Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

We are coming together this evening to say a few words about Abraham Lincoln , the father of the modern Republican Party. I also want to touch on the dangerously inept Biden administration and the political prospects for Connecticut Republicans in the 2022 off-year presidential elections. But first things first: Lincoln, then Biden, then Connecticut politics. Lincoln In the matter of Slavery, Jim Crow and Civil Rights legislation, The Republican Party has nothing to apologize for. Since Lincoln was the president who abolished slavery following a bloody Civil War he prosecuted successfully in due course, one hopes that Lincoln statues across the nation will be relatively safe from vandals who have assaulted Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Of course, in the postmodern world, one never knows. Such is the vile passion of self-affirming malcontents that we should not be surprised if in the near future they lay violent hands on the statues of Fredrick Douglas, the ex-slave and

Ukrainian victim Ukraine may soon cease to be a problem for both NATO and Western countries, especially incautious energy thirsty Germany, because it may at some point in the near future cease to be a country. Vladimir “Son of Stalin” Putin and his communist praetorian guard do not consider Ukraine a country at all.   While 200,000 Russian troops were encircling the country, plodding methodically to invade it, Putin told us, “Ukraine is not even a country.” Not so. Following the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, Ukraine, known as Kievan Rus -- a loose federation of East Slavic, Baltic and Finnic peoples in Eastern and Northern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century -- became a rich and prosperous land of traders and farmers at a time when Moscow even in the 13 th century was little more than a small town fortified with a timber fence and a moat. Historical details such as this did not appear in Putin’s KGB breviary. Ukraine is and has been a country separate from Rus

“I think this is the only path forward. It is the right thing to do. ... Ultimately, it allows parents to make that final choice” – State Senator Rob Samson on the question “Who should decide?” Let’s begin with the obvious. COVID and its variants, each succeeding variant more contagious but far less fatal than its predecessor, is not an emergent medical problem. It has been with us on the front pages of our newspapers for two years, approximately 730 days. We are old enemies. Here in Connecticut, “science,” such as it is, has prompted the state to redraw its battle lines. Many stores no longer requiring masks have pulled themselves back from the economic brink. The emergency powers of Governor Lamont, more than 20 as Connecticut entered its first year of the pandemic that originated in China, a hostile communist, authoritarian regime, have been trimmed considerably. All the indicators, both in the United States and Europe, suggest that COVID has now become manageable – to be tre

Lamont and Unions Continuing corruption scandals in Connecticut point to the need for an Office of Inspector General, fully staffed, abundantly financed, and completely independent of the state’s executive department. And if a diminishing opposition to such an office should ask the question -- Why now? – good government advocates in the media and on both sides of the partisan party divide should answer -- because every attempt put forward so far to manage rather than eliminate corruption in the executive department has conspicuously failed to uproot corruption. The uprooting has been left in the hands of federal prosecutors, when the state might have forestalled corrupt activity long ago through the creation of such an office. Connecticut cannot rely solely on its present “public watchdogs,” including a vigilant media, to rid the state of the stain of corruption. Connecticut’s so called government “watchdog institutions” – specifically, the Attorney General Office and the State C

Albert Camus In March, 1957, Albert Camus published an essay, at great cost to himself, titled “ Kadar Had His Day Of Fear .” His epitaph on the suppressed Hungarian revolution may serve as well as an epitaph on the suppressed Ukrainian revolution. The Hungarian revolution had been suppressed, and Stalin had installed in Hungary a political administration much to his liking. Camus regarded the takeover of Hungary by totalitarian Stalinists as a counter-revolution. His essay was costly to Camus for a number of reasons. It was an epistle of liberty and a resolute, unambiguous disparagement of totalitarianism. The essay began on a defiant note: “The Hungarian Minister of State Marosan, whose name sounds like a program, declared a few days ago that there would be no further counter-revolution in Hungary. For once, one of Radar's Ministers has told the truth. How could there be a counter-revolution since it has already seized power? There can be no other revolution in Hungary.”

In mid-February, Governor Ned Lamont announced he would be traveling to Israel in an attempt to persuade businesses there to put down roots in Connecticut, a state more business friendly and less expensive than, say, New York. His media availability at UConn was interrupted by questions from Connecticut’s scriveners, and on the same day he announced his pending Israel trip, the following headlines appeared in Capitol Report , a news aggregation site: Building Trades President: 'We never made it to that item on the agenda'... Tolland had no choice in school contractors: 'Very assertive' DIAMANTIS 'dealt an ultimatum' to town... LAMONT pledges transparency in ongoing probe of state projects, 'we'll get to the bottom of it'... TOP LAMONT OFFICIALS WERE TOLD OF SCHOOL BIDDING COMPLAINTS IN 2020; LETTERS TO MCCAW AND GEBALLE CAME MONTHS BEFORE FBI PROBE AND DIAMANTIS' FIRING... COLLINS: LAMONT's ship is burning... MCCAW, GEBALLE, TON

