Christopher Columbus and the Government We Deserve
For Throwback Wednesday, Rosa's 'racial insensitivity'
Hope you had a joyous Columbus Day. Here’s a column from 2019.
Enjoy!
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No member of the U.S. House of Representatives is more “progressive” than Rosa DeLauro (D-CT).
Born in 1943, to a political family — her mother served on New Haven’s Board of Alders for an interminably long time — DeLauro attended Marymount College and Columbia University. She was “the first executive director of EMILY’s List,” an organization dedicated to electing abortion-friendly female Democrats. Work for Chris Dodd and Michael Dukakis also helped pay the bills. DeLauro successfully directed a nationwide PR campaign to oppose the Reagan administration’s aid to the Contras. Cutting her teeth in an era when aspiring pols were willing to wait their turns, she delayed running for office until 1990. An endorsement from The New York Times, and an opponent who called her “Walter Mondale in drag,” helped secure victory in a congressional district with the beyond-liberal Elm City at its center.
In nearly three decades of “public service,” DeLauro’s been a toe-the-line Democrat, and a reliable backer of unlimited government and identity politics. The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste puts her lifetime voting record at 9 (out of 100). She thinks gun violence is “a public health emergency,” seeks a national soda tax, and enthusiastically propagates the myth of the “gender pay gap.” It would be nearly impossible to find a fedpol who leans harder left.
But DeLauro is not down with demonizing Christopher Columbus.
Asked by the Yale Daily News if she favors changing the name of the New Haven-based Christopher Columbus Family Academy, DeLauro replied that she did not. Performing a virtuoso act of politically artful dodgery, the congresswoman shifted from an inconvenient fact about the past to a virtue-signaling opportunity of the present: “We ought to be more focused on the repression of immigrants [today] than concerning ourselves with trying to denigrate someone else who created an immigrant experience.”
It’s worse than you might think, though. DeLauro’s comments were made at a ceremony in which members of the Knights of Columbus, “in full regalia,” honored their hero with the laying of several wreaths at his Wooster Square statue.
Doesn’t DeLauro know that assailing Columbus is a key priority for the cultural left? Is she … nuts?
No. She’s a politician. In her world, votes trump ideology. According to Realtor.com, New Haven is the metro region “with the highest percentage of Italian Americans.” The last census revealed that almost 1 in 5 Nutmeggers — a share higher than in both New Jersey and New York — trace their lineage to “the Boot.”
Which brings us to a useful thought experiment: Would DeLauro’s fealty to the “discoverer” of the New World vanish, if indigenous tribes, pueblos, communities, bands, rancherias, and nations started making big donations to her next campaign?
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