Whitman State Rep. Geoff Diehl at his U.S. Senate campaign kickoff August 1, 2017. (Evan Lips — NewBostonPost)
Elizabeth Warren’s inability to pronounce the name of the town of Bourne (“Bern”) during a debate earlier this month wasn’t just a slip of the tongue. Nor was it a gaffe in the classic sense of the term. She didn’t make a mistake by misspeaking.
Instead, she looked at a word on a piece of paper that someone on her staff had given her and didn’t know how to pronounce it. That word happens to be a famous place name in this state.
Why did she mispronounce it?
It’s not just because she’s not from Massachusetts. She has lived here (at least technically) since 1995. That’s long enough to make a connection with a place. But she hasn’t. She’s not only not from here, she’s not of here.
Nor does she have the slightest interest in representing Massachusetts in the United States Senate during the next one and a half to two years. (The length varies depending on how successful her putative forthcoming presidential campaign may be.) Not only is “Bern” in her rearview mirror, so are all of us (win or lose), come Tuesday, November 6.
In fact, the best argument she has for your vote next Tuesday is the likelihood that if she wins re-election to the Senate she’ll be skipping votes frequently on Capitol Hill, as she travels around the country trying to lock up various left-wing constituencies in key primary states.
But why should Massachusetts voters give her a continuing platform?
In nearly six years in the United States Senate, Warren has been an albatross for Massachusetts and the country.
On immigration, Warren says she isn’t for open borders, but she doesn’t seem interested in defending our borders, either. She called for “replacing” the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency on June 30. Since then she has tried to walk back that comment, calling for ICE to be “reformed” during a debate October 19. But the core message remains the same: Don’t enforce immigration laws strenuously, don’t do anything effective to prevent illegal immigrants from pouring into the country.
Warren is against the Trump tax cuts that have had such a good effect on the economy nationwide and here in Massachusetts. She also has signaled that she’d like to see taxes much higher than they are now – a sure killer of the current economic growth and a blow to freedom.
Egregiously, Warren called the American criminal justice system “racist … I mean front to back” during an appearance in Louisiana on August 3, a comment Massachusetts police officers have rightly interpreted as a slap at them. Again, Warren has tried to soften the tone of her comment, but she has never withdrawn it. Her Republican challenger, Geoff Diehl, is drawing unprecedented numbers of endorsements from police unions made up both of supervisors and street cops who know that Diehl supports them and Warren doesn’t.
Warren isn’t responsible for the administration of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, since she never got a chance to run the agency that she conceived and lobbied for. But the agency’s disgraceful performance is a product of Warren’s addled thinking about public policy – that unbridled government power is the answer to perceived unfairness in financial interactions. In many cases, the cure is proving far worse than the supposed illness.
Nor is Warren a principled left-winger that someone can disagree with but still respect. She rails against the harm done to home owners who lost their homes to foreclosure, for instance, without mentioning that she made significant sums in Oklahoma buying two foreclosed properties and later selling them for a significant profit. There’s nothing illegal or immoral about it, but there’s nothing open or honest about her handling of it years later as a public figure, either. We never hear from her one of those pseudo-confessional moments on the campaign trail about the times she profited from distressed mortgages, and whether she believes it was the right thing or the wrong thing to do. Has she changed her mind? Or does she think it’s still a decent maneuver even though nowadays she is the self-proclaimed champion of foreclosees?
Warren’s opponent, Geoff Diehl, has run the best campaign in Massachusetts this year. Open, accessible, energetic, honest.
One of the most refreshing things about him is that his approach to politics seems to be up-or-out – as befits a small business owner who came to politics fairly late in life and is in it primarily to accomplish good things for his community, state, and country.
Diehl was first elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 2010. He came to prominence in 2014 as a leader in the successful movement to persuade voters to repeal an automatic increase in the gasoline tax that our rapacious state Legislature had approved the year before. Diehl perceptively points out that legislators didn’t want the extra money to fix roads and bridges, but rather to prop up the bloated Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.
In other words, he’s an economic conservative who has worked hard to shrink government and lower taxes, and who understands that the surest way to limit government overreach is to limit the amount of money government takes from its people.
Diehl understands the problem of illegal immigration, and supports strong and necessary measures to secure our borders.
Impressively, Diehl hasn’t walked away from principled conservative positions in order to try to appeal to left-leaning voters, as surely more than one GOP political consultant has urged him to do. He hasn’t repudiated his pro-life reputation, and he has steadfastly maintained his commitment to vote No on Question 3 to try to restore sanity to public bathrooms and locker rooms.
Diehl is an accomplished conservative leader in a state sorely in need of them. He has good ideas to help Massachusetts and the country, and the experience and personality to put them into practice.
And he knows how to pronounce “Bourne.”
Vote for Geoff Diehl on Tuesday, November 6 – for liberty and authenticity.
Whitman State Rep. Geoff Diehl at his U.S. Senate campaign kickoff August 1, 2017. (Evan Lips — NewBostonPost) 
