Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, re-elected in 2016 and not up for election until 2022, is in danger of becoming a tiresome party hack. However, in two years there is plenty of time for necessary course corrections. The political manual for slippery politicians may be found in T. S. Elliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”   There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; … And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.

It would take someone like Murray Kempton to do justice to the Rowland “tragedy,” admittedly a much misused and overused term. Unfortunately, Mr. Kempton – ever the gentleman, friend to the lonely and crushed – died in 1997, and we shall not see his like again. Bill Buckley, whose like we shall not see again, said of Kempton   that he was a “socialist — a sworn enemy of all anti-Communist legislation, sworn friend of militant unions” also “the finest writer in the newspaper profession,” disposing of a “wit and irony and a compassion which is sometimes unruly.” Buckley, who had a genius for friendship, then added that Mr. Kempton was “a great artist and a great friend.” Innocence, of course, is the essence of tragedy, and we know after a trial and an appeal – soon to be followed by more appeals, until Mr. Rowland runs out of money, at which point all the lawyers will disappear – that Mr. Rowland is NOT innocent. Mr. Kempton would not have focused on the trial or the ap...