Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The last few weeks of 24-7 news has been dripping with unintended irony. Just as the Democratic Party was setting up to attribute former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s loss to political stumble-bum Donald Trump as a result of President of Russia Vladimir Putin's interference in her campaign, President Trump bombed Bashir al Assad of Syria, Mr. Putin’s Kewpie Doll. The bombing served to mute some of the more outrageous claims. Everyone but Dick Blumenthal has been investigating the Trump-Putin connection; so far -- nada.

So, what do politicians really think? Perhaps the more important question is: How do the rest of us know what politicians really think? The post-modern answer to this last question is: We read their emails. By their emails shall ye know them. When speaking among friends and political comrades in emails, politicians sometimes discard their masks, loosen their belts and tell the rest of us what they REALLY THINK. We owe these freshets of honesty to hackers and hacker aggregators such as WiliLeaks.

The media has lost its moral pull. The approval rating of the lowest bottom-feeding politician is several fathoms higher than that of “the media,” according to a September 2016 Gallup Poll . The media, even less than the current Democratic and Republican presidential nominees, simply does not give a hoot about approval polls directed at them, which are worth pausing over none-the-less.

At the cusp of the New Year, lame duck President Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union Address. The real state of the union is in disarray, and here in Connecticut many nutmeggers are living lives of quiet desperation: “Dark Clouds, Sunny Speech” ran a page one, top of the fold headline in a Hartford paper. Dark clouds indeed! The national economy continues to under-perform, and some economic tea leaf readers see yet another recessionary bump in the road. Mr. Obama has added $8 trillion to the union’s already unsupportable national debt, quickly approaching $19 trillion.  After two terms of visionary hope and change, the U.S. Congress has fallen to Republicans. Reports of al-Qaida’s demise, loudly trumpeted by Mr. Obama during his second presidential campaign, have been greatly exaggerated. Mr. Obama has turned over to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the butcher of Ukraine, the U.S.’s Middle East portfolio. Libya – the Democrats' Iraq – is under siege by ISIS...

For thirty years and more, Republicans in Connecticut have been fleeing with their pants on fire what the Democrats call “social issues,” a flight from the political battlefield – and reality – that has abandoned all the social turf to progressives, some of whom are radical social engineers with knives in their brains. It is a serious mistake to suppose that President Barrack Obama has twice won office because his economic vision was superior to that of his Republican opponents, John McCain and Mitt Romney. Mr. Obama’s two elections were won on social issues, largely because Republicans refuse to engage Democrats on matters other than the domestic economy.

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy has not said whether or not he thinks it was wise diplomacy when President Barack Obama drew his red line in the sand on the question of the use of chemical weapons by Syrian strongman Bashir al Assad against his opponents. But the answer to the question can be deduced from Mr. Murphy’s position on a promised U.S. military intervention. Mr. Assad having stepped across Mr. Obama’s red line, Mr. Obama seems poised to respond militarily in some thus far mysterious fashion. Mr. Murphy, the junior U.S. Senator from Connecticut, has been tagged by his state’s media  as “one of the most vocal opponents of a proposed air strike.” His Democratic comrade in the Senate, Richard Blumenthal, is less pacific. Mr. Blumenthal is urging prompt military action in Syria “to send a message to Assad.”