Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Annie Lamont There are, and always will be, unanswered questions in politics – for several reasons. The questions may not have matured yet; problems may not yet be seen as problematic. These can be safely put off to another day. Oleaginous politicians, usually after consulting with their lawyers, may be unwilling to answer pressing questions. A direct answer to a question is always fraught with danger, and many politicians – former President Donald Trump being a conspicuous exception – are danger averse, which is why they often yield to the temptation to straddle both sides of the same issue. This unnerving straddling occurs most often among politicians who wish to haul into their voting blocs both those who say the earth is flat and those who subscribe to the not-flat theory. Some of the above elements may be glimpsed in what may become the sleeper issue of Connecticut’s upcoming elections. Annie Lamont, a much praised venture capitalist, is a founding partner of Oak HC/FT, “a w...

                             Corruption occurs in politics when no one is watching and God sleeps. In a nation in which the Christian God is mercilessly being exiled from the public square, what John Adams and other founders of the Republic called “virtue” does not rule in the hearts of men and women. Private interest is king. “Our Constitution,” Adams said, “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.” The founders were not on good terms with...

Mr. Liebowitz is, along with Brent McCall, the author of Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime , reviewed by Connecticut Commentary on February, 2018. Mr. McCall’s most recent book is Sham, Inside the Criminal Corrections Racket , also reviewed by Connecticut Commentary. By Michael Liebowitz Anyone who criticizes the prison system invariably runs the risk of coming off as “soft on crime,” and faces accusations of wanting to coddle criminals. This dynamic is especially pronounced when the system’s critic is, like myself, a prison inmate. Our complaints are routinely dismissed as those of people who never respected the rights of others, but now have a heightened concern for their own rights. Therefore, let me state emphatically that my concern is not only with the well-being of prisoners, but with the taxpayers who provide the funds to support a prison system that consistently fails to give them their money’s worth. It is important to bear in mind th...

Black Jack I had been playing basketball and decided, possibly for the second time in my first year as a student at Western Connecticut State College, to take a shower. Most often I showered at Mrs. Gallagher’s, about three city blocks from the college, where I had been boarding with a roommate, Edward Kennedy, a red-headed Irish pool shark. Mrs. Gallagher was our sometimes eccentric landlady whose features suggested she was a stunner as a young lady. She liked Kennedy’s red hair. And he, who could easily wind people around his pinky, joined Mrs. Gallagher for rum toddy once a week before bedtime. The sky, as I remember it, was overcast, the weather around 38 degrees. The November wind was rasping, but gentle. Girls were bent over a red convertible, its top down, weeping over the blare of a radio. “What’s happened?” I asked as I passed them. “Someone killed Kennedy,” one of the girls said. Almost whispering to myself, I muttered, “Who would want to kill Ed Kennedy?’ Preside...

Looney Martin Looney, President Pro Tem of the State Senate, and Governor Ned Lamont are engaged in a battle of metaphors. Lamont pulled his support for the Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI) on Tuesday, and then, receiving some pushback from Green New Dealers in Connecticut, added an important codicil. Lamont, the CTExaminer tells us, attempted to walk back his comments the following day, “saying he would sign the bill if lawmakers passed TCI this session,” at which point Looney offered a telling metaphor, after announcing that the TCI legislation would “obviously not” be introduced in the Senate, over which Looney presides as a legislative gatekeeper. Looney told reporters, “The operative statement is the one he gave yesterday,” withdrawing his support for TCI legislation. “This is of course a gubernatorial initiative. Without the governor advocating for this, pushing for it, it clearly can’t happen, because with an issue like this, you can’t lead from the rear.” Th...

Douglas The politics of postmodern progressivism (PMP) cuts bloodily across the grain of political memory. PMPs are not concerned with hiding their extreme programs or methods, both of which are of necessity unorthodox, boastfully so, and revolutionary. One of the reasons so called “cancel culture” does not alarm the PMPs is that, like revolutionaries everywhere, they purposely aim not to please but to repeal and then readjust culture and politics along revolutionary lines. Engraved on Marx’s tomb in Highgate Cemetery, North London are the words “ The philosophers have only  interpreted  the world, in various ways [Marx was thinking chiefly of Hegel]. The point, however, is to  change  it.” In the progressive world view, change serves as a substitute for what Hegel regarded as the movement of spirit in history. In the Leninist-Stalinist period, Marxist-Communism succeeded in this project only too well. Through the use of force alone, against a backdrop of ma...

The Cynic The “beef with Biden,” the Cynic says, is that he campaigned for President as a Democrat moderate and has governed ever since as a half-crazed, addled progressive. If you are indifferent to politics, as many voters in the U.S. are, you will be hugging your resentments as you march to the polls in November, because the entirely predictable consequences of the postmodern itch to make the world over has now settled itself in our easy chairs, and most professional politicians, notably here in deep blue Connecticut, have succumbed to “ The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over .” That effort in recent days has been costly. The prices of goods and services have increased dramatically during the first year of President Joe Biden’s administration. Even well-wishers are beginning to talk darkly of a malingering recession. Recessions occur when there are too many dollars chasing too few goods. Excessive public debt, business closures by governors wielding extraordinary, extra-consti...

