Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

New Taliban flight attendants in Afghanistan In politics, we should always pay careful attention to what is NOT being peddled through the usual grapevines. Otto von Bismarck used to say, “Never believe anything in politics, until it has been officially  denied .” And Bismarck, the realpolitiker who helped cobble together the German state, should know. Embracing Bismarck’s luminous proposition is not cynicism. It is realpolitik, a sensible appreciation of the way politics has operated everywhere in the real world from time immemorial. Biden already has, and will in the future, be boasting that he has “ended the war in Afghanistan.” We may imagine, even now, his campaign operatives busily issuing to state Democrat Party disseminators campaign directives rarely seen by the public that will be shared with a credulous media and state and national Democrat campaign committees. Few will bother to press the point that Biden had not ended a war in Afghanistan. He ended a brittle twent...

Marine Sargent Nicole Gee, political victim     There are some important differences between the Trump and Biden approaches in Afghanistan. Trump was willing to end America’s presence in Afghanistan in May, and his was a conditional withdrawal the most important provision of which was that the United States would agree to leave Afghanistan if – and only if – the Taliban were to agree to share power with the government of Afghanistan. Biden’s surrender to the Taliban was unconditional, and that is why the Taliban was able to dictate to Biden the terms of surrender. The victors in any confrontation always spoil the best laid plans of the losers. Because his surrender was unconditional, Biden found it necessary to leave both Americans and friends of America behind enemy lines following his self-imposed exit-date of August 31, surely a day that will live in shame and ignominy U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, a Marine, said on August 28, according to CTInsider , that “he and o...

Blumenthal and Murphy The upcoming elections should be brutally lucid. During the last non-presidential election, Democrats in Connecticut successfully ran against President Donald Trump, who was not even on the ballot. Republicans could not move during the anti-Trump, non-presidential elections without confronting interrogations concerning Trump’s fitness to serve as President. President Joe Biden, who may become the Donald Trump of the upcoming elections, has been seriously wounded by his political actions -- which always speak louder than words -- on the now permeable US southern border; the closure of the nearly completed US-Canadian XL energy pipeline, a servile bow to the environmental lobby; the Presidential sprint to plunge the nation into a post-Coronavirus recession; and most recently Biden's loss of Afghanistan to untrustworthy Pashtun Taliban pirates. The President's approval ratings have tumbled since he began waving the white flag of surrender in Afghanista...

There is a modest residue of “moderate Democrats” in the State General Assembly, according to the indispensable  Yankee Institute . The moderate Democrat caucus – everyone these days has a caucus – numbers about 28 souls. The term “moderate”, particularly as it relates to economics, an art rather than a science, is not merely a meaningless point between extremes. Until the Democrat Party was dropped into the fiery furnace of Keynesian economics, most Democrats were responsible moderates. Bill Clinton, for example, was the last President, Republican or Democrat, who gave the nation a balanced budget. He was, to be sure, a big spender – and so were all other Keynesians who supposed that deficits were worry-proof because the national debt was “a debt we owed to ourselves.” This mode of thinking, which demolished spending barriers, has now left us with a national debt currently tipping the scales at an ever increasing $28 trillion, so rapidly has the debt we owe to ourselves meta...

Lamont, Biden, Hayes There is a modest residue of “moderate Democrats” in the State General Assembly, according to the indispensable Yankee Institute . The moderate Democrat caucus – everyone these days has a caucus – numbers about 28 souls. The term “moderate”, particularly as it relates to economics, an art rather than a science, is not merely a meaningless point between extremes. Until the Democrat Party was dropped into the fiery furnace of Keynesian economics, most Democrats were responsible moderates. Bill Clinton, for example, was the last President, Republican or Democrat, who gave the nation a balanced budget. He was, to be sure, a big spender – and so were all other Keynesians who supposed that deficits were worry-proof because the national debt was “a debt we owed to ourselves.” This mode of thinking, which demolished spending barriers, has now left us with a national debt currently tipping the scales at an ever increasing $28 trillion, so rapidly has the debt we owe t...

Lamont and Looney The CTMirror’s sub-headline, “ Connecticut's expansion of earned-income tax credit unites a centrist governor and liberal lawmakers ,” seeks to establish some permanent political boundaries in Connecticut. Governor Ned Lamont is the presumptive “moderate Democrat” in the state, while President Pro Tem of the State Senate Martin Looney is, variously, the chief “Democrat progressive” or liberal. In Connecticut and elsewhere in the nation, most of these terms – moderate, leftist, liberal, progressive, conservative – are fungible. If a poll were taken of the first thousand names picked at random from a Connecticut phone book, most would agree that Lamont and Looney, while they sit in the same Democrat church, occupy different pews, and the CTMirror piece draws on some major differences, nearly all of which center around progressivism. Postmodern progressivism is concerned mainly with the redistribution of wealth by means of progressive income taxes. The animat...

