Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

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.

WARNING TO THE CARELESS READER: WHAT FOLLOWS IS NOT – REPEAT NOT – AN ASSERTION OF INNOCENCE BY REASON OF STUPIDITY IN THE LONG RUNNING ROWLAND/LISA WILSON FOLEY/BRIAN FOLEY CORRUPTION CASE. It’s a he said, he said controversy. The parties in dispute are former radio talk show host John Rowland’s attorneys and the attorneys for Lisa Wilson Foley, who was, at the time she was charged and found guilty of a misdemeanor by prosecutors, a failed candidate for the US House of Representatives in the Connecticut corruption infested 5 th District.

Governor Dannel Malloy has more or less appointed himself as a national progressive Democratic attack dog, according to an interview with Time magazine : “Seizing an opportunity in a party depleted of household names not Clinton or Obama, Malloy is rising to the occasion, positioning himself as one of the party’s top attack dogs as the 2016 cycle approaches.” Hailing from Connecticut, where much of the media has placidly accepted Mr. Malloy’s progressive tax and spend program, there are no attack dogs on the left, and so Mr. Malloy has been permitted to range freely, biting whomever he chooses.

According to Jonathan Pelto ,  who ran out of money in his short-lived gubernatorial bid before he could seriously challenge Governor Dannel Malloy, Governor Dannel Malloy’s promise of a tax reduction was “a hoax.” It’s difficult to disagree with him. Three days prior to Mr. Malloy’s budget address before the General Assembly, the governor appeared on WFSB’s  "Face the State” and told moderator Dennis House he would be cutting the sales tax rate from 6.35 percent to 6.20 percent on Nov. 1, and to 5.95 percent more than two years from now, in April of 2017. The governor who had imposed on Connecticut the largest tax increase in its history had become, in the twinkling of an eye, a tax cutter, a miraculous transformation.

US Senator Chris Murphy might have said simply that the US invasion of Iraq in March, 2003 radicalized enemies of “the Great Satan” – that’s us. At best, this was a half-truth. There is some discussion afoot as to whether George Bush’s largely successful overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime during a three month war radicalized ISIS. Perhaps ISIS has been radicalized by something else. Some people, staring at Mr. Murphy from across the political barricades,  assert that the premature withdrawal of American troops from Iraq following the war was the precipitating event that gave birth to ISIS’ largely successful advance from Syria to northern Iraq. ISIS, according to this reading of events, simply exploited a military and political weakness issued from President Barack Obama’s “lead from behind” Middle East strategy: When the cat’s away, Islamic terrorists will play. The propriety of the war to dislodge Saddam Hussein has become an  political briar patch so thick and tho...

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...

Q: Some people think you are a misanthrope. GG: I must regretfully reject the compliment. Q: Compliment? GG: It’s no small thing being a misanthrope. You must dislike or mistrust everyone . Unfortunately, I haven’t the energy to be so democratic in my antipathies.                                                                                                                        ...

Someone – could it have been the ghost of Tom D’Amore ? – has suggested that the Republican Party should open its primaries to unaffiliateds. An unaffiliated is someone who, for reasons not perfectly understood, does not wish to   formally affiliate with political parties. Tom D’Amore, now entertaining Jacob Javits Republicans in Heaven, was Senator Lowell Weicker’s majordomo when Mr. Weicker was in Washington DC fighting the good fight against Reagan Republicans. For a time, Mr. D’Amore, at the insistence of Weicker, was the Republican Party Chairmen in Connecticut. As Chairman he pledged he would not preside over the destruction of the Connecticut GOP and then introduced the idea of permitting unaffiliateds to vote in Republican Party primaries, an idea that went over like a lead balloon,  once thoughtful Republicans had discovered that the idea would prevent Ronald Reagan conservatives from making inroads into the Connecticut GOP, perhaps heaving Mr. Weicker ...

Former US Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker – now retired from public affairs and living the life in Old Lyme  – once again has stepped forward on the public stage to tell  Republicans in Connecticut what they must do to save themselves from the destruction wrought upon their party by Lowell Weicker, among others. The first thing they must do is to abandon the ideas of former President Ronald Reagan and embrace the ideas of Mr. Weicker. And of course if Republicans in his overtaxed and over-regulated tottering state saw fit to nominate for public office people just like Mr. Weicker, that would be a cherry on the state’s cake. And, oh yes – let us not forget – Mr. Weicker and his enablers on the Hartford Courant’s editorial board want the Connecticut GOP to open its primary doors to unaffiliateds.

Former US Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker, the bad conscience of Connecticut’s Republican Party, has surfaced once again in one of his usual haunts, the Hartford Courant , a paper that has in the past managed to oblige Weicker’s whimsy, whether he was muscling the General Assembly into passing an income tax or torpedoing Republican campaigns against then US Senator Chris Dodd, now a Hollywood mogul, or supplying the Republican Party in Connecticut with the rope Weicker suspected it would use to hang itself. Having appointed his majordomo, Tom D’Amore, as state GOP Chairmen, D’Amore proposed that the Republican Party should allow independents to vote in party primaries, thus assuring the election for life of then US Senator Weicker. At the time, D’Amore assured the party’s central committee that he had not assumed his responsibilities as Chairman to preside over the demise of the Republican Party. Republicans declined the offer of the rope; D’Amore later was replaced by a cha...