is a know-nothing attack of a benign form a government.
Which is, if she was truthful, a foreign political philosophy complete at odds with our Constitutional one (the NH one, Katy – have you read it lately?). She shows a complete lack of thinking things through in that phrase – what IF we were to go to socialism, two things would happen:
- GraniteGrok would get shutdown because NOTHING can be against the State in practical terms.
- She’d probably get an award for being inline with it.
In his previous incarnation, before he decided to tackle the project of setting America straight, he confined himself with attempting to wreak havoc in Concord. He lurked for a bit on the back benches of the House of Representatives until he could gather a small army of acolytes and malcontents – Birthers (remember them?), gun absolutists, anti-government zealots and others on the fringes of our political world – to mount a successful coup in that august body.
And thank God he did! Otherwise, Government would have continued its onslaught in being “Govt over People”. It would have careened into the lodestar of NH Progressives – broad-based taxes for new sources of revenues to grown government and (even better) nail the Rich who have avoided what Progressives believe is their fair share of taxes.
However, the person who decried that her “happy little State”, with it’s “civility” is just fine and dandy in smearing and “Othering” those that just won’t be assimilated. Gosh Katy: birthers, gun absolutists, anti-govt? That latter part – Collectivists ALWAYS use that moniker, Socialists cannot conceive of a Society in which Govt isn’t supreme. So they label anyone who wishes to restore that which our Founders bequeathed us – a limited govt, one that minds it own business, stays in its lane, and was set up to properly have Civil Society and Individuals hammer most things out. Instead, it HAS become a swamp with all sorts of dark corners where money is exchanged for access and…..tax monies.
“August body”? Yeah, like the latter-day Roman Senate. Sorry, any time politics is inserted into a situation, it gets, well, political and political is the furthest place in which I would apply “august”. No, it is just a lame rhetorical trick to further Otherize O’Brien to her readers – “look at this Ruffin, how DARE he come into ‘our’ place”!
But what she forgets is that for him to have been voted into the Speakership, he had to garner a majority of those “Birthers, gun absolutists, anti-government zealots, and others on the fringes of our political world”. And in order “to mount a successful coup in that august body”, there had to be a majority of citizens to have voted in those representatives. She thinks that she deftly sidestepped that little fact.
Also, that “successful coup” – yeah, all those “gun absolutists” came in on Organization Day, guns ablazin’, cowering everyone to vote for O’Brien and covering the Hall red for those that voted against him…..Oh, Wait!
There was no blood, there was no gun brandishing, there were no brown shirts, there was only voting. There could be a coup because there was no substance until the newly elected had self-organized. And with some RINOS excepted, the majority of Republicans seated O’Brien.
But she doesn’t say that, does she? And then she blithers on:
His first act as speaker was an attempt to kick a duly elected Manchester member, a union employee, from the House for trying to introduce a bill raising the state’s minimum wage. He was unsuccessful. No matter. The important thing was that he signaled a new tone for our legislature. For several years, havoc reigned under the golden dome.
Wacky legislation is introduced every year – what else would you expect with 400 House members? – but under O’Brien it swelled into a tidal wave of crackpot ideas, everything from mandating that schools teach only “reading, writing and arithmetic” to a proposal that the state stop mandating school at all.
Bills would have forbidden federal authorities from enforcing federal law here, mandated criminal background checks for all legislative candidates and provided that all business signs could only be in English or they would have to include all six “official” United Nations languages, whatever that meant and no matter the cost.
So, was it wacky to have solved the deficit, Katy? Or are you of the mind that EVERY Dollar is “sacred” and government can never be cut? I think this flourish, “Bills would have forbidden federal authorities from enforcing federal law” is rather amusing – have you looked at how many Democrat Sanctuary towns, counties, and States there are now that have “forbidden federal authorities from enforcing federal law” when it comes to illegal immigration. I’m quite sure that you’re in favor of that.
But that’s YOUR side of the aisle that is without stain on this (‘cepting, all the American citizens that have been now subjected to crime, including murder, by illegal aliens that shouldn’t have been here in the first place, but that must be your “collateral damage” while spouting that our enforced laws don’t “represent our American values”.
What she also fails to point out that there was still a SIGNIFICANT political movement on the Right at the time, the TEA Party movement, that was demanding that Govt start to hold itself to living within OUR means and holding to Constitutional values AS ENUMERATED (and not, as Democrats want, a Loki-ian shapeshifting document in order to “progress” their political agenda forward”.
