Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Members of Connecticut’s Democrat State Central Committee on July 22 voted unanimously to pull the eject lever on Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States, and Andrew Jackson, 7th President of the United States, widely considered the father of the modern Democratic Party. On a unanimous voice vote, the names of the two gentlemen were stripped from the Party’s annual “Jefferson, Jackson, Bailey Dinner.” The Confederate Flag lowered permanently from a flagpole on the lawn of the State Capitol in South Carolina following the racist-terrorist murder of nine churchgoers at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church has brought down more than a flag. On the 67 th  year of the annual Jefferson, Jackson, Bailey fete, Connecticut Democrats awakened suddenly to  the slaver pasts of both Jefferson and Jackson.   U.S. Congresswoman  Rosa DeLauro stoutly resisted  the effort to airbrush Mr. Jefferson from Democratic Party history. The th...

“It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us -- the lesson of the fearsome word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.” ― Hannah Arendt,  Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil The relationship between U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal and Connecticut’s left of center media during his twenty years and more as the state’s Attorney General has been a cordial one. There are reasons for this. A consumer protection Attorney General, Mr. Blumenthal found it easy to press all the right buttons, and journalistic experience he had acquired at Harvard – he was an active journalist for the Harvard Crimson – put him in good odor with newspaper editors. A sampling of Mr. Blumenthal’s news reporting is preserved even today in the news morgue of the Harvard Crimson.

Somewhere,  Fyodor Dostoyevsky  says the average life of a man is about three generations; that would be around 180 years. Why so long? Well, a man lives in the lives of his family, children and friends. The problem of death – real death, in the sense of obliteration and forgetfulness – begins after the third generation. By the fourth generation, a man is forgotten. Life has lost its grip on the human imagination, and the man is gone, utterly gone, at least on this side of death’s veil. For Christians who believe in the promises of the Living God, death is swallowed up in life everlasting. But not all of us have the courage – or the imagination -- to believe such things.

Never has a president waved the white flag so gaily.  The sanctions on Iran were a success, which is why, come to think of it, Iran has so importunately insisted on their removal. Removing the sanctions for so little in return is an abject failure. One day after the Obama-Iran deal was inked, Obama faced the cameras and said the alternative to his agreement would have been war rather than, say, tougher sanctions. That is a false alternative. But then this administration has been for several years on good terms with falsity. The operative assumption of the Obama administration seems to be that you really CAN fool most of the people all the time. The only thing more disgraceful than the Obama-Iran agreement – which surrenders any real possibility of preventing the distribution of nuclear weapons throughout the Middle East – is “Winter Soldier” John Kerry, the second worst Secretary of State in recent times.

Not only does every regulation impose additional costs on businesses, excessive regulation also unwittingly embraces unintended consequences that may be fatal to the best laid plans of those who oppose urban sprawl, the movement of business operations from urban areas to the suburban frontier. This “Big Bang” movement has been occurring ever since the protective walls of castles disappeared centuries ago. For anti-sprawlists in Connecticut, many of whom are environmentalists, local farms are essential to a movement that seeks to nudge businesses back into cities; the more farms there are in the hinterlands, the less land will be available for “exploitation” by businesses and home construction companies. Environmentalists do not generally object heatedly to “urban sprawl.”

Here in the United States, we supposed we had washed our hands of aristocratic pretensions after the American Revolution.  So packed with aristocrats was France prior to its own revolution that the sans culottes had to resort to the guillotine to rid the country of the pestilence. The absence of aristocrats following the French Terror paved the way for  Napoléon Bonaparte , which paved the way for a restoration of the monarchy and the consequent re-emergence of French aristocrats. The same road to power was traced in imperial Rome following the destruction of the Roman Republic. Though a bloodline aristocracy in the United States was never possible, George Washington and many of the founders feared the emergence of a political aristocracy. When Napoleon, First Council of France and later Emperor, heard Washington was to retire as President to return to Mount Vernon, thus refusing a permanent directorship, he said that, if Washington did this, he would be the gre...

Growing up as a boy in Windsor Locks in the early fifties, you could not help brushing up against blacks at close quarters.  My very first boss at age thirteen was a Jamaican whose voice was, like a cello, deep and musical. It threw off chords that made you fall in love with your own native tongue. Mr. Black – his real name -- was a straw boss in the tobacco fields of Windsor Locks and Suffield. And when you wanted to catch his attention, you had best not omit the Mr. The man was cloaked in immense dignity. He stuttered when excited, a defect nearly all the toughs in the tobacco fields were careful NOT to notice.

Governor Dannel Malloy – former New York State prosecutor, former Mayor of Stamford, Connecticut, a progressive, chief of the gayest administration in Connecticut history, architect of both the largest and second largest tax increases in state history, “Porcupine” (a self-description popularized by political humorist Colin McEnroe)   – recently turned off the light during press conference on the budget, the most expensive in state history. Mr. Malloy had been taking questions on the budget, each reporter being given one. A short follow-up session occurred. The interrogatory took about thirty minutes, at which point Mr. Malloy and communications director Mark Berman proposed that the remained of the briefing should be conducted “off the record.” Reporters were asked whether they were comfortable with such an arrangement. When Waterbury Republican American reporter Paul Hughes expressed his discomfort, Mr. Malloy said he could leave. There was no point in con...

Progressive Governor Dannel Malloy is in the midst of building “a new economy in Connecticut.” So Mr. Malloy claimed in an address during the Democratic Party’s annual Jefferson, Jackson, Bailey fund raising dinner, soon to be renamed. Democrats only recently discovered that Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Jackson were slavers. A proposal to rename the annual event was made following progressive firebrand U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s key note address before assembled Democrats. The names of Mr. Jackson, a notorious Indian killer, and Mr. Jefferson are to be scrubbed from the marque event, Democrats announced four days before the Fourth of July, also known as Independence Day, so named after Mr. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.

French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval was impertinent enough to suggest to Josef Stalin in 1935 that he should encourage Catholicism in the Soviet Union in order to appease the Pope. Stalin responded, “The Pope? How many divisions has he got?” He hadn’t enough, apparently. If in the unlikely event Governor Dannel Malloy should demand of public employee unions “shared sacrifices” they are unwilling to embrace, the question no doubt will be asked, “How many divisions has Malloy?” He will not have enough.