10 March—I had intended to do a follow-up to my stimulating essay on jerkoff—i.e., masturbatory—devices today, but Gov. Ned Lamont’s flying visit to Litchfield County must take precedence. Is that serendipitous or what?

After giving away the store to the notorious and dreaded State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition (SEBAC), Ned had the chutzpah, the unmitigated gall to come up here on Tuesday and pretend he really gave a twopenny turd about anything in the area not involving his getting reelected.

Had I known about Ned Lamont’s pre-campaign campaign stop (on the taxpayers’ dollars) at Litchfield Town Hall, I’d have been waiting for him, my car parked in its usual spot right out in front, sporting its giant FU,CT! magnets, and I wearing my stylish FU,CT! sweatshirt.

And, just as selectman Jon Torrant was civil enough to allow Ned to pump his Republican flesh at Town Hall, I’d have been there to present the governor with some FU,CT! goodies: car magnet, sticker, lapel pin, and key-fob. And maybe even a Bitchfield magnet and sticker as well as a bound and autographed copy of the momentous essay that started the FU,CT! craze. And I’d even shake Ned’s hand, because that’s what gentlemen do. So do I.

(Truth is, when Ned got to be governor I actually mailed a parcel containing the pregnant essay and FU,CT! goodies to his office. But I never even got the courtesy of an acknowledgement. I guess a few of Ned’s staffers just wanted to keep all the FU,CT! stuff for themselves. Or, given my experience with the notorious and dreaded [sic] USPS, maybe the FU,CT! stuff never reached the Capitol. I’ll never know.)

So I’d sit down with Ned and we’d have a frank chat about how the state I love and have been living in for a half-century is still going to hell in a hand-basket because he and his complacent majority party complaisantly kiss the asses of all the wrong people just to get votes.

Dream on, Rosie!

Yeah, that’s practical, realistic politics; and the Republicans would do the same if they were in the catbird seat. Of course, that’s not the way I’d do it. And that’s precisely why I could never get elected and (only) one of the reasons my own party screwed me on two occasions.

But even given that Ned wants to keep as many of the state’s overcompensated unionized employees as he can from retiring—which, given the current labor market, probably isn’t a sound fiscal strategy–$3,500 bonuses all around this year, plus 2.5 percent wage hikes for this year and the next two, plus who knows what other goodies, including gratuitous COVID bonuses, come on. Ned Lamont knows that his pals in the General Assembly can’t wait to support his largess, if only for their own selfish reasons.

Despite his posturing to the contrary, then, Ned is selling out to SEBAC primarily to buy its votes in November, just as he’s farting around with silly, meaningless, piddling tax reductions to hoodwink everybody else.

Sadly, as I wrote in the FU,CT! essay, in a slightly different way, the people in the Capitol really don’t give a damn about the rest of us. And Ned Lamont is one of them . . .