And of course, continuing on with her jeremiad against the Second Amendment and Article 2-A, she took a slap on that devolving power back to the people and restoration of Constitutional Rights. Boy, she must still be steamed that Constitutional Carry is still settled law this far into the Democrat “coup” in taking over the House and Senate (see, two can play that game, can’t we?).
There was also a flood of more serious proposals, looked on with favor by leadership, especially where guns were concerned. In fact, the new legislature’s first act was to pass a law opening the State House, including the legislative chamber, to open gun carrying.
And close O’Brien ally Al Baldasaro posted online a photo of his recent nuptial ceremony with the entire wedding party carrying assault rifles. Yeah, that’s the Baldasaro who, shortly after, achieved national notoriety as an official Donald Trump advisor who advocated dragging Hillary Clinton before a firing squad for treason.
Why not? Law-abiding people don’t misuse firearms. Are you saying, Katy, that those who chose to carry are irresponsible? That they are “hair-triggered” that at any sense of a political confrontation, they’d whip them out and use them?
Er, HAS that happened, Katy? Or, as other of your ilk who cried “the streets will run red from the blood”, has there been mass shootings here in NH?
And then we get to one of the bugaboos of the Democrats: “settled law”:
Under O’Brien, the House made serious (if not ultimately successful) attempts to repeal gay marriage and women’s rights to determine their own health care. He tried (unsuccessfully) to repeal clean air laws and worked particularly doggedly (if in vain) to impose so-called Right to Work laws on New Hampshire workers, which would have turned our state into the sort of workers’ paradises that people now enjoy in such places as Mississippi and Alabama.
So, she makes sport of the voters who put in those Reps that then voted O’Brien into place. Sorry, Katy, but there is NOTHING that says once a law is in place that it must stay in place forever. Voters wanted gay marriage repealed, they wanted to limit abortions as that is simply killing innocent babies no matter what euphemism you want to use, wanted cost effect common-sense laws that wouldn’t require high costs to pay.
And what is wrong with the Freedom to work at a place without having to join a union? How can you be so anti “Live Free or Die” so as to take away someone’s right to choose where and how to work?
During O’Brien’s tenure, our legislature became the regular butt of jokes in late night TV comics’ monologues. A particularly popular highlight was the widely shown tape of a contingent of Birther legislative members chasing New Hampshire election officials through the halls of the State House trying to force them to remove President Obama’s name from the upcoming 2012 presidential primary ballot.
Just as the Dems now are trying all kinds of political stunts to block Trump from being on the ballot (e.g., CA new law that says “no tax returns, not on the ballot”; am betting THAT put a spring into your step, eh?)
And back to the Barbarian bit:
O’Brien was notorious for his bullying of members, so severe that one Republican legislator – said to have been reduced to tears by the speaker – even introduced a bill to ban bullying in the chamber. If members with physical limitations – and our largely elder 400-member legislature has its share of them – didn’t vote according to O’Brien’s pleasure, he would deprive them of their aisle seats in our notoriously cramped legislative hall. And they would be summarily dismissed from their chosen committees.
Of course, other Speakers get away with similar actions – just not publicized either because they depended on Democrats to put them into office (e.g., Doug Scammon) or were completely Democrats. But those, well, that’s just carrying out their duties and keeping, as she said: “matters are running…smoothly“. Just keep papering on, Katy!
And the then-speaker’s wrath wasn’t limited to members. When he was annoyed with criticism from the Monitor’s editorial writers, he barred the paper’s well-respected State House reporter from his news conferences.
Given that you denizens of the newsroom are overwhelming Democrat (and you’ve seen the stories of how many donations from such lurking areas go to Dems vs Republicans), why WOULD he allow himself to be set upon by those that Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame has called “Democrats with bylines”. When you have the current version of Jim Acosta in your face, who needs that headache? There’s plenty of other journalists. You just still have a bee up your butt because it was YOUR paper causing the mischief.
In 2012, a Democratic rout toppled the Republicans from power, O’Brien among them. And two years later, when the GOP was back at the reins of the State House, a new speaker – decidedly not O’Brien – was elected in a bipartisan vote.
Bipartisan? Hardly – a rump number of RINOs joined with all the Democrats. ‘Nuff said.
…This must be it. Get ready, Washington, Bill O’Brien is coming your way!
Well, that is, if he gets through a primary.
And a general election – against a formidable opponent people actually like. So, Washington, don’t lay out the red carpet just yet.
Meanwhile, somewhere, the goddess Eris is mischievously smiling.
Thanks, Loki, for letting us know your inner self. And it ain’t Eris that rictus smile, either.
Well, this has gone on 5X the length that Steve normally would appreciate; well, this time, owner’s privilege.
