Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Democrats across the nation and in Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, all-Democrat since 2009, are assembling their adjectives to describe a recent vote in the U.S. House on the question of an “impeachment resolution,” which is not at all the same thing as a vote in the House on a bill of impeachment. In an impeachment proceeding, the U.S. House of Representatives produces and then votes yes or no on a bill containing articles of impeachment. If the vote carries in the Democrat controlled House, it then passes to the Republican controlled U.S. Senate, which conducts a trial. If a sufficient number of senators, sitting as a jury, find the offender guilty of the charges specified in the bill, the offender is removed from office, the only punishment that can be visited upon an impeached government official.

Leftists are winning the culture war, the war on western civilization, because rootless politicians have shown themselves unwilling to enter the lists and do battle with the new morality. For this reason, American culture is being redefined – reinvented, as the leftists would have it – by social anarchists with knives in their brains. It has become fashionable among New York leftist politicians to wink at, and even to publicly celebrate, infanticide. No assault on traditional sensibilities, it would seem, is beyond the pale. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s notion that third trimester abortion is too close to infanticide to be tolerated by men and women of conscience is now regarded as embarrassingly quaint   by New York’s smart set, among whom are Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, not his birth name.

An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere – Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad The national and state elections have, unsurprisingly, intersected. Former U.S Representative Chris Shays not only announced he would not be supporting the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump; he also said he would be actively supporting Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party presidential nominee. Ditto Lowell Weicker , the “Maverick” Republican who ran for governor of Connecticut under his own party label, “A Connecticut Party.” These defections are not at all surprising, and anyone writing about Connecticut politics who is surprised at them should have their press credentials revoked.

Hartford, Connecticut’s capital city, has been a one-horse town since 1971, when the last Republican Mayor, Ann Uccello, was recruited by then President Richard Nixon to serve in the U.S. Department of Transportation. Since that time, more than 44 years, Hartford has languished in the grip of the Democratic Party hegemon. Hegemony always has and always will produce aberrant and corrupt government, largely because in one-party systems there are no political checks and balances, the administrative state is captive to an easily manipulable single party, and there are fewer eyes looking through the windows.

Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor will be retiring, according to a news report ,  in January, just as the New Year begins. When Mr. Pryor first entered the Malloy administration, he was warmly received by the newly elected governor, who was dissatisfied with the quality of public education in Connecticut’s urban areas. Mr. Malloy made it plain that students in low performing public schools were not dispensable.  Students in Connecticut’s larger cities may have languished in under-performing schools during the administrations of less solicitous governors; but, in Mr. Malloy’s view, such students, whose futures had for years been blasted by inadequate education, were no less precious than the children of more prosperous parents in West Hartford, Avon or New Canaan. Mr. Malloy was to be an education governor. It did not take Mr. Malloy long to discover that it was nearly impossible to purge bad schools of bad teachers. To redress this socially destructive inequity, h...

“ Connecticut Commentary ,” as usual, anticipated former U.S. Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker’s remarks on WNPR by nearly a week. On May 9, Don Pesci addressed Republicans in Westbrook   and mentioned Mr. Weicker at some length: “Both Mr. Weicker and Mr. Malloy are progressives. At the root of progressivism lies the sundering notion that if government is good, more government must be better. From here it is but a baby step to the equally absurd notion that government is the state. In fact, the state is all of us, the government merely an administrative apparatus designed, if you credit the U.S. and State Constitutions, to accomplish our reason informed will. Mr. Weicker, whose ego as U.S. Senator and Governor was infinitely expansive, took this absurd logic a step further and regarded himself as the state. I should like to call your attention to the hopeful tense in that last sentence: Mr. Weicker was , he regarded – past tense: There is a God.

On the Republican side, Tom Foley is refusing to debate other Republicans running for governor. Mr. Foley has a sizable edge over his Republican competitors in recent polls. On the Democratic side, Governor Dannel Malloy only recently announced he was running for re-election. Previous to his announcement, Mr. Malloy, like President Barack Obama a perpetual campaigner, had been using his bully pulpit to gain an advantage over his Republican opponents; among political cognoscenti, this is known as “running for re-election.” Campaign “white lies” have become much dirtier over the years -- c.f. Governor Lowell Weicker: Instituting an income tax would be like “pouring gas on a fire.” Asked why he should not give up the pretense and just announce he was running for re-election, Mr. Malloy showed his campaign hand. He said he wanted to give the Republicans sufficient time to beat up on each other. That is what a primary contest is: a friendly wrestling match among political compatr...

There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea -- T.S. Elliot Kevin Rennie, a Harford Courant columnist, is regarded by some in politics as the Torquemada of Connecticut commentators – especially in matters of what one might call political ethics. Many politicians have felt his bite and winced.

