Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

It is no longer true, as your mother may once have told you, that you are judged by the company you keep. Former President Barack Obama had a few diamonds in the rough on his friends list. There were the Chicago terrorist bombers Bill Ayers , a former leader of the Weather Underground, now an American elementary education theorist, and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, responsible for bombings of the United States Capitol, the Pentagon, and several police stations in New York, as well as the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion that killed three of its members. Dohrn left a position in 2013 as “Clinical Associate Professor of Law" at the Northwestern University School of Law. Far from being a repentant sinner, Ayres told the New York Times in 2001 "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Ayers and Obama served together on the board of directors for the Woods Fund of Chicago, their terms overlapping for three years, and Ayres is credi...

If you want a functioning First Amendment – which prevents Congress or state legislatures (or college administrators?) from making laws and regulations prohibiting free speech – you must suffer the demagogues to come unto you. The First Amendment is the baby, the demagogue the bathwater, and you do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is because we wish to preserve the right of statesmen to speak freely that we tolerate the demagogue. It may be important to point out that the word “demagogue” did not always have a negative connotation. The demagogue in ancient Greece and Rome was one who was uniquely able to speak to the populace in terms they might understand; he was the vox populi . In a society rigidly separated by class – rich and poor, privileged and non-privileged, free and slave – Greek and Roman demagogues were what today we would call populists, a term of approval in some quarters. The first notable Greek cynic, Antisthenes, a student of Socrates, wou...

Republican Gubernatorial nominee Tom Foley has been accused of plagiarism in an attack ad endorsed by Governor Dannel Malloy. Should there be an FBI investigation? Knowing the ways and means of powerful political incumbents, an investigation of some sort may be in the offing. Incumbents have a way of turning the great water cannons at their disposal against their, relatively speaking, inoffensive challengers. When Hartford Courant columnist Robert Thorson  protested that innocent plagiaristic-like slip-ups were common in this the era of “copy and paste,” he risked being set upon by the righteous forces supporting Mr. Malloy, who has not yet been accused of plagiarism, though in this regard he is guilty as Foley. Mr. Malloy’s recent Bibb ad, in which former workers at the Bibb factory step before the cameras to accuse Mr. Foley of snatching food from the mouths of their children, was plagiarized from an earlier assault on Mr. Foley produced by Jamestown Associates and end...

President Barack Obama’s past has come up several times in the national debate. Is this a legitimate issue? The disreputable pasts of other presidents have been noticed in other campaigns. President Bill Clinton, some people recall, had a “bimbo” problem. President John Kennedy had serious health problems, and he also wandered from his marriage vows. President Nixon may not have been a crook, but his politics was not always straight and narrow. Mr. Obama’s past has been examined since he has been in office. It turns out the book that introduced him to the American public, “Dreams of My Father,” was not, as many people supposed at the time it was issued, a strictly factual production. There are huge chunks of Mr. Obama’s past that are only fleetingly touched upon in his supposed autobiography. Many of the incidents in the book, it appears on close examination, are fictional; some of the characters in the book are “composites.”

Santa Claus Is Coming To Town. Liberal heartthrob Ned Lamont , the Greenwich millionaire who, hand in hand with agents of Lowell Weicker, tried and failed to off Sen. Joe Lieberman, has written in The Hartford Courant a “Recovery” opinion that contains the following sentiment: “But every state is lining up to sit on the lap of the federal Santa Claus and say whether they've been naughty or nice. So, Connecticut better be prepared to explain how our projects can put people to work in year one, how they make us more competitive in the long term, and how we can pay our share of the cost.” The subliminal message of Lamont’s lucubration is: “We’re broke, let’s spend money in the expectation of a gift from Santa.” Jodi Rell sat on Santa’s lap during this year’s governor’s conference and found it cushy. The occasion was celebrated in a Courant editorial : “Mr. Obama singled out Republican governors, whose number includes Mrs. Rell, in extending ‘the hand of friendship’ on Tuesday. His Li...

CNN, not noted for supporting the McCain candidacy, has now completed its investigatory report on the Ayres/Obama connection. The bottom line of the report: Obama’s claim that his connection with Ayres was casual is what Mark Twain might have called “a stretcher.” Bill Ayres is the now well known “unrepentant terrorist” who, along with his present wife Bernardine Dohrn, was in the silly sixties one of the founders of The Weather Underground, an anti-Vietnam group that turned to terrorism as a means of self expression. The Weather Underground bombed the Capitol in Washington DC and Congress, a distinction they share, as conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh never hesitates to point out, with the 9/11 bombers. Ayres apparently was given numerous occasions to repent of his past terrorist activity but politely declined. He said he and his wife “had not done enough” during their bombing spree in the sixties to turn the country against the war. Ayres is now a pedagogue at Univers...

The American public, at least that portion of it not presently in the tank with Democrat nominee for President Sen. Barack Obama, will not accept as sufficient Obama’s explanation of his association with University of Illinois professor Bill Ayers . Obama has sought to dismiss his association with Ayers by saying he was eight years old when Ayers was a founder and member of the Weather Underground, a group of Anti-Vietnam War era domestic terrorists that bombed targets inside the United States, including the Capitol building in Washington DC. According to a 2001 story about Ayers that that Obama ought to have seen in Chicago Magazine , “Between 1970 and 1974, the Weatherman took credit for 12 bombings, including one at the United States Capitol and another involving several police cars.” In 1970, a bomb that was apparently being built in a Greenwich Village townhouse, occupied by at least five members of the Weatherman, accidentally exploded—killing three of the group, including Ayers...