Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

It would be imprudent on Sen. Barack Obama’s part to imagine that racism will take a holiday during his campaign. It is therefore prudent of him to head it off at the pass. At the end of June, after Obama warned a friendly crowd it could expect a resurgence of racism, the Washington Post ran a story about neo-Nazis and segregationist groups spurring racism on internet sites. The presence of some racist bad apples on the internet should not give anyone pause to suppose that the opposition party apple cart is infested with racists and, though it doesn’t happen often enough, even racists are redeemable. Sen. Robert Byrd waved farewell to the Klu Klux Klan long ago and grew up to be, at present, the longest serving senator in the U.S. Congress. Conservatives and Republican well wishers have in their stables many non-racists politicians and political commentators such as Condoleezza Rice and Thomas Sowell, both of whom are African American non-racists. Still less should anyone suppose tha...

Jon Lender reported in the Hartford Courant that “State Appellate Court nominee John R. Downey's praise of longtime segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond as a ‘great American’ four years ago has now surfaced as an issue in his legislative confirmation.” That “praise” stuck in the craw of state Legislative judiciary committee co-Chairman Michael Lawlor, who said, according to Lender’s report, that the comments about Thurmond, “by themselves, are unlikely to derail the Superior Court judge's nomination by Gov. M. Jodi Rell to the higher court. "Lawlor said Downey's prospects are ‘probably OK, but he's probably going to have to answer questions about his thought process leading up to those comments,’ as well as queries about race relations in general. Downey's confirmation hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.” Several paragraphs into the story, Lender advises that Downey was praising Thurmond’s “transformation” from one who was considered by many to be a “bigot and raci...

Over at Slate magazine , not a conservative publication, Christopher Hitchens, not a disreputable neo-con, speculates that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the target of two 500 pound bombs, was not an innocent bystander in the war against the West being prosecuted by Islamic Salafists. The guy who sawed off the heads of two American prisoners, Hitchens writes, …contributed enormously to the wrecking of Iraq's experiment in democratic federalism. He was able to help ensure that the Iraqi people did not have one single day of respite between 35 years of war and fascism, and the last three-and-a-half years of misery and sabotage. He chose his targets with an almost diabolical cunning, destroying the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad (and murdering the heroic envoy Sérgio Vieira de Melo) almost before it could begin operations, and killing the leading Shiite Ayatollah Hakim outside his place of worship in Najaf. His decision to declare a jihad against the Shiite population in general, in a document o...