John Bailey and Jack Kennedy Democrat Party political boss John Bailey dominated Connecticut politics from 1950 until his death in 1975. He coordinated his party’s politics in Connecticut and oversaw election campaigns in the state’s General Assembly, which is a polite way of saying he pulled most of the political strings in what used to be a rock-ribbed Republican state. When he had finished bossing Democrats, his party had become a bastion of highly electable Jewish and Catholic politicians such as Governor Abraham Ribicoff, U.S. Senator Thomas Dodd, Governor John Dempsey, and Governor Ella T. Grasso.    The reformed postmodern Democrat Party of today is considerably less disciplined, and political candidates have long discovered that the two major parties are little more than flags under which Democrats and Republicans gather to sport the wares of individual savior politicians, all of whom are responsible for raising their own campaign funds. Nearly every major politician of long

Blumenthal The title of the story in the Hartford paper was, “ Consumers are struggling with rising home heating prices. Senators want to halt US exports of natural gas ,” and the lede graph was, “A group of U.S. senators, including Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, is targeting natural gas exports as a culprit behind rising prices and asked the Biden administration to halt the shipments.” Years ago, when Blumenthal was running against Linda McMahon’s $50 million campaign chest – not a high hurdle for Blumenthal to surmount – McMahon asked Blumenthal during one of their debates to tell everyone how he thought jobs were created. Blumenthal banged about for a while in the economic china closet, breaking most of the expensive gold monogramed pieces, until he was driven out by McMahon. “Mr. Blumenthal,” Connecticut Commentary noted at the time, “proceeded to rattle off at great length his crony capitalist talking points, prominent among them that governmental intervention – i

Voltaire Dr. Pangloss is one of the chief characters in Voltaire’s Candide whose optimism by page twenty becomes a bit cloying. “All is for the best,” Pangloss tells Candide, “in this, the best of all possible worlds,” and Candide swallows this large lump of candied optimism without question. After Candide is subjected to war, rape, theft, hanging, earthquakes, cannibalism, slavery and other indignities, he begins to have doubts concerning Pangloss’ irrational optimism. Voltaire, who managed to live most of his life with his eyes open and was what we might call an enlightenment realist, had a few troubles of his own, most of them related to his writing. Thomas Jefferson kept a bust of Voltaire within worshiping distance of his desk at Monticello. After two years in which the Constitutional order of government in this “The Constitution State” had been subverted – of necessity, some say – by a General Assembly that simply refused to meet during the Coronavirus pandemic, a sort of m

The  Holodomor Why make things more complex than they are? In the farcical diplomatic struggle between American President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Biden will be the loser and Putin the winner. The reason is obvious: Putin has more than 200,000 troops mustered on Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia, while Biden has Antony Blinken, U.S. Secretary of State, whom he is depending upon to offer diplomatic resistance to the 200,000 troops. We know from history that in any contest between force and diplomacy force will win out. The United States government, which recently surrendered Afghanistan to Taliban terrorists, is not prepared to shed a drop of American blood in long-suffering Ukraine , historically a pathway to Soviet domination of free Baltic States and Poland. These stepping stones deposited the Soviet military in the post-war period in East Germany, which remained under Soviet occupation for decades until then President John Kennedy declared near the Brande

Sam Adams, Father of the American Revolution Thomas Paine wrote that “character is better kept than recovered.” The same proposition applies, perhaps even more forcefully, to our essential liberties.   Very few people will see, splashed for days and months on the front page of their newspapers, the results of a recent the Johns Hopkins meta-analysis. Two years after Coronavirus leapt from China to the United States, the “science” of the novel -- very likely lab-produced -- virus has entered its scientific stage, which is to say: We know things now that were not known two years ago when the “science” of Coronavirus was yet in its infancy and prone to questionable speculation, much of it political in nature. To put the matter in political terms, Fauci-science, an odd mixture of politically directed speculation and personal aggrandizement, is now being led to the scaffold. May it rest in peace. The John Hopkins study – “ A literature review and meta-analysis of the effects of lo

Blumenthal and Biden Some people, both within the Democrat Party and Connecticut’s media, likely wish that former President Donald Trump would be on the ballot in 2022. The presence and non-presence of Trump on campaign ballots has been, some would say, a boon to Democrats in deep blue Connecticut. There is a sense among Republicans that Democrats even now are preparing for a rerun of the last off-year presidential election, when Republicans across the board were vilified for having failed properly to vilify the nominal head of their party. But elections are better rerun in the heads of the victors than they are rerun in fact – because things change. Trump is no longer President of the Republic or head of the Republican Party and, now out of office, he no longer presents a real and present danger to our democracy. Then too, any comparison between Trump and current President Joe Biden may present some difficulties for Connecticut’s incumbent Democrats running for reelection. Biden