The Cynic The Cynic tells me, with a wry smile, “We are all cynics now.” He is cynically referring obliquely to an often quoted quip in late 19 th century, when socialism first bestrode Europe like a colossus  -- “We are all socialists now.” President Joe Biden, my Cynic says, is protean, crossing and re-crossing political barricades with impunity because, ideologically weightless, he is able to assume the character of whichever emergent group he wishes to appeal to. He is thinking, he says, of the sloppy mental ruminations of U.S. Representative  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , and others like her. Biden is a derivative, rather than a creative, politician. That is why plagiarism for Biden is not an error in judgment but a habit of mind. Recently in France, Biden referred to himself as “Jill Biden’s husband,” a line he borrowed without attribution from President John Kennedy. The quip must have confused some French people who likely are aware that Jill Biden’s maiden name is J...

Lamont Addressing Unions, CTMirror Governor Ned Lamont has probably learned more than he has been willing to say from recent state and municipal elections. If one could stretch Lamont out on a comfortable couch and peek into his political psyche, one might find him sharing space with Virginia’s new Governor, Glenn Youngkin, and the bête noir of the progressive wing of the national Democrat Party, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Manchin is something of a Democrat budget hawk, whose hectoring, residual moderates believe, is very much needed in a party that has adopted improvident spending as an operative political principle. Singing from the balcony of the party’s once vibrant moderate center are Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi, party leader in the Senate Chuck Schumer, and the lead choir boy, President Joe Biden, all of whom have borrowed hymns from   socialist Bernie Sanders' progressive song book. Budget watchers generally agree that the redistributionist Demo...

John Durham United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut John Durham may well be the most proficient anti-corruption prosecutor in the United States. The University of St. Joseph , which had invited Durham to speak to its students in 2018, here offers a partial curriculum vitae recounting some of Durham’s successful prosecutions. Durham has not been much in the news because his operations tend to be leak-proof. Though personable and very much respected by his peers, Durham is not the sort of State Attorney who suffers fools gladly. He is both professional and plodding. And there is in the core of the man a strong sense that certain Biblical admonitions – “place not thy trust in princes” – are helpful in the sometime tedious work of prosecutors. Perhaps the term persistent, as understood by President Cal Coolidge, notoriously adept at concision, would be more appropriate: “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than...

Blumenthal We have been very careful over the years not to call the border busters who illegally are crossing what has become a mythical redline (AKA “the U.S. southern border”) into the United States “illegal aliens.” The preferred designation in much of the media has been “undocumented workers,” even though the “workers” are present in the United States illegally and have no work visas. Who controls the language, George Orwell makes plain in his writings, controls both the past and the future, and The Big Lie always begins with a little white lie, fatal, almost unnoticeable omissions of the truth. The truth, hovering like a thunder cloud over our politics during the past year, has been painfully obvious to two sets of people: those living in border states whose daily lives have been upturned by a massive influx of “undocumented workers,” many of whom are too young to work in the United States; and voters elsewhere in the country who have eyes to see and ears to hear -- minus thos...

Biden and McAuliffe Otto von Bismarck, a very successful German politician in the Romantic Period, roughly from 1800 to 1850, used to say, " Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others ." Bismarck was able to cobble Germany together from a medieval assortment of German and Prussian city-states, no small accomplishment. Along the way, he bumped into and moved aside politicians who were, there is no other way to put it, prisoners of their own past successes. In the aftermath of elections won by Republicans across the nation and in Connecticut, the question arises: Are Democrats capable of learning from the mistakes of others? Terry McAuliffe lost a gubernatorial race in Virginia to Glen Youngkin, principally for two reasons: 1) McAuliffe’s campaign shtick – run against former President Donald Trump rather than his political opponent -- did not stick with voters, particularly soccer moms and unaffiliateds; 2 McAuliffe insulted ...

McAuliffe Republicans in Virginia early Wednesday morning woke – pun intended – to find their state awash in red. The New York Times called the race before the birds began singing: “Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, defeated former Gov. Terry McAuliffe after largely steering clear of Donald J. Trump.” It was never a good sign that the McAuliffe camp had been preparing, at least five days before the first vote had been cast, to contest the election, according to a Fox News report. “Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe's campaign raised eyebrows by spending nearly $60,000 to hire a high-profile attorney known for masterminding election-related legal challenges,” Fox reported. “When Fox News sent the campaign a request for comment, the McAuliffe campaign scrambled to "kill" the story, according to emails mistakenly sent to Fox News. “Less than a month before Election Day, McAuliffe's campaign spent $53,680 on the services of the Elias Law Group, a...