Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The state of Israel must survive, and this is not a walk in the park. Israel is surrounded by noxious Arab powers that long for its utter destruction, the most ambitious of which is Iran, now on the path to becoming a nuclear tipped hegemonic power in the Middle East. Once the enemy of the United States, Iran is a fierce and energetic enemy of both Israel and the United States, which it regards as “The Great Satan.” Since the fall of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country has become both more Islamic and belligerent. These two, a puritanical reform of Islam and an increase in theologically inspired violence, seem to walk arm and arm together in this sorry veil of tears.

Here is former President George Bush on Russian President Vladimir Putin's domestic centralization of power as quoted in a recent book, "Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House: "He thinks he'll be around forever. He asked me why I didn't change the Constitution so I could run again.” Mr. Bush, brutalized by then candidate for president Barack Obama, never looked back when he left office and has been silent as a tomb ever since. Still, one cannot help but wonder what Mr. Bush’s reaction was to the latest news out of Russia, as reported by Reuters: “ Putin dissolves state newsagency tightens grip on Russia media .”

The present state of Iran – calamitous, full of barking imams and led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who recently, at the invitation of President of Columbia University Lee Bollinger, entertained the assembled students with his fictions – is former President Jimmy Carter’s present to the world. Carter facilitated the fall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, once friendly to the United States, now become the Great Satan among Middle Eastern men who like their women wrapped in burkas, like human hotdogs in wool buns. Oriana Fallaci is the first and only woman journalist to pull off her chador while interviewing the Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, Iran’s answer to the Shah, throw it to the ground and declaim, “I will not be imprisoned.” Jimmy Carter is no Oriana Fallaci. After the fall of the Shah, Khomeini, the Lenin of the Iranian revolution, returned to Iran from France, where he had been in exile, and quickly took over. In this he was assisted by then President ...

Believe it or not, there are Democrats whose most ardent hope is that Bush will come to his senses and end the war in Iraq before the next presidential election. One can almost hear the sweat pouring off their foreheads splashing on the floor of the U.S. Senate. That hope, somewhat unrealistic considering Bush’s adamantine refusal to withdraw the troops, is in its death throws after General David Petraeus’ report to congress. The Petraeus report did not go down well with the ardent anti-war crowd huddled in the bunkers over at MoveOn.org, who accused the general of “Betrayal (rhymes, sort of, with Petraeus) or the anti-war harridans over at DailyKos, Impeach Bush Central. Our own Sen. Chris Dodd is one of the principal leaders of the Movement To Get Bush To Put His Head In A Noose And Pull The Trap Door. It’s not working. The man is stubborn and has no yen for self destruction. The Democrat, anti-war take on Bush is that he bumbled into the presidency fraudulently (the environmentally...

According to a report in the Hartford Courant, US Sen. Chris Dodd “could back a temporary increase in the number of U.S. troops in Iraq - but only if that surge was for a very short period and specifically helped end American involvement.” Should anyone be worried that Dodd’s position may not please progressives in the Democrat Party who together worked to oust Sen. Joe Lieberman from the senate, largely because of his support for the war, they need not trouble themselves too much; Dodd’s “support” of the introduction of new troops into Iraq is heavily conditioned. In the Courant report, Dodd laid down two conditions that must be met to assure his support: 1) Before new troops are introduced, the two warring religious sects, the Shias and Sunnis, must sit down and recognize that they have an obligation to come together as a people; and 2) The troops must be “needed” to “get the job done.” "Show me, Dodd said, “some demonstrable evidence that they're coming together as a people...

After being forced underground for ten years at a cost of £1 million a year, the price of bodyguards in Merry Old England, Salman Rushdie, author of the Satanic Verses -- which got him a fatwah from the Ayatollah Khomeini – has lost none of his fizz. "Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family,” Rushdie said during a recent interview , “there's not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted wearing the veil. "I think the battle against the veil has been a long and continuing battle against the limitation of women, so in that sense I'm completely on [Leader of Britian’s House of Commons Jack Straw's] side.” And here’s the fizz: “He [Straw] was expressing an important opinion, which is that veils suck, which they do. I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women." Although the fatwah against Rushdie presumably has been removed, opinions of this kind are not likely to earn the ...

The foreign policy views of Ned Lamont have “grown,” as the liberals sometimes say, since he became the Democrat nominee for the US Senate.  In the early days, when Lamont was pushed into a primary race against sitting Sen. Joe Lieberman, his views on Iraq were hardly distinguishable from those of Cindy Sheehan: Get out of Iraq now – or else! At that time, his position on the war might have been described as “open ended retreat.” Having won the primary, Lamont then went to Yale, and his views have matured. Yale sometimes does this to people. At the moment, Lamont’s position may best be described as qualified retreat. Lamont has proposed a withdrawal of troops from Iraq, where the United States is engaged in a hot war with Islamic terrorists, and a redeployment of troops to Afghanistan, where the war against terrorism has become more manageable, possibly because terrorists are engaged in Iraq. Presumably, the United States is to retreat from Iraq because it had backed into a war in ...