Former Connecticut U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman has shown that there is life after politics. The usual route for departing Beltway politicians is to associate themselves with a large law firm in some lobbying or quasi-lobbying capacity, thereby softening for the clients of the firm the burdensome laws and regulations they had so assiduously created as congressman. Former U.S. Senator Chis Dodd managed to escape the mold somewhat when, after having left the Congress, he hitched his star to Hollywood. The author of the imponderable Dodd-Frank bill, so compendious that we still don’t know “what’s in it,” to borrow a phrase from Mr. Dodd’s compatriot in Congress, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Dodd is now busily engaged in attempting to convince his former associates to do something – anything! – about Chinese violations of U.S. copyright laws. Since former President Richard Nixon first touched glasses with mass murderer Chairman Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1972, the Chinese ...

For those unfamiliar with the early part of the 21 st century – perhaps you were watching sports on your 92 inch Mitsubishi DPL TV during the first decade of the new century – Connecticut, as predicted by prophets unloved in their own state, did finally go the way of Greece, Spain, Italy and much of Europe. The plane crashed into the mountain two years after the re-election of Governor Malloy the Minotaur, and the shock of the crash finally woke up the sleeping passengers. Thereafter, the state was administered by political technicians who had decided they must sell off their sole remaining assets. To this end, they held a state-wide sale of politicians.   Auctioneer: Alright, listen up. It’s a sad business indeed when a state once prosperous must sell off its politicians to satisfy creditors. In all ages, creditors are ever the same – single-mindedly vicious. It’s the prospect of a negative return on their investments that puts fangs in their mouths. But that’s where we a...

Republican Senate Minority Leader John McKinney called upon Democratic Speaker of the House Chris Donovan to relinquish his position as Speaker following the arrest of his former finance chairman, Robert Braddock, for having concealed the identity of a donor, likely an FBI plant, who wanted to kill tax legislation on “roll your own” cigarette businesses in Connecticut. Pointing to an affidavit used to secure the arrest of Mr. Braddock, Mr. Kinney said, “The facts and allegations in the affidavit are a grave violation of the public trust and cast a pall on all of the legislative activities Speaker Donovan has participated in since announcing his run for the U.S. Congress in the 5 th District,” a fairly damning assessment. For his part, Mr. Donovan temporarily turned over the usufructs of his office to colleague Brendan Sharkey, who is expected to be appointed Speaker after Mr. Donovan’s term ends, and he has refused a call from one of his Democratic primary opponents, Dan R...

Cardinal József Mindszenty was the Primate of Hungary and the Archbishop of Esztergom, the seat of the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Hungary, who took refuge in the American Embassy in order to prevent the communists who had imprisoned him from deporting him. Accused of treason, conspiracy and other offenses against the newly formed communist government, the cardinal, wise in the ways of fascist and communist interrogators, took the precaution before his arrest of writing a note denying he had been involved in any conspiracy and informing much of the world that any confession he might make as a result of duress would be fraudulent. The always inventive communists accused the cardinal, among other charges, of having orchestrated the theft of Hungary's crown jewels, including the Crown of Saint Stephen, with the explicit purpose of crowning Otto von Habsburg emperor of Eastern Europe. Under duress the cardinal confessed he had schemed to remove the Communist govern...

The important thing to remember about Watergate – other than the notorious cover-up, the stonewalling, the raft of lies told to the media, the imperious claims of “executive privilege” – is that nobody died there. Some of the principal presidential miscreants responsible for Watergate were rounded up, paraded before various congressional committees and suitably harassed by the media. Some of them sang to avoid a term in jail, others went to the hoosegow. A grand jury indicted the “Watergate Seven” – President Richard Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Attorney General John Mitchell, Charles Colson, Gordon C. Strachan, Robert Mardian and Kenneth Parkinson -- in March of 1974, and Mr. Nixon was secretly named as an unindicted co-conspirator. Mr. Nixon, Time Magazine said, was undergoing “daily Hell and very little trust.” The fires of Hell were stoked and the trust disappeared altogether when a “smoking gun” tape was produced showing Mr. Nixon approving a plan to cover...

Where were you in 1973? The Congress of the United States in 1973 was hard at work hammering out the War Powers Resolution , a joint act permitting the president of the Unites States, Richard Nixon at the time, to send the armed forces of United States into action only after obtaining the authorization of the legislative branch of government. An exception was allowed under the resolution if the United States were to come under direct attack or a serious threat of attack. The War Powers Resolution was an attempt by congress to snatch back from the executive department a presumed constitutional power that had eroded after World War II. During the Korean War, euphemistically called a “conflict,” and the Vietnam War, the United States had marched off to battle without obtaining from congress “a declaration of war.” Passed by the two-thirds vote in Congress necessary to overcome Mr. Nixon’s veto, the War Powers Resolution required presidents to notify Congress within 48 hours of commi...

