Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

After the August primaries, most major papers in Connecticut will endorse Ned Lamont as the state’s next governor. Like politicians, newspaper owners and Editorial Page Editors are victims of their past choices. If you’ve said “yes” at the altar in the presence of so many church witnesses, it becomes a chancy proposition to call it quits too soon after the honeymoon. Lamont was the preferred candidate of former Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker. Left of center writers in Connecticut became Weicker-likers for any number of reasons. He was a manageable Republican senator. Indeed, there are some people who think, considering his record in office, that Weicker was a closet Democrat. Weicker’s left of center  Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) rating  during his last term in office was 90; Connecticut U.S. Senator Chris Dodd’s was 85. Weicker could be depended upon to frustrate wide-awake conservatives. Generally, the left of center m...

A Boston Paper reports, “Authorities say the statues [of Christopher Columbus] at Harbor Park in Middletown and Wooster Square in New Haven were vandalized overnight Saturday. The paint has been cleaned up.” On August 21 st , the  Baltimore Sun reported  that a monument to Christopher Columbus had been vandalized by vandals, a perfect word to describe the members of  Antifa, a group that claims to be anti-fascist,   but does not scruple to employ the methods of fascists, including the beating of non-violent protesters by masked, black-clad brownshirts.

On August 21 st , the  Baltimore Sun reported  that a monument to Christopher Columbus had been vandalized by vandals, a perfect word to describe the members of  Antifa, a group that claims to be anti-fascist   but does not scruple to employ the methods of fascists, including the beating of non-violent protesters by masked, black-clad brownshirts. The destruction of the oldest monument to Columbus in the nation occurred one week after city fathers had decided to remove  “ four controversial monuments : a statue of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate Women’s monument, the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument and a statue of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who authored the 1857 Dred Scott decision that upheld slavery.”

Saturday, December 5, 2015 Despite all the so-called “debates” that have already occurred, our presidential election will fall on Tuesday, November 8, 2016, a little less than a year from now; lots of water there yet to flow under our bridge. President Barack Obama will be using the next eleven months to put the final gloss on what we call here, sometimes derisively, his legacy; which is to say, he will attempt, despite the tear stained and  bloody flood of misery washing around his feet, to keep his old and tattered campaign pledges: withdraw all troops from every war theatre, patch the leaky roof on Obamacare, close GITMO, the military base in Cuba, and who knows, perhaps put a bow on it and give it back to his new Cuban friends, continue the destruction of the Republican Party, put a period on his long and eventful political campaign, then slip away to establish his presidential library and perhaps write another semi-fictional autobiography.  I think you can see...

J, To Dust Thou Shalt Return It was a stroke of luck, or the hand of Providence, that forced you to move from Connecticut to South Carolina. For more than twenty years, you have been out of the way of Connecticut’s inexorable getting-and-spending steam roller. Distance may not make the heart grow fonder, but it does prevent the spirit from being mauled by current events. Here in your former home state, where you reared your family, we are all pretty much clawed by an administrative machine that is at once both solicitous and rapacious.

Girolamo Grumpi, obviously not his real name, is a retired journalist who lives north of Hartford and who wishes to remain anonymous -- November 9, 2014 Q: By Sunday November 9, most journalist morticians in Connecticut and others had turned in their reports. Among them was Lowell Weicker, who left the Republican Party to run as an Independent for Governor in 1990. GG: The Weicker response to the current elections was a reprise of a column written by him and printed in the (Hartford) Courant last May. Even then, there were serious problems with the Weicker analysis. Weicker argued that the Republican Party has declined since he left it to run as governor. A careful historian may want to pause here to note that Weicker did not leave the parry of his own accord when he lost his seat to then Connecticut Attorney General Joe Lieberman. He was not able to garner a sufficient number of votes to win re-election, possibly because the Republican Party in his own state had grown t...

Who shapes politics? The question is not quite so easy to answer as it may seem. In what some politicians consider the good old days, politics was fashioned by the public official running for office, a handful of political associates, party leaders and a few old boys in the establishment media network. In the modern period, party bosses have all but disappeared; the media network has expanded to include, comedians, Hollywood starlets and bloggers; both political parties have been shorn of much of their power through campaign reforms; primaries have made party convention decisions much less decisive; and politicians – if they are not incumbents – may have half a dozen reasons for entering the campaign jousts.

Vladimir Putin has been preparing for this moment ever since the Berlin Wall, like Humpty Dumpty, came tumbling down. The eight oil pipe lines that run across Ukraine from Russia to Europe traverse sacred ground, for it was Ukraine that bore the brunt of Josef Stalin’s man made famine in 1932-33. Germany – which, unlike Ukraine, is a part of NATO – may have forgotten its Berlin Wall. It’s been twenty seven years since former President Ronald Reagan visited Germany and shouted to free Western Germans within sight of the Brandenburg Gate, “Mr. Gorbechev, tear down this wall.”

