U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, the Democrat from Connecticut, says he didn’t have a clue that an awards ceremony at which he spoke was a Communist Party event. And if he had known, he said, he wouldn’t have attended.
Blumenthal delivered the pathetic excuse in an interview with the Hartford Courant, and if he means what he said, it suggests that Blumenthal is either deaf or asleep.
Communist Party leaders invited potential members to join more than once during the event, held to honor leftists who supposedly toiled for the betterment of oppressed workers.
Now, Blumenthal claims he’s a capitalist with an uppercase C.
Who Knew?
Blumenthal renounced the Nutmeg State Reds after the speech went viral. Commentators had rightly concluded that the senator’s accolades for recipients of the party’s Amistad Award shows just how far left the party is spinning.
“My understanding was that this ceremony was strictly a labor event,’’ Blumenthal told the Courant on Friday:
If I had known the details, I wouldn’t have gone…. Let me just say very emphatically, I’m a Democrat and a strong believer in American capitalism. I have been consistently a Democrat and a strong supporter and believer in American capitalism.
Blumenthal said he went to the meeting because he “was invited by local labor unions to honor these three individuals, and that’s why I was there. That’s pretty much it.’’
Actually, that’s not it.
Some of the senator’s remarks at the pinko pow wow suggest he knew exactly where he was.
He tacitly disavowed the Reds, as The New American reported:
You don’t have to agree with anyone or everyone, with any party or any particular union or organization. I’m here to honor the great tradition of activism and standing up for individual workers that is represented by the three honorees.
In other words, Blumenthal knew exactly where he was and who sponsored the event. Even worse, he said Republicans who want voters validated with identification to ensure election integrity are “threatening the right to vote in state after state, in congressional district after congressional district all around the country.”
More proof that Blumenthal knew who sponsored the event is that one of the organizers, Ben McManus, observed that the date of the event was the 102nd anniversary of the Communist Party’s founding, as Chuck Ross of the Washington Free-Beacon reported. McManus also sought new members:
We invite you to join the Communist Party in this epic time as we make good trouble to uproot systemic racism, retool the war economy, tax the rich, address climate change, secure voting rights and create a new socialist system that puts people, peace and planet before profits.
Another communist did likewise: “I’m a member of the Communist Party,” Lisa Bergman said:
I love it. I think it’s an amazing organization.
The 100 million dead at the hands of communist tyrants might disagree, but anyway, as Ross observed, Blumenthal didn’t bail out after the Reds openly tried to recruit new subversives.
Another McCarthy Smear
The state GOP chief, Ben Proto, told the Courant what everyone knows: that the party has taken a radical turn to the left:
“We know the Democratic Party is moving further and further to the left and becoming more socialist,” he said:
I don’t know if they get to communism…. At the end of the day, he is an example of where the Democratic Party is going, which is further and further to the left.
Indeed, young radical socialists and Cultural Marxists are running the party and pushing it to extremes that even leftists in the 1960s didn’t imagine.
That aside, Proto couldn’t resist retailing the usual smear about Senator Joe McCarthy; i.e., that McCarthy falsely accused innocents of being communists, or that the Red Scare he initiated “ruined” people who even shook hands a communist but didn’t know it.
“I know we’re well past the McCarthy era, but people’s lives were ruined 60, 70 years ago simply because they had a friend who was a communist,” Proto said.
Proto did not name any of those people, and he apparently doesn’t know that McCarthy sought to ferret out Reds embedded in the government who posed a national security risk because they were either disloyal or Soviet agents.
Nor, apparently, is Proto familiar with the unhappy fact, at least for leftists, that McCarthy likely underestimated the Red infiltration, and that the Venona transcripts declassified by President Bill Clinton proved that he was right.
