Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

G.K. Chesterton somewhere writes that all barbers are would-be philosophers under the skin. The trade has changed over the years. Barbers used to be surgeons at a time before pharmacology and modern medicine branched off and began to produce physicians who knew a little more about human healing than the barbarous barbers who painted their poles red and white. In medieval Europe, barbers, not doctors, performed surgery, and the pole was a sign that indicated the blood and napkins used in their business, the barber’s most frequent customers being soldiers whose bodies had been shattered on the field of battle. Barbers left off surgery, but not philosophizing.

Tong and Blumenthal It is not at all surprising that Attorney General William Tong, who had joined other attorneys general in suits against President Donald Trump, should have endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden for President. Such things are expected. When Trump threw his hat into the ring in a Republican presidential primary and unexpectedly won the endorsement of his party, some leapt on the Republican bandwagon while others hesitated. Tong's endorsement was fulsome. “Today, I'm proud to endorse @JoeBiden for President of the United States. We need Joe to restore the soul of this nation, to restore our humanity and our grace,” Tong twittered .

As of April 28 th , U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal has not yet endorsed likely Democrat Party presidential nominee Joe Biden. Blumenthal’s continued non-endorsement cannot be the result of an oversight. Most prominent Democrats, even those engaged in the Democrat primary – including Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Vermont socialist Senator Bernie Sanders – have offered their heartfelt endorsements. Former President Barack Obama, after a little hectoring from big wigs in his own party, has issued a late but fulsome endorsement. No one seems to know for certain what may be holding up the Blumenthal endorsement, but theories are making the rounds.

In “The Wasteland”, T. S. Eliot writes: April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land… I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. April 24 fell a month and a few days after Governor Ned Lamont, perhaps in consultation with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, announced on March 20 that many businesses in Connecticut would be shuttered owing to the onset of Coronavirus. To people whose stricken relatives abide in Connecticut nursing homes, that month must seem like an eternity.

Eventually, necessary information trickles up to Connecticut’s left of center media. On April 23, days after Governor Ned Lamont announced a date positive for the partial re-opening of Connecticut’s shuttered economy in June, CTMirror ran a story titled “ Coronavirus is breaking the food supply chain .” But Coronavirus is doing no such thing. The supply chain has been broken by the very first, intentional national recession. And the national recession has been caused by businesses shuttered by politicians who have settled upon the shuttering of businesses as a way to contain Coronavirus.

Blumenthal When Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, an unwilling witness, was persuaded to come out of the closet and give public testimony concerning her allegations that then Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh had molested her decades earlier, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal was among the first out of the gate to credit what turned out to be a poorly supported allegation. The authors of a 2019 book, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation”, noted that a high school friend of Ford’s who, Ford testified, was at the party where the alleged assault took place initially stated that, while she did not recall the evening in question, she never-the-less believed Ford’s claim of sexual assault by Kavanaugh. The author’s interview of the testifier revealed that her friend, a Democrat who was not in the same room during the alleged assault, had felt pressured to corroborate Ford's account. Ford herself was pressured to make an appearance before the investigation committ...

Lamont and the side-lined General Assembly Gore Vidal – deceased, but not from Coronavirus complications – was once asked whether he thought the Kennedy brood had exercised extraordinary sway over Massachusetts. He did. And what did he think of the seemingly unending reign of “lion of the Senate” Edward Kennedy, who had spent almost 43 years in office? Vidal said he didn’t mind, because every state should have in it at least one Caligula.

Blumenthal and Murphy U.S. Senator Chris Murphy has been roughly cuffed by some news outlets, but not by Vox, which published on April 16 a worshipful article on Connecticut’s Junior Senator, “ The Senator of State : How Connecticut’s Chris Murphy, a rising Democratic star, would run the world.” On April 15, The Federalist mentioned Murphy in an article entitled “ Sen. Chris Murphy: China And The World Health Organization Did Nothing Wrong . The lede was a blow to Murphy’s solar plexus: “Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy exonerated China of any wrongdoing over the global pandemic stemming from the novel Wuhan coronavirus on Tuesday. “’The reason that we’re in the crisis that we are today is not because of anything that China did, is not because of anything the WHO [World Health Organization] did,’ said Murphy during a prime-time interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.”

