Murphy, a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing?

Seeking to puncture his shifting public political positions, Winston Churchill once characterized Clement Atlee as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing.” Historian and polemicist Victor Davis Hanson has said of President Joe Biden that he is the most radical president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but Hanson has yet to characterize Biden as a “wolf in wolf’s clothing.”

Generally regarded in Connecticut and nationally as a money-maker for Democrats, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy has been able to stretch his legs between political right-left poles without ripping his pants. He has been a spokesman for the left in his party for many years – a wolf in wolf’s clothing -- without suffering adverse political repercussions from moderate Democrats, Independents or Republicans in Connecticut, known around these parts as “The Land of Steady Habits.”

To put it in other words, Murphy has become a steady habit at a time when Connecticut has veered sharply left.

There is little doubt that Connecticut has been, for the past two decades or more, teetering on a lofty leftist precipice. But not even politics is able to skirt Isaac Newton’s Second Law of Motion -- for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. Like God, the laws of nature are not to be trifled with. However slow in coming, the reaction will arrive at some point, and recent polls, national and state, indicate that a majority of people might become reactionaries before they stomp off, angrily, to vote in the 2024 elections.

Along with his comrade in arms, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, Murphy knows how to put on a “moderate” face when elections draw near. This dodging between the poles would make both senators progressive wolves in moderate clothing.

Murphy is up for reelection this year, but it is doubtful he will be seen on any public platform in the state wearing both his moderate and progressive faces at the same time. After eleven years in Washington DC, Murphy has mastered the fine art of pretentious doublespeak. The whole point of political rhetoric is to blur sharp political contours and to suggest – overtly or subversively – that either/or is a mystical polemical creature, somewhat like a unicorn.

“Either Hamas or Israel” is a political fantasy only for politicians who have not lived in Israel for the past eighteen years. Hamas was elected to rule Gaza in January 2006, the last time Gazans went to the polls to democratically choose their government.

Following the Iranian inspired and financed terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, Biden pledged the United States would “have Israel’s back.” Hamas must be destroyed, said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden, U.S. Senator from Connecticut Dick Blumenthal, and Democrat leader in the Senate Chuck Schumer, seconded the motion: Either Hamas or Israel – and not both!

Blumenthal and Schumer are Jewish.

War, political philosophers tell us, is “diplomacy by other means.” A war successfully prosecuted by Israel that militarily destroys enemies militarily arrayed against the Israeli state allows Israel – rather than Hamas and Iran -- to determine a peaceful future in Israel and Gaza, the site, progressive Democrats unceasingly tell us, of a “two state solution” that two Democrat administrations – that of past President Barack Obama and Biden – have pledged to defend, if not with troops, then with checks drawn on the public purse.

Policy-wise and purse-wise, the Obama-Biden administrations have lavished attention on Iran.

It ought to be plain to any rational politician in the United States who has reviewed the history of the state of Israel from its inception in 1948 to date that a ”two state solution” to Middle East problems is not the solution to current problems in the Middle East. The proposed “solution” is the problem, and indeed has been the problem for the past three quarters of a century.

The question for American politicians is a simple one: Who shall rule in Israel, the state of Israel or terrorist groups pledged to destroy the state of Israel?

This is an either/or that cannot be straddled by politicians whose reelection prospects should be put in doubt by rational voters who perceive the political utility of making right choices.

It is yet an open question whether Murphy has courage enough to rise to the occasion of a clarifying choice.