There are actually two social-political orders, conservative and liberal, one of which, depending upon one’s ideological proclivities, apparently has been constructed by the devil. Both views are rooted in sociological perceptions. A dependable sociology will reason from facts, which are, according to Jim Manzi writing in National Affairs , both prophetic and distressing. Surveying the last half century, Mr. Manzi can not help but notice a deplorable cultural bifurcation: “Increasingly, our country is segregated into high-income groups with a tendency to bourgeois norms, and low-income groups experiencing profound social breakdown.” Mr. Manzi traces the collapse of bourgeois morality to a longstanding academic and avant garde assault on traditional social norms associated with the left in the 1960’s. By the 1970’s, “attitudes and behaviors began to change on a mass scale.” But every radical social action leads ineluctably to an equal and opposite reaction; and the resistance, whe...

To be just and honest, the noble ambition of credible journalism, it should be said up front that Tom Foley does not, or rather did not, beat his wife; neither is Ned Lamont a racist. That is the undeclared imputation in two recent stories: one involving Foley, the Republican Party nominee for governor, and the other involving Lamont, now locked in a primary battle with former Mayor of Stamford Dan Malloy. In the quarter decade old Foley story, the perp momentarily blocked his wife from leaving a driveway and disputed with her through a couple of stop signs, after which both were arrested. The matter was settled privately, charges were dropped, and the details of the case were not shared with the news media. A messy divorce is no walk through a rose garden, especially when the two former lovebirds quarrel over visitation procedures involving a young child. The Foley story is, relatively speaking, old and hoary; the Lamont story is somewhat fresher. Lamont, according to this one...

Jack Schaeffer of Slate , generally not a scorpion's nest of Republican firebrands, reports on Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s early 70’s connections: “The resourceful Blumenthal was nothing if not connected: When his student deferment clocked out, he got his draft board to give him a 2-A "occupational deferment" for his work as a special aide to Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham, whom he met through her son Donald, a classmate at Harvard. The 2-A deferment was for jobs essential to the "national health, safety, and interest." (For the record, Donald Graham joined the Army and served in Vietnam, not that you'll ever hear him brag about it.) “In 2008, Jack Shafer pondered Joe Biden's told grandiose lies. In 2004, Timothy Noah reported Dick Cheney's last ditch effort to duck the draft. Blumenthal's next stop was Richard Nixon's White House, where he secured yet another occupational deferment in 1970. But then Nixon began to ...

Blumenthal In mid-June Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, the nominee of the Democratic Party for the U.S. Senate, popped out of his bunker long enough to give  a brief interview to Mark Pazniokas . Formerly a state politics writer for the Hartford Courant who lost his job in a downsizing, Pazniokas, a veteran reporter of 25 years, now writes for the Connecticut Mirror (CTMirror). Pazniokas sought to tease from Blumenthal a rough accounting of the number of times Blumenthal “misspoke” concerning his service in Vietnam. Whether it was five, six or seven, Blumenthal remonstrated, “It was very limited… But whatever the number, I regret the mistakes. I'm sorry for them. I take full responsibility. I have been asked and I have answered questions about my service." Blumenthal strongly suggested in the interview that he had exposed himself to a draft by joining the Marine Reserves: "I could have stayed in the White House and continued the deferment," Blumenthal sa...

We think we know what made Dodd not run, but what makes him run? Over the last few months, U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd has been waving goodbye to the senate, a bittersweet farewell occasioned, some think, by plummeting polls and the perception on the part of some of his constituents that he stuck around too long, like some disintegrating, punch-drunk boxer dreaming of his glory days in the ring. Then again, in the last few months, Dodd has been “born again” – this time as a reformer. Prior to his born-again experience, he was what Roll Call calls “the consummate insider .” The senator after whom Dodd patterned himself, “lion of the senate” Edward Kennedy, was, to be sure, more “consummate,” beltway lingo indicating the congressional “virtue” of getting your way by playing between the keys of the political organ. It is said by the chattering class that Dodd is “working on his legacy .” A politician’s legacy is what remains of him after he has left office, history’s verdict on his multif...

The Washington Times , citing a Gallup April poll, is reporting that only one other president, Bill Clinton, is less popular after his 100 days in office than Barack Obama. “Mr. Obama's popularity after 100 days,” the Washington Times editorializes, “is the second-lowest for a simple reason: He is more partisan and divisive than his predecessors - including Richard Nixon” and George Bush.