Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Bernie Sanders When in 1992 Queen Elizabeth had been asked how she felt after Windsor Castle had suffered a severe fire gutting 100 rooms, she responded, “Awkward.” Moderate Democrats and recovering progressives likely consider Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders’ primary losses to former Vice President Joe Biden a propitious sign. Many Democrats are silently wishing Sanders will have the good grace to slink off silently into obscurity after he had been decisively rejected by voters. The association of the party of President John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt with Sanders’ batty socialist ideas has been awkward. And why, friends of the Democrat Party are now asking, should Sanders cast a shadow over Biden’s presidential prospects when every Democrat’s nightmare, President Donald Trump, is waiting in the wings for four more years?

Schumer, Blumenthal, Murphy A day prior to the “somber” vote in the U.S. House of Representatives, now controlled by Democrats, National Review reported, “The level of support for Trump’s impeachment and removal dipped below the level of opposition for the first time since the inquiry was formalized in October, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average updated just two days before the impending House vote on impeachment. RCP’s average tipped in Trump’s favor, 47.3 to 46.7 percent on Monday following the addition of two new national polls, NPR/PBS/Marist and  USA Today /Suffolk, which found that opposition to impeachment outweighed support by three and five percentage points, respectively.” What we have here is censure parading as impeachment. The nearly three year effort by Democrats to slather President Donald Trump with pitch and set his pants on fire might have succeeded as a censure, but impeachment, always a gaudy show, is a bridge too far.

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post is not among the ardent defenders of prospective Democratic Party Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. The good news, Mr. Cillizza writes in “The Fix,” is that Mrs. Clinton will not be wearing an orange jumpsuit anytime soon: “The FBI has recommended that no charges be brought following its investigation of the former Secretary of State's private email server.” “Here’s the bad news,” Mr. Cillizza added, “Just about everything else.  It’s hard to read Comey’s statement  as anything other than a wholesale rebuke of the story Clinton and her campaign team have been telling ever since the existence of her private email server came to light in spring 2015. She  did  send and receive classified emails. The setup  did leave her — and the classified information on the server — subject to a possible foreign hack. She and her team  did  delete emails as personal that contained professional inform...

Oh dear. Democrats in Connecticut who are hoping that President Barak Obama will be the tide that lifts all their campaigns boats had better hope that no one saw the first televised debate between Mr. Obama and former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney. Fortunately for them, campaign debates do not decide elections. On the left in Mediaville, Chris Mathews’ former tingle turned into a knotty cramp that left him apoplectic with unsuppressed rage. “Here on this network is where we’re having the debate. We have our knives out. We go after the people and the facts. What was he doing tonight? He went in there disarmed. He was, ‘Wait an hour and a half, I think I can get through this thing, I don’t even want to look at this guy.’ Whereas Romney — I loved the split screen, staring at Obama, addressing him like the prey. He did it just right. I’m coming at an incumbent. I’ve got to beat him. You got to beat the champ and I’m going to beat him tonight. And I don’t care what this guy ...

According to an AP report , former Attorney General and Governor of New York Elliot Spitzer was hoisted by his own petard because the so called “dirty tricks” commonly employed by attorney generals in this the land of the free and home of the brave were not transferable once Spitzer had become governor of New York. The canary who sang to Albany County District Attorney P. David Soares was Spitzer’s former communication director Darren Dopp. Before Dopp began his employment with then Attorney General Spitzer, he was a reporter for the Associated Press. In his previous capacity, Dopp likely would have gone to jail to protect his source. As communications director for Governor Spitzer, Dopp was just a yeoman functionary attempting to burnish the public persona of his boss. He was successful in this possibly because he had friends in high places within the journalistic community. When Dopp was threatened with jail, he began to sing. Dopp told Soares that Spitzer had “directly ordered him ...