Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Sen. Lou DeLuca has now been “done in” by most commentators and editorial boards. It’s difficult to see how he can survive the drubbing, and it is safe to predict that his days in the state senate soon will be drawing to a close. The Harford Courant has, somewhat tardily , called for DeLuca’s resignation from the senate. DeLuca has stepped down as Minority Leader for Republicans but continues to cling on to his seat by (pun intended) the seat of his pants. “And Mr. DeLuca,” the Courant intoned two days before two of its columnists, Kevine Rennie and Bill Currry opened fire in the Sunday edition of the paper, “ a Woodbury Republican, was wrong again last week in deciding not to resign his seat in the Senate. Resigning would be the honorable thing to do, but Mr. DeLuca is nothing if not consistent.” Rennie , whose jeweler’s eye was trained on prosecutorial inconsistencies, in addition to holding aloft DeLuca’s severed head, also lambasted prosecutors who arrogantly refused to settle wha...

The successful prosecution of “Scooter Libby" – for lying to a grand jury – was a spectacular failure because it did not answer the question “Who outed Valerie Plame as an undercover agent?" There will be no further prosecutions in the case because the prosecutor fingered the wrong man: Scooter Libby did not blow Plame’s cover, because she was not an undercover agent. Prosecutor Fitzgerald packed his bags and went home after his flawed prosecution of the case because he fingered Libby rather than Richard Armitage, chief aide to then Secretary of state Colin Powell, as the primary leaker. Libby’s troubles began with a column written by Sun Times columnist Robert Novak , who testified to the grand jury under oath that Libby had said nothing to him about Plame. “While my column on Wilson's mission triggered Libby's misery,” Novak wrote in a recent column, “I played but a minor role in his trial. Subpoenaed by his defense team, I testified that I had phoned him in reporti...

“Tell the truth,” says the poet Emily Dickenson, “but tell it slant.” The poetry resides in the slant. Bill Curry , a liberal Democrat who twice ran for governor and now writes a column for the Hartford Courant, is Connecticut’s politician poet in residence. Personally, I’ve always considered it unfortunate that Curry had not prevailed over former Gov. and felon John Rowland. Had he won in one of his two attempts to be governor, the state almost certainly would have been spared a messy gubernatorial prosecution and threatened impeachment, and not only because Curry can be as honest as the day is long – when it suits his purpose – but also because the state’s liberal press is somewhat laggard in the matter of applying to Democrats the lashes it distributes with such relish to Republicans. I do not doubt – as have said or intimated many times in this space – that Rowland got what he deserved, and before commenting further on Curry’s column on “Scooter” Libby, I wish to state without equi...

It seems like only yesterday that special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald was homing in on Karl Rove. Top vice presidential aide I. Lewis Libby, second in command to Vice President Dick Cheney, was said to have leaked the name of Valerie Plame to a reporter and blown her CIA cover, apparently in retaliation for a piece written in the Wall Street Journal by her husband, Joe Wilson, that questioned President Bush’s rational for prosecuting a war in Iraq. Plame was a CIA analyst and not an undercover agent at the time her name was released. But this made no difference. Hot on the chase and anxious to bag Cheney and Rove, the mainstream media devoted an ocean of ink to the subject, and it was widely speculated that Libby was executing a dirty trick on the Wilsons on orders from Rove, the Svengalli of the Bush administration. It all turned out to be a lot of sound and fury , signifying nothing . According to recent more accurate reports in the New York Times, it was not Libby, but rather R...