Skip to main content

The Battle For Attorney General

Facing abysmally low poll ratings, U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd chose to bump himself off a few days ago, wherefore all the professional politicians who for years thought Dodd was bee’s knees breathed a huge collective sigh of relief.

Republicans scratched their heads in dismay when Caligula announced his availability for Dodd’s seat.

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, never one to shy from a camera -- having waited what was for him a decent interval before Dodd’s corpse, metaphorically speaking, had been trundled off the stage, a mere two hours – jumped into the race and later made an appearance on Fox News the same day as Dodd’s valedictory.

Most pollsters have already anointed Attorney General Richard Blumenthal as Connecticut’s next U.S. Senator. But Professor Gary Rose, Chairman of the Department of Government and Politics at Fairfield University, is not quite ready to leap on the bandwagon. Rose has an issue with Blumenthal’s TV presence.

“There’s not the most appealing image on TV,” he said. “He looks anemic or gaunt. Not healthy. I don’t know if that’s going to play out. I think it could.”

A little pancake makeup might do wonders.

At least one Democrat who has had her eyes on the gubernatorial prize, the mercurial Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz, is now looking lustily at the position, a political gold brick, that will be left vacant by Blumenthal. Bysiewicz told Shelly Sindland of Fox news that she was “assessing” a switch. Co-chairman of the legislature’s Judiciary Committee Mike Lawlor who, along with his confederate in the senate, Andrew McDonald, attempted sometime back to rearrange the apostolic structure of the Catholic Church, is also assessing.

It’s hard to believe that the attorney General’s office used to be a part time position. It was current Sen. Joe Lieberman who made the office what it is today – a meandering mess without statutory borders, a baby step removed from a utopian tyranny. For as long as Blumenthal was and is attorney general, no one in the state was or is safe from his withering reach. Blumenthal, the state’s consumer-protector-in-chief, is the closest Connecticut has come to producing a vigorous, progressive, autocratic Caligula, the 1st century Roman Caesar who also had that lean and hungry look, the hallmark of utopianists come to save the earth from its folly.

The attorney general’s office has sovereign immunity from prosecution -- which means, if Connecticut’s Caligula violates your 14th Amendment Constitutional rights by depriving you of your property without giving you the opportunity to respond to his sometime fictional charges before a judge, you have no recourse to temper his behavior through a well deserved money suit.

What petty Caligula would not want to wield such unbridled and loathsome powers?

Bysiewicz, should she decide to jump onto Blumenthal’s empty shoes, will not be alone in the tousle for the gold brick.

In addition to Pope Lawlor and Bysiewicz, past chairman of the state Democratic Party George Jepsen has expressed interest. In an attempt to give a boot to the often berated Sen. Joe Lieberman, Jepsen accused the embattled senator of having exalted “morality over personal loyalty in excoriating President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, yet demanded personal loyalty from Connecticut Democrats in 2006 who opposed the Iraq war on moral grounds.”

At some point before assuming divinity like proportions as attorney general, Jepsen might want to walk that statement out the door since 1) even Bill Clinton, after a chat with his wife and his political handlers, more or less admitted moral culpability in inserting cigars in odd orifices; and 2) every Democrat’s dream president, Barack Obama, is now demanding personal loyalty from Connecticut Democrats who may oppose his efforts to make war upon Afghanistan, portions of Pakistan, the pirates of Somalia, and possibly Nigeria, the home of underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

As usual, the warmongering Lieberman is happy to oblige.

In any case, it might be real nice, from a Democratic point of view, if Joe were to lend his support to Blumenthal’s campaign; it might do some good, and it certainly would not hurt Jepsen in his effort to assume the mantle of Caligula.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Blumenthal Burisma Connection

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."

Powell, the JI, And Economic literacy

Powell, Pesci Substack The Journal Inquirer (JI), one of the last independent newspapers in Connecticut, is now a part of the Hearst Media chain. Hearst has been growing by leaps and bounds in the state during the last decade. At the same time, many newspapers in Connecticut have shrunk in size, the result, some people seem to think, of ad revenue smaller newspapers have lost to internet sites and a declining newspaper reading public. Surviving papers are now seeking to recover the lost revenue by erecting “pay walls.” Like most besieged businesses, newspapers also are attempting to recoup lost revenue through staff reductions, reductions in the size of the product – both candy bars and newspapers are much smaller than they had been in the past – and sell-offs to larger chains that operate according to the social Darwinian principles of monopolistic “red in tooth and claw” giant corporations. The first principle of the successful mega-firm is: Buy out your predator before he swallows

Down The Rabbit Hole, A Book Review

Down the Rabbit Hole How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime by Brent McCall & Michael Liebowitz Available at Amazon Price: $12.95/softcover, 337 pages   “ Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime ,” a penological eye-opener, is written by two Connecticut prisoners, Brent McCall and Michael Liebowitz. Their book is an analytical work, not merely a page-turner prison drama, and it provides serious answers to the question: Why is reoffending a more likely outcome than rehabilitation in the wake of a prison sentence? The multiple answers to this central question are not at all obvious. Before picking up the book, the reader would be well advised to shed his preconceptions and also slough off the highly misleading claims of prison officials concerning the efficacy of programs developed by dusty old experts who have never had an honest discussion with a real convict. Some of the experts are more convincing cons than the cons, p