It’s shear happenstance that Andrée is reading a biography of Flannery O’Connor on “talking books” just as I had finished reading to her a short biography on Simone Weil . Following the Weil biography, I picked up a book called the Simone Weil Reader , a collection of her major writings. Both writers were afflicted, O’Connor with lupus and Weil with an eating disorder. Camus says of Weil that she refused during the Second World War to take more nourishment than was available to troops in the war theatre and so starved herself. This was partly true; Weil had suffered for years from anorexia.

Most moralists would have no difficulty with the notion that good people have a flip side; they are sometimes bad. The trick in judging them morally, which ought to be done rarely and with great circumspection, is not to slide into a kind of moral Manichaeism in which you end up saying that the good side of a man redeems the bad side. It does not . St. Augustine, who was very bad before his mother drew him into Christianity, may serve as a model. He flew from his sins without having make the mistake of believing that his meritorious works in some sense cancelled the sins. It took sometime after the late former Sen. Edward Kennedy died for people to get around to noticing that he was, in fashionable parlance, “complex,” which is to say he was riven, as most men are, by sin. Or, if agnostic and atheistic readers prefer a less religiously freighted expression, we might say Kennedy was the victim of “human failings.” Some of Kennedy’s human failings were monstrous. Kevin Rennie , a...

Both the Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post have published pictures that prompted President Barrack Obama to say he was disturbed by the violence in Iran. The photo below shows a crowd of young Iranians bearing the bullet ridden body of a protestor. When Iranian police elsewhere fired upon a crowd of protestors, the crowd began to chant in unison, “Don’t be scared. We’re all together.” The president had been criticized as being tardy in his response to the Iranian election (read-- fraud). On Sunday, according to a report in Politico , Vice President Joe Biden expressed “doubts” about the election, and on Monday, press secretary Robert Gibbs was battered by a reporter: "... State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said the U.S. is 'deeply troubled' by events in Iran but stopped short of condemning them. “'I haven’t used that word, condemn,"' he [Gibbs] told the State Department press corps. 'We need to see how things unfold.' “'You need to se...

Q: Justice Sullivan, how do you feel now that you’ve been thoroughly humiliated? A: There’s a point at which you sense that the pack is after you. So you look around, consult your closest friends; and then you realize with a shutter that they are the pack. Of course, if you’ve screwed up, everything’s hopeless; now they have you in their jaws. Resentment runs deep in our characters, and lawyers are by nature and disposition disputatious folk. Q: At the hearing, your lawyer seemed a little harsh with Justices Borden and Palmer. A: That’s the packaging. You have to look past it to see the truth. Q: Which is? A: I screwed up. I did seek to withhold information from those in the legislature who were engaged in certifying the nomination of Justice Zarella as Chief Justice. In the end, that information, by itself, could not have torpedoed the nomination. It was a piece of stupidity I regret. But that is only part of the truth. On the other side, is there any doubt that Justices Borden and P...

A ticked off squirrel attacked and bit two children in Winter Park Florida. Just curious: Do they have snow there? The squirrel was captured by a vigilante who plopped a bucket over it and waited two hours for the animal service to show up, incarcerate the thing and perhaps provide it with an animal psychologist. But they were no-shows, and the squirrel was released in its own custody. Well, wouldn’t you know it, the vicious squirrel, whose country of origin could not be determined, promptly bit a senior citizen and another kid. At around the same time the squirrel was gnawing on park dwellers, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was palavering with esteemed American journalist Mike Wallace of CBS. The jovial president of Iran expressed some surprise that Wallace was still among the living. Ahmadinejad doesn’t get out much, and American talking heads are not his cup of tea. Ahmadinejad then tore into President Bush, who apparently did not give proper attention to a treatise the jew h...

The front page Associated Press picture in the Hartford Courant said a thousands words. It showed a somewhat cautious Ned Lamont being bear-hugged by Tommie Jackson, the pastor of Faith Baptist Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church in Stamford, while the Reverend Al Sharpton stood to his left beaming, no doubt waiting for his papier-mâché hug or, perhaps better, a peck on the cheek and a whispered sweet nothing in his ear. Why so diffident? Well sir, hugs and pecks mean something in our politics. They are a way of branding a politician. A serious hug means: I’m yours, and you’re mine. In the 21st century, no politician will plight their troth for more than, say, fifteen minutes, just enough time for a quick dip in fame’s baptismal font. They will rent themselves out to all comers, for the price of a vote. Those who have committed themselves, whether to a person or a cause, will be followed about by a huge papier-mâché reminder of their indiscreet dalliances. It seems that Lowell Weicker...