Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

It’s been one of those months. Departing President Of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – unlike Supreme Leader for life Ali Khamenei , the presidency of Iran is term-limited – has paid the United Nations, Babel on the Hudson, his final visit. His unvarying spiel was the same. Oil rich Iran is engaged in the peaceful production of nuclear facilities. No, Iran is not building nuclear weapons. Israel is a fake state that historically has no roots in the Middle East . Iran will obliterate the fake state if Israel should be presumptuous enough to attack Iran facilities that are producing nuclear weapons to obliterate Israel -- on and on.

President Obama’s muffled response to the revolution in Iran -- and it is a revolution – is due to his perception that Iran might possibly use strong statements supporting those who resist oppression in that country, mostly Western oriented young people and intellectuals, to effect its own purposes: He does not wish, by imprudent statements, to allow the United States to become “a foil” used by oppressors to snuff out the resistance. There is a serious objection to this diplomatic nonsense: The oppressors in Iran – and they are oppressors – will seize on any pretext to accomplish their purposes. Even Secretary General of the UN Ban Ki-moon’s mild retorts , paralleling those of Obama, have been used by the oppressor regime to suppress the revolution. To the oppressors in Iran, all words are fighting words. All words are foils. Obama’s excessive caution is a double-edged sword. It is also used by the oppressor regime as a permission to commit violence on the resistance. When a victoriou...

Both the Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post have published pictures that prompted President Barrack Obama to say he was disturbed by the violence in Iran. The photo below shows a crowd of young Iranians bearing the bullet ridden body of a protestor. When Iranian police elsewhere fired upon a crowd of protestors, the crowd began to chant in unison, “Don’t be scared. We’re all together.” The president had been criticized as being tardy in his response to the Iranian election (read-- fraud). On Sunday, according to a report in Politico , Vice President Joe Biden expressed “doubts” about the election, and on Monday, press secretary Robert Gibbs was battered by a reporter: "... State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said the U.S. is 'deeply troubled' by events in Iran but stopped short of condemning them. “'I haven’t used that word, condemn,"' he [Gibbs] told the State Department press corps. 'We need to see how things unfold.' “'You need to se...

Bob Woodward, author of “All the President’s Men” and several other political bodice rippers, is at work on a book about President Barack Obama. The White House, according to a story in the New Republic , is understandable nervous. Why? Well, because Woodward has been in the habit in a few of his books of introducing unverifiable dialogues and other Balzacian devises to pad his narratives. Woodward’s books are only incidentally historical narratives. They are, in reality, narratives that prove a thesis, sometime foreshadowed in their titles – “slants,” in Emily Dickenson’s luminous phrase, that tell a poetic truth: Nixon was a crook; Bush was befuddled; Obama was... Some in the Obama administration no doubt are thinking : Who needs this? As we all know, the Obama administration has enough problems to contend with – what with the great mess he has inherited from former President George Bush: two wars , one of which, thanks to Bush, is winding down; a collapsed capitalist economy; owne...

In the first few weeks of his presidency, Barack Obama has been, true to his word, an active president. He produced a “stimulus package” that represents a massive intrusion of the federal government into the private market place, an extension of a program hastily developed during the last frenetic days of the Bush administration. He has taken steps to keep his campaign promise to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, though it is still undecided what do with “detainees” such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed , the mastermind of the 9/11 attack on New York. The President has sent former diplomatic wunderkind George Mitchell to the Middle East to broker a peace between warring factions in Israel. And he has shown that his Middle East policy prescriptions during the campaign were serious by opening an entente with the Arab World. Iran, very much a part of that world, promises to be his stone of stumbling. The US-based International Institute for Strategic Studies on Wednesday conclud...

Here on the far left, there are two kinds of bad guys: good bad guys and bad bad guys. Jesse James is an example of a good bad guy. Like US Rep. Barney Frank and US Sen. Chris Dodd, he had developed over a period of years the good bad habit of shaking down the Big Boys – large banks, trains full of wealthy commuters -- and distributing their ill gotten gains among the oppressed, some of whom were his friends. Billy the Kid was a good bad guy. He shot up a lot of bullies, some of them sheriffs, was a true white knight toward the ladies and, a Byronic romantic, allied himself with what he thought was the honorable side in a violent range war. Bit of bad luck there. Al Capone was a good bad guy: He rid Chicago of lots of bad bad guys, mostly by shooting them. He was anti-prohibitionist at a time when even FDR’s first Vice President, John Nance Garner, was tippling in the White House to protest temperance leagues. Like Charlie Rangle of New York, he was indifferent about paying taxes. In ...

The Democrats approached the Republican convention in their usual way, full of a deceptive self confidence. After all, their party had just concluded a convention that would have made Nero blush. The stadium in which Democrat presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama accepted the nomination of his party dwarfed the ancient Roman coliseum several times over, nor were fireworks available to the Romans at the Circus Maximus. Democrats have a very attractive presidential candidate in Mr. Obama, who had just put away Sen. Hillary Clinton in a bruising primary. Prior to the ascendancy of Mr. Obama, the Clintons, Hillary and Bill, were the face of the Democrat Party. Most pundits agreed that Mr. Obama had conducted a very shrewd campaign from which he emerged as an agent of change and the Main Stream Media’s Main Man. Leftist bloggers also were solidly in his corner. His oratory sent chills up the quivering leg of longtime political commentator Chris Mathews. News reports were glowing. Mr. Oba...