People's Liberation Army  in Wuhan  What is the honest answer to the question: “What political prescriptions utilized to fend off Coronavirus have been successful?” The obvious and modest answer is -- we are not certain. No one need doubt that modesty is in short supply among politicians the world over. To assemble actionable data, you must know the denominator and the numerator of the data set. Victor Davis Hanson tells us we can be certain of neither in the case of Coronavirus: “The result of scientific arrogance, without practical audit, presents as something like the surreal online ‘world meter’ data on the hourly progress of the virus. Such sites offer superficially impressively precise, but ultimately flawed, information on COVID-19 cases, mortality, and lethality and infection—without label warnings that neither the number of actual active or past infectious cases, nor the percentage of those who die from, rather than with, can yet be accurate. Much less are ...

Governor of Lamont, Andrew Cuomo Is Connecticut’s governor governing Connecticut? If not Governor Ned Lamont, who is governing the state? We know for certain that the Democrat dominated General Assembly, deferring too often to the governor, is operating in suspended animation. If the reader -- possibly a waitress, barber or candlestick maker teetering on the edge of unemployment, owing to the governor’s too frequent obiter dicta – answers that Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, or Philip Dunton Murphy, the financier Governor of New Jersey, is governing Connecticut, he may not be far wrong. Governor Ned Lamont has made a compact with both governors to co-ordinate their executive orders.

Hartford Business Journal (HBJ) does not anticipate a quick resolution to the nation’s very first intentional recession. A recession, as everyone knows, is a business slowdown accompanied by predictable after effects: unemployment, an increase in welfare rolls, a reduction in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a consequent reduction in national and state revenues, and political caterwauling among politicians jockeying for political position. Recessions in Connecticut have been extraordinarily long-lived. It takes the state about ten years to recover from recessions. Connecticut has yet to recover total jobs lost from the most recent recession, which ended elsewhere in the country in June 2009. “Hartford County’s economy,” HBJ reports, “is projected to experience an 18.3% contraction in the second quarter, equivalent to a $3.9-billion economic loss, StratoDem Analytics data shows.

Well, we couldn’t go to Bard’s bar and hear Bard and others hold forth on all manner of subjects, but mostly romance, politic and sports, most of which have been temporarily suspended during the ongoing Coronavirus infestation. Two of these subjects, romance and politics, are intimately related, Bard hotly insisted, a relationship not so much strained as inappropriate. The worst politicians are the romantics, idiots who want to make the world over and insist vehemently that what is not broken must be fixed – NOW! Bard permitted only cigar smoking in a room set aside for “rebellious serfs,” as he called them. Here is Bard, just before his business was shut down by “His Excellency Ned Lamont.” That is how Connecticut's governor signs off on his too frequent executive orders, a title carried over, Bard said, from colonial times, when men mostly – women had other less disruptive means of socialization --   gathered in bars to drown their sorrows, philosophize, and plot aga...

Merrill The last word, or the next to the last word, on Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders’ ill-fated run for the presidency may be that of communist evangelist Karl Marx. In  The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte  Marx writes, “ Hegel  remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” This is the second time Sanders has run for president, succumbing the first time to former Secretary of State in the Obama administration Hillary Clinton and this time to former Obama Vice President Joe Biden. This, his second and one suspects last run for the presidency – Sanders is getting on in years -- may be a tragedy to the youth of the nation, who hung on his every word, but it is a farce for most grownups.

Twain The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it – Mark Twain I’m going to try and say some non-twitter-like, intelligent things about progressivism, Connecticut’s media and what Karl Marx, were he alive today, might call the “correlation of forces” in our own state. By the way, I’m not sure how many people reading this know that for about four years in the 1850s, Marx, then living in London, was the European correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune. He even exchanged letters with President Abraham Lincoln. Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote for a European, not an American audience. Their articles on the Civil War were later collected into a 325 page book, “ The Civil War in the United States.” It might be well to start this discussion with some undisputed claims.

Michael Liebowitz, along with Brent McCall, is the coauthor of “Down The Rabbit Hole”, reviewed in February 2018 by  Connecticut Commentary . Much has been written about reforming Connecticut prisons over the past two decades, most of it by academics and blabologists who have never seen the inside of a prison. I’ve known Michael, through the word only, for a few years; prisons are much harder to break into than out of, and so are prisoners. It is good for the general public to see the institutions they have created from the inside. The words that best describes everything that falls out of Liebowitz’s mind are “thoughtful” and even “scholarly,” as the reader will notice if he or she has the patience to lend Michael an ear. He is, after a couple of decades in prison, deeply analytical and grateful.       Ending Mass Incarceration By Michael Liebowitz Introduction   I would argue that, strictly speaking, ending mass incarceration per se...