Blumenthal U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, usually seen in a white hat at garage door openings, has a problem, and it is the same problem that shortly will torment President Joe Biden – Afghanistan, or rather what may be left of Afghanistan after the victorious Taliban has finished toying with it. “I’ve been known,” the ubiquitous Blumenthal once said, “to make appearances at garage door openings .” Taliban leaders, after capturing Kabul and routing the Afghan government, still claim – implausibly -- they will respect the terms of a Taliban-US pledge fashioned by former President Donald Trump and implicitly reaffirmed by Biden when he made a decision to end American support involving intelligence and air power to the U.S. recognized Government of Afghanistan. The withdrawal of air power assistance and reliable on the ground intelligence was the trigger that has led to the catastrophic end result now apparent to all. The Trump-Taliban deal – Trump loves making deals – was designed t...

Biden in Afghanistan It is painful to put the matter in such blunt terms, but the United States has lost Afghanistan to the Taliban, and no amount of lipstick on the pig can change the nature of the loss. Good, some may respond, 20 years rolling the rock up Noshaq, the second highest point in the whole of the Hindu Kush Ranges, elevation 24,580 feet, only to see it roll down again, is enough.   Prometheus’ shoulders are sore. He is bone weary. In a White House statement on Afghanistan, President Joe Biden, attempting to plaster the pig with misleading rhetoric, put it this way: “One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country. And an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me. “ While Vice President in the Barack Obama administration, Biden had born patiently the “endless American presence” in Afghanistan. He a...

“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others” – Otto von Bismarck The Associated Press has never been characterized as a former President Donald Trump prop. The lede graph in a recent AP story, Biden team, Murphy surprised by rapid Taliban takeover in Afghanistan , printed in The Day of New London, Connecticut, not a Trump prop, reads, “President Joe Biden and other top U.S. officials were stunned on Sunday by the pace of the Taliban's nearly complete takeover of Afghanistan, as the planned withdrawal of American forces urgently became a mission to ensure a safe evacuation.” Stunned! The President, who has at his disposal a Pentagon full of military personnel and intelligence resources, was stunned! He was not alone. Connecticut’s junior U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, was surprised, according to the Day: "’Given how much we have invested in the Afghan army, it's not ridiculous for analysts to believe that they'd be able ...

Taliban insurrectionists in Kabul “Photos circulating online,” the Epoch Times reported hours before Afghanistan fell to radical Islamic warlords, “show members of the Taliban, holding AK-47-style rifles, inside the palace. Speaking to Al Jazeera TV during a live stream, a member of the group who was inside the presidential palace said the Taliban is planning to declare Afghanistan the ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’ in the near future.” The picture, also displayed on the front page of the Hartford Courant, is not one of a breakaway group of thuggish Trump celebrants romping through the U.S. Capitol building in Washington D.C. This is what a real insurrection looks like. As Nancy Pelosi is certain to notice, shown in the photo are Taliban Islamic extremists victoriously disporting themselves with guns in the presidential palace in Afghanistan. The photo is a living testament to President Joe Biden’s inept withdrawal from Afghanistan, now and always " the graveyard of empires...

Cuomo, de Blasio Democrat politicians throughout Connecticut and the nation may want to know – what are the political ramifications of the Cuomo resignation? Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo, his reputation in tatters, gave up the political ghost on Tuesday at, my wife commented, High Noon, though she was careful to add that no one would ever confuse him with Gary Cooper. New York's Democrat political cabal had days earlier, following a “scathing” report from New York Attorney General Leticia James , abandoned Cuomo en mass , leaving him to his own insufficient resources. The outgoing Governor will be replaced, in the interim between elections, with New York Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul, whose relationship with the Cuomo administration and his enablers in a cloying Eastern Seaboard media is fraternal but not yet incestuous or fratricidal. Hochul’s temporary occupancy of the office may temporarily snuff the ambitions of New York political jackals who even now are secretly...

Kasser When the story fell under the nose of a cynical friend, he sighed, “Only in Greenwich, and then internally quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The rich, they are very different than you and I.” Actually, the rich are not so different, Ernest Hemingway remonstrated. They are just richer. The story will make happily married people happy they are married, not divorced, and blissfully happy they had never entered politics. The cynic was referencing a story titled “ A signed, Jackson Pollock collage has become a point of contention in former state Sen. Alex Kasser’s long-running divorce .” The poor do not own Jackson Pollock paintings, and the poor I know would not adorn their walls with Pollock paintings even if they were rich as Croesus – or Alex Kasser’s not yet ex-husband . The reporter is a professional, and so there was not a hint of a snicker in the piece. It was all straight reporting, intentionally non-provocative. Possibly the piece had been referred to the paper’s lega...

The Cynic Cynicism, my friend the Cynic tells me, has been given a bad rap. The cynic, throughout history a moral activist, questions everyone and everything because he mistrusts everyone and everything – initially. His intellectual allegiance may be bought, but the price is high, and he will, ultimately, refuse to serve any unprincipled party. Antisthenes , a student of Socrates who founded the Greek Cynic School, was no respecter of persons. Historically, it is possible to trace a direct line from Greek Cynicism to Roman Stoicism to the early Desert Fathers of the Christian church, all highly moral, ascetic and mistrustful of the kind of leisure and loose ethics that great wealth brings in its train. Since cynics regard virtue rather than knowledge, though the two are not unconnected, as the road to human felicity, you must convince the cynic you are right and upright, and he is a tough customer. At a time during which – just to keep the discussion focused on politics – clev...