Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

On Monday (February 6, 2017), the Harford Courant printed a long, 1335 word op-ed column written by U.S. Senator Chris Murphy that previously had appeared in the Huffington Post, “ Trump’s Reckless Path Towards War .” http://www.courant.com/opinion/op-ed/hc-op-murphy-trumps-reckless-iran-policy-0206-20170203-story.html This is the lede to the column: “Since the inauguration, the White House has taken several ham-handed escalatory steps that bring into question whether  Trump  and his most radical advisers are begging for war with Iran. This would be a disaster of epic scale, perhaps eclipsing the nightmare of the Iraq War.  Republicans  and  Democrats  need to start viewing President Donald Trump's actions and words as a possible accidental or intentional prelude to major conflict, and take steps to counter this dangerous slide to war.” Almost every sentence is parsable. Taken as a whole, the piece amounts to a pawn house of campaign talking ...

The Associated Press called it “a striking rupture with past practice.” But it was more than that. It was an intentional slap in the face to Israel, President Elect Donald Trump, and all prior presidents who had manfully resisted the recent UN declaration made possible by lame-duck President Barack Obama’s decision to abstain from a UN Council vote that condemns Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as a “flagrant violation of international law.” Mr. Obama’s decision to abstain from the council’s 14-0 vote, the AP reported, “is one of the biggest American rebukes of its longstanding ally in recent memory. And it could have significant ramifications for the Jewish state, potentially hindering Israel's negotiating position in future peace talks. Given the world's widespread opposition to settlements, the action will be almost impossible for anyone, including Trump, to reverse.”

The media has lost its moral pull. The approval rating of the lowest bottom-feeding politician is several fathoms higher than that of “the media,” according to a September 2016 Gallup Poll . The media, even less than the current Democratic and Republican presidential nominees, simply does not give a hoot about approval polls directed at them, which are worth pausing over none-the-less.

Where to begin? Question: Mr. Blumenthal, who do you regard as being more corrupt, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or present Secretary of State John Kerry? Former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton is valiantly attempting to power through yet another stone wall, this one involving the Clinton Foundation. A short while back it was disclosed that Mrs. Clinton’s cover-up accomplices used BleachBit to permanently erase  from emails she had sent over a private, poorly secured server data that contained, according to FBI Director James Comey, top secret restricted information. The Clinton Foundation has now come under scrutiny. But Mrs. Clinton is not a lone player in the power game of using public office to advance the prospects of herself, her family or friends. John Kerry, a longtime U.S. Senator from Massachusetts and the present Secretary of State, appears to be following in his predecessor’s footsteps.

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.

Governor Dannel Malloy, approval rating 24%, is fast becoming the Donald Trump of Connecticut politics. Known among some commentators as “the porcupine,” largely because of his bristly nature, Mr. Malloy recently unloaded on Governor of Indiana Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s Vice Presidential choice. Mr. Trump very likely will be the Republican Party nominee for President once the Republican presidential nominating convention has concluded its business, and Democrats across the nation are even now busily arranging their bumper-sticker responses. Mr. Malloy, head of the National Democratic Governors Association, has jumped far ahead of the pack. If Donald Trump is looking for someone who is willing to discriminate,  Mr. Malloy told the Hartford Courant hours before Mr. Trump had publicly announced his Vice Presidential choice, "he couldn't do any better. If you want to bring back discrimination in America, the Republicans have a ticket for it." Mr. Malloy added, “I thi...

“The government doesn’t care about profits, which is why it’s always in the red. It doesn’t care much about service either, which is why there are long lines at Connecticut’s Department of Motor Vehicles. It cares only about votes.” – The Cynic at the Breakfast Table, a work in progress. On Thursday, Hillary Clinton came to Hartford, not so long ago the murder capital of New England, to agitate indirectly against Democratic presidential rival Bernie Sanders – AND FIRE ARMS. Mr. Sanders is from Vermont and does not suffer from hoplophobia , an irrational fear of guns. In the hinterland of Vermont, guns are used to shoot game; in one-party urbanscapes such as Hartford, guns are used by drug dealers, gangbangers and young school kids to kill rivals and innocent by-standers. Anti-gun Democratic politicians now seek to forestall urban gun crimes by allowing lawyers to sue gun manufacturers – good for the lawyers, bad for law-abiding gun owners and good for politicians wh...

