Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

If you lop off California and New England, you’ve got a pretty good country” – Barry Goldwater To people who have been stung by socialism – ask any American refugee from Cuba, Venezuela, or any of the Baltic States that only recently have thrown off Soviet tyranny – there is not much difference between professed socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Connecticut Democrats ran against Trump in the last off-year presidential election, and he was not on the ballot. There were no ringing defenses of Trump among Connecticut Republicans, who tend to be rather shy on the subject of Trump’s accomplishments, the most important of which involves jobs produced in Connecticut by Trump’s aggressive military procurement policy. Electric Boat, Sikorsky and Pratt & Whitney are producing jobs and hiring new workers at a record pace, all of which will, during the next 20 years, produce tax revenue for a state still mired in a recession that ended elsewhere in the nation about 10 years ago. Despite Connecticut’s 30-year-long descent into economic turmoil, Connecticut progressives did very well in the 2018 elections. Hard won Republican gains in the General Assembly were wiped out, and the progressive caucus in the Democrat dominant General Assembly is now approaching 50 percent. In 2020, Trump will be on the ballot in Connecticut, desp...

Connecticut has just been bowled over by a bomb cyclone, a rapidly strengthening area of low pressure. In the area where I live, all the houses went dark – for three days and nights. Throughout Connecticut, about 41,000 energy consumers lost power. And winter is coming. CTMirror tells us there is a stalemate over long-term transportation funding between legislators and Governor Ned Lamont. The battle of the political egg-heads is “about to create an immediate crisis: With $30 million in promised local aid months overdue, fall tree trimming and winter snow removal are at risk.” The recent outage was caused mostly by falling trees that are singularly uninterested in Lamont and tax hungry legislators. The General Assembly in Connecticut has been controlled for the last three decades by Democrats whose reckless spending proclivities have been responsible for much of the budget outages during this time.

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."

A recent Hartford Courant-Sacred Heart University poll demonstrates that Governor Ned Lamont, as well as Democrats in the General Assembly, have intractable policy problems. Lamont’s policies are largely the same as those of former Governor Dannel Malloy, whose poll ratings were abysmally low when he left office after two terms. The latest poll results blow out of the water an always dubious theory that Malloy’s disapproval poll numbers, hovering around 25 percent during his two-term administration, were low because the former governor was a bristly character. Lamont, Malloy without the quills, everyone will agree is far more eupeptic than Malloy. Lamont’s approval rating remained at 24%,” the Courant story   notes, “but 47% of respondents said they disapprove of how he is handling his job, a seven-point increase from a poll conducted in May. Twenty-nine percent said they were unsure about how Lamont is doing.”

Lowell Weicker “If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin” -- Samuel Adams A surprisingly honest Otto von Bismarck is reported to have said of the politics of his own day, “Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.” Ironically, the attribution itself has been called into question.   In any case, the apothem applies with special force to egotistic politicians who garland themselves in glowing personal fantasies. We should believe their own accounts of their own heroic actions, they vainly suppose, because they fervently believe their own accounts of their own heroic actions, which many times are so mixed with fantasies as to be laughably improbable.

The story was titled “ Murphy ‘Country should be scared’ of Republican partisanship over Ukraine .” The story was an accurate review of U. S. Senator Chris Murphy’s appearance on Meet the Press early in October. Murphy was meeting the press to “push back” at “Republican critics of the impending House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine.” Murphy admonished, “This entire country should be scared that at a moment when we need patriots, what we are getting is blind partisan loyalty.” The interviewer, a cringingly sympathetic Chuck Todd, did not remind Murphy in his interview that, during a trip to Ukraine with Republican U.S.   Senator Ron Johnson, Murphy also had intervened in an on again off again Ukrainian investigation of the country’s natural gas producer, Burisma and, inescapably, Democrat candidate for president   Joe Biden’s roll in firing a prosecutor whose investigation of Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, h...

Longtime Courant columnist Frank Harris III is not happy with President Donald Trump. In his latest production, “ Impeach the Vampire , ” Harris plumbs the depth of his dissatisfaction: “America has never been less great than it is today. Like a vampire, the president has plunged his fangs deep into the Constitution. His fangs are sharp, and he won’t let go as he sucks the blood out of the very meaning of America. He has sunk them into the flag, sucking away the red stripes, turning them against the stars of blue. He has sunk them into the Justice Department, making it his own right arm to administer his justice rather than the justice of the land. He has sunk them into the Republican Party, turning them into wind-up vampires, hissing the Trumpian line.”