Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

We all remember where we were when Walter Cronkite brought us the news. I had just finished playing ball and took a shower in the gym at Danbury State Teachers College, now Western Connecticut University. The weather that day, November 22, 1963, was fairly mild, around 50 degrees. Cars were parked in the lot, students crowded around some of them. The girls were weeping, the boys somber, a look of fury and shame on their faces. “What’s the matter?” I asked “Kennedy has been shot,” one of the girls said, weeping bitterly.

The driving force behind Western styled capitalism, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” says George Gilder, the Walt Whitman of Capitalism, is – hang onto your hats here – altruism. Or, to put it in terms that might best arouse the fierce antagonism of socialists, progressives and “Occupy Wall Street” san culottes, the primary notes of capitalism are: methodological experimentation, creativity and a concern for others – not greed. The very notion that altruism, a meeting of the wants and needs of others, rather than greed is the spark that sets the entrepreneurial spirit aflame is anathema to the ardent followers of Ayn Rand, the author of “Atlas Shrugged,” apart from the Bible one of the bestselling novels --   or, as some would insist,   polemical tracts -- of all times.

L’affair à La Renaissance was arranged by conservative talk show host Brad Davis. Over six hundred people showed up at La Renaissance in East Windsor to munch on lunch and listen to Sen. Joe Lieberman -- dogged by video bloggers, sulfurous anti-Vietnam war protestors, his ancient nemesis Lowell Weicker, and Democrat nominee for his seat in the senate Ned Lamont – do his shtick. Ten or more points up in the polls from what once was a neck-and-neck race, Lieberman is cautious but full of energy, a contagion he might have caught from genial host Davis, red haired, benevolent and of indeterminate age. An attractive woman at table told me while eating her baked scrod, “I used to listen to Brad during the old Milk Show days.” That was long ago. American Bandstand was all the rage, and Elvis had not yet stuffed himself to death with doughnuts. All the fast friends of Brad Davis were there: the king of “Blueberry Hill,” Davis’ nettlesome radio antagonist and Red Sox fan Ace Gizzardi, the honor...

The Able Danger disaster will soon be coming to a newspaper near you. Much of the information contained in this column can be found on various blog sites, both liberal and conservative, now crackling with the story. This is what is known so far about the brewing scandal: • Able Danger, an intelligence unit established by the Pentagon in 1999 to identify al-Quada affiliated members and cells for U.S. Special Operations Command, hit pay dirt sometime in August or September of 2000. According to a military intelligence official and U.S. Rep Kurt Weldon, who claims to have spoken to four people involved with Able Danger, the intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi as members of an al-Quada cell named “Brooklyn” by the internet sleuths because of the cell’s loose connection with Brooklyn, New York. Atta and two other cell members went on to achieve notoriety by steering planes into the Trade Tower buildings in New York, killing upwar...