    As the Middle East and President Barack Obama’s foreign policy of non-interference in the region dramatically disintegrate, President of Russia Vladimir Putin is gleefully pulling Uncle Sam by the beard. Most recently, Mr. Putin has supplied Iran, a traditional enemy of the United States, with defense missiles that grossly interfere with the non-nuclear weapons pact presently being negotiated between Mr. Obama and Iran. It should be understood that Iran is a theological oligarchy and not a democracy such as Israel. For all practical purposes, “Iran” is the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.

It’s been a rough few weeks in the Middle East. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come and gone, leaving behind in his wake a stream of petulant objections: Should he or should he not have been invited by partisan Republicans to address the US Congress concerning Iran’s machinations in the Middle East? Democrats in the Congress, we are to understand, are never partisan. One wonders, what is the point in having a party if its members are not permitted to be partisan? Appearing on Morning Joe shortly after Mr. Netanyahu’s address, US Senator Dick Blumenthal allowed that although the invitation itself was inappropriate, he never-the-less had decided not to boycott Mr. Netanyahu, because Israel and the United States traditionally have been allies. This was a grown-up view of interpersonal relations. Why should a longstanding relationship between two countries fall victim to personal pique? Mr. Blumenthal noted that there was some disagreement as to whether the White Ho...

Surely it is no secret among members of the Obama administration that Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu would rather not see Iran acquire nuclear weapons with which it might make Israel go poof. President Barack Obama was bound to oppose Mr. Netanyahu’s entirely predictable speech before the US Congress. And Mr. Obama, an advocate of extreme campaigning, as usual pulled out all the stops on his rhetorical organ. It may be best to get some housekeeping details out of the way.

US Senator Chris Murphy, who has been in the Senate only a little more than  two years and two weeks, is now “Desperately Seeking A Progressive Foreign Policy,” the tile of a column the senator wrote on his new blog . According to Mr. Murphy, the modern progressive movement is still in its swaddling clothes. The new movement was “founded on foreign policy” after Democrats had spent a couple of decades "in the wilderness during the era of the Democratic Leadership Council… in the early days of the Iraq war.”

It appears that Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, the sole democracy in the Middle East, will be addressing Congress after all on March 3 rd . The US Congress has been called the greatest deliberative democratic body on earth, and so here is a match that appears to have been made in Heaven. What then is the problem? Dick Blumenthal, as of this writing, is pretending not to know. Connecticut’s first consumer protection U.S. Senator has dropped into his Hamlet mode and has not yet made up his mind whether he’ll attend Mr. Netanyahu’s address. Said Mr. Blumenthal , “Well, I’m here as the senator from Connecticut, and I have to make a decision about what serves the national interest. And obviously I am Jewish, so I will be inclined to go but I, you know, have to make a decision on what I think is the right thing to do,” and “I certainly have respect for the head of the state of Israel and out of that respect I could go. But the invitation and the acceptance were very u...

Bill Curry -- who lost an election, honorably I might add, to John Rowland -- is usually aggravating, in the good sense, and pushing his party with Archimedean fervor to the left. It was Archimedes who said “Give me a spot outside the world where I may place my lever, and I will move the world.” The Democratic Party, most especially in his own state, has obliged Mr. Curry in one respect; it has put up between itself and Mr. Curry a political Berlin Wall that, in a recent piece in Salon , he valiantly and sometimes confusedly attempted to breach.

"The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood." - Otto von Bismarck A Hartford paper’s Sunday edition crackles with a front page story that asks and answers the tormenting question: Is progressivism dead ? The paper’s emphatic answer is – no, not yet, certainly not in Connecticut. The paper notes in passing the whupping progressive Democrats took in the off year elections, though the account spares the wounded the most important details.

According to the Jerusalem Post : “US officials are publicly taking a wait-and-see approach to the formation of a new Israeli government, but privately many have expressed concern that Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu might preside over a right-wing coalition. "”There would be great unease’ at the prospect of such a government, said one Capitol Hill source.” The unnamed source predicted “that a governing coalition of parties from the Right could embolden the left flank of the Democratic party and turn up pressure, particularly in the US Congress, to pass measures that made clear demands on Israel.” The post story is titled, “US worried over prospect of right-wing gov't.” More prosaically perhaps, Joe Israel is worried that the right wing government of Hamas will continue to rain missiles down on his head.