Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Themis Klarides, the leader of a much reduced Republican contingent in the Connecticut House of Representatives, is fair-minded, but not the sort of woman who will suffer fools – and, more importantly, political frauds – gladly. She may allow two strikes, but three strikes and you’re out. Very early on, Klarites drew a bead on the Malloy administration, which sought to marginalize Republican influence over political affairs by loudly shutting the door on Republicans such as Klarides. A shrewd judge of character, she carefully catalogued the quills Governor Dannel Malloy had been throwing about. Malloy had described himself as a bristly porcupine, a self-designation that stuck and struck because it was inconveniently true.   As a Republican leader in the House, Klarides did not suffer gladly Malloy’s lordly indifference. It was either Malloy’s way, Republican leader in the Senate Len Fasano noted early in Malloy’s first term, or the highway. But then, what is the po...

Most moralists would have no difficulty with the notion that good people have a flip side; they are sometimes bad. The trick in judging them morally, which ought to be done rarely and with great circumspection, is not to slide into a kind of moral Manichaeism in which you end up saying that the good side of a man redeems the bad side. It does not . St. Augustine, who was very bad before his mother drew him into Christianity, may serve as a model. He flew from his sins without having make the mistake of believing that his meritorious works in some sense cancelled the sins. It took sometime after the late former Sen. Edward Kennedy died for people to get around to noticing that he was, in fashionable parlance, “complex,” which is to say he was riven, as most men are, by sin. Or, if agnostic and atheistic readers prefer a less religiously freighted expression, we might say Kennedy was the victim of “human failings.” Some of Kennedy’s human failings were monstrous. Kevin Rennie , a...