Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

What is the difference between political commentary and reporting? The distinction between the two is not as sharp now as it once was, or pretends to be. Pretends to be? I do not think a convincing case can be made that print media in the United States had ever been politically unconnected . News writers gather their news from working politicians – that is politicians holding office. Here in Connecticut, Democrats have ruled the political roost, particularly in the state’s large cities, for almost half a century. The last Republican mayor of Hartford, Connecticut’s Capital City, was Antonia (Ann) Ucello, who left office in 1971, a distant 53 years ago. The state’s General Assembly is dominated by Democrats; all the members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation are Democrats, the last Republican U.S. House member, Chris Shays, having been defeated by Jim Himes in the 2008 election; the last two governors are Democrats. And registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in t

Duff -- Wilton Bulletin It’s been decades since former President Bill Clinton said that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare”, a formulation launched by Clinton in 1992. According to a 2019 article in Vox , “The language was likely meant to appeal to people who supported the right to an abortion in principle but still felt morally conflicted about the procedure — a large group, according to some polling. But many abortion rights advocates argued that calling for the procedure to be ‘rare’ placed a stigma on people who seek it.” The use of the word “stigma” in such a context is bitterly ironic, and a profanation. The word “stigma’ is derived from the Latin word “stigmata,” the wounds of Christ on the cross transposed onto the human flesh of saints in the Christian Church such as Francis of Assisi. In Connecticut , abortion, both surgical and medical – within a certain period, women may abort their fetuses by taking a pill, widely available and at low cost – is hardly rare. S

Matthew Spalding -- Hillsdale Matthew Spalding is Vice President for Washington Operations and Dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College. Those reading these words who know little of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan have some homework to do. Hillsdale has a post in Somers Connecticut, The Hillsdale College Blake Center for Faith and Freedom. Spalding’s address on February 22, 2004, “Pater Patriae: George Washington as America’s Founder,” was delivered before a standing room only, appreciative crowd at the Blake Center, and Spalding did not disappoint. The Blake Center itself, an architectural wonder, a brick by brick accurate replica of Thomas Jefferson’s Home in Monticello, was, in many ways, a perfectly appropriate site for Spalding’s remarks. Spalding’s address sought to answer, among other questions: Does character in politics matter? It does and did, prior to, during and after the American Revolution. The larger question that confronts us i

Navalny The death of Alexei Navalny at the hands, and perhaps the orders, of Russian President Vladimir Putin was, according to a Hobbesian view of power, either necessary or not necessary. It is true that Navalny was a vigorous opponent of Putin’s attempt to turn Russia’s strategic orientation from West to East. Likewise, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a vigorous opponent of Saint Stalin, an eastern oriental potentate who little understood that Russia belongs to the West, not the East. The Putin restoration of a debased Stalinism is perhaps his most fatal mistake. The rejection of Western perceptions cuts against the Russian grain from Peter the Great to Chekov, who wrote some of his most memorable plays in Ukraine. Necessity, Thomas Hobbes tells us, is a cruel master – life in a Hobbesian universe, one without ordered liberty, is “nasty, brutal and short” -- but a master none-the-less. Once ethics and morality are removed from politics, power and force alone reign supreme. In a pol

Republicans will never become a majority party in Connecticut – or, indeed, anywhere else – unless they are able to reclaim what used to be called, in pre-neo-progressive days, the vital center of American politics. The vital center has become far less vital than it had been in the waning days of Camelot, the morally enlightened administration of the John F. Kennedy administration. Kennedy was a genuine liberal, in the fashion of John Locke, Adam Smith and the founders of the American Republic. The founders of the American Constitutional Republic were intimately familiar with Smith’s writings. His 1759 book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, written long before his seminal work, The Wealth of Nations in 1776, provided the underpinnings to his later works, including Essays on Philosophical Subjects in 1795, and Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms in 1763. The works of Smith are less read in academic circles these days than, say, The   Pedagogy of the Oppressed , a bo

Murphy Hartford Courant Political writer Kevin Rennie delivered a glancing blow to U.S. Senator Chris Murphy in a recent column, “ Gov. Ned Lamont, and U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal stepped into different spotlights last week .” Rennie noted, “In his 2020 book, The Violence Inside Us: A Brief History of an Ongoing American Tragedy , Murphy wrote, ‘it is likely that no American ever exported more violence from our shores onto foreign soil than Dwight D. Eisenhower.’ Murphy uses the Second World War Allied invasion of France as a premier example of the ‘violence we export.’ “In the 80 years since the D-Day invasion, the people of free nations have considered the liberation of France an achievement that deserved unqualified celebration, and always will. Murphy notes that D-Day ‘resulted in a stunning 425,000 troops on both sides being killed or seriously injured.’ That other side, the murderous Nazis, goes unmentioned.” Indeed, life, most especially life in war, Shak

Murphy, Anna Moneymaker -- Getty Images U.S. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut appears to be teetering on the edge of a perilous Either/Or: Either the U.S. southern border is secure, or it is not secure. Only a few weeks ago, the Democrat members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation were in lockstep agreement that the southern border was secure. They were citing Cuban-born United States Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to that effect, and Mayorkas’ repeated postulations left little room for descent within the ranks. Scripts produced in Washington DC during campaign seasons are rarely disputed once they have been parceled out to party factotums. In fact, the border is not secure, and the abandonment of policy prescriptions during the Biden administration that served to keep illegal entry numbers low – such as a “remain in Mexico policy” while amnesty cases were being adjudicated -- has resulted in chaos at the U.S. open border. Appearing on MSNBC'