Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Here is former President George Bush on Russian President Vladimir Putin's domestic centralization of power as quoted in a recent book, "Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House: "He thinks he'll be around forever. He asked me why I didn't change the Constitution so I could run again.” Mr. Bush, brutalized by then candidate for president Barack Obama, never looked back when he left office and has been silent as a tomb ever since. Still, one cannot help but wonder what Mr. Bush’s reaction was to the latest news out of Russia, as reported by Reuters: “ Putin dissolves state newsagency tightens grip on Russia media .”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who said brains in the Beltway would pop on the release of his new book, “In My Time,” caused a slight kerfuffle when in an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl he encouraged present Secretary Of State Hillary Clinton to primary President Barack Obama. “I think she’s probably the most competent person they’ve got in their– in their cabinet,” said Mr. Cheney. “And– frankly, I thought she was gonna win the nomination last time around. Maybe if– the Obama record is bad enough– and these days it’s not very good, given the shape of the economy, maybe there will be enough ferment– in the Democratic Party so that there will be a primary on their side.” So far, Mrs. Clinton’s husband has not taken the bait.

Former Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz, now running for U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman’s soon to be vacated seat along side U.S. Rep Chris Murphy, may have had her front grill dented a bit in recent days, but it must be said the lady now is in fearsome forward motion. Mrs. Bysiewicz has called for U.S. troops to leave Afghanistan as soon as practicable and, by so doing, got a jump on the laggard Mr. Murphy, who has been advertising himself in different venues as the progressive’s progressive. The modern progressives, nearly all of them Democrats, not so long ago were bestirring themselves as anti-war zealots. Who can forget Cindy Sheehan’s often reported march on former President George Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch? During the Bush presidency, the air crackled with fervent calls by then presidential campaigner Barack Obama to shut down the Iraq war shortly after the Petraeus surge had been launched. The progressives were hot on closing down GITMO, still open for business. A not ye...

With the departure of the Jodi Rell administration – all good things must end – Lisa Moody, a punching bag for people who did not want, for whatever reason, to punch Mrs. Rell, will also leave the stage, to be replaced by Tim Bannon, Gov. Elect-Dan Malloy’s Chief of Staff. Mr. Bannon, among other accomplishments, is the very first gubernatorial chief of staff in Connecticut to have appeared as a character in a comic strip. T.F. Bannon, of the firm Torts, Tarts & Torque, an early character in Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury,” was patterned after Mr. Bannon, a school chum of Trudeau’s when the two were terrorizing Yale together, Mr Bannon as chairman and Mr. Trudeau as Editor in Chief of the Yale Record, America's oldest humor magazine. The use of a major domo to deflect criticism from the chief is considerably older than the friendship between Mr. Bannon and Mr. Trudeau, who likely will not reinsert Mr. Bannon into his strip any time soon. Though she was perfectly capable of t...

Jack Schaeffer of Slate , generally not a scorpion's nest of Republican firebrands, reports on Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s early 70’s connections: “The resourceful Blumenthal was nothing if not connected: When his student deferment clocked out, he got his draft board to give him a 2-A "occupational deferment" for his work as a special aide to Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham, whom he met through her son Donald, a classmate at Harvard. The 2-A deferment was for jobs essential to the "national health, safety, and interest." (For the record, Donald Graham joined the Army and served in Vietnam, not that you'll ever hear him brag about it.) “In 2008, Jack Shafer pondered Joe Biden's told grandiose lies. In 2004, Timothy Noah reported Dick Cheney's last ditch effort to duck the draft. Blumenthal's next stop was Richard Nixon's White House, where he secured yet another occupational deferment in 1970. But then Nixon began to ...

The question at bat is: Was Lisa Moody, Governor Jodi Rell’s chief aide, the governor’s Svengalli? Svelgalli was a fictional character, an evil hypnotist in George du Maurier’s novel “Trilby.” Not even Moody’s most severe critics would assert that she manipulated the governor by hypnotizing her or casting spells over her. But did she influence the governor? It would be odd if she did not. One always hopes that chief aides are more influential than, say, the editorial board of the Hartford Courant. There is a temptation on the part of press people to over inflate the influence played by aides, perhaps because they are reluctant in their criticisms to mortally injure the king. During ex-president George Bush’s administration, Vice President Dick Cheney was portrayed pretty much as Bush’s brain. The president was thought to be a major duffer. Since Svengalli was a fictional character, it may be more helpful to inquire whether Moody was Rell’s Cheney. Was she? Yes and no. Chen...

Jefferson said of education that it “enables every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom.” Historian Rick Shenkman in his new book, Just How Stupid Are We? concludes that in the November 4 election, people were clueless without 15-second infomercials in deciding whom to vote for. How can ignorant people make such judgments, asks Chester Finn, Jr., in his introduction to Terrorists, Depots, and Democracy, What Our Children Need to Know . Finn asks, “How does it strengthen America for the future if it is raising a generation of ignorant citizens whose teachers are urged not to inform them of the truth about events for which they have no context, background, or information base”? The Fordham Foundation’s monograph (no relation to Fordham University), which deals also with what teachers need to know about America and the world, contains short essays by William J. Bennett, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Lynne Cheney, James Q. Wilson, Stanley Kurtz, Tony Blair, and two do...

The rapidity with which the “candidate of change” changes is astounding. In choosing as his Vice President Joe Biden, a fixture that has been in the senate long enough to acquire cobwebs, Obama has surrendered any claim to be the candidate of change in Washington. What Obama's choice really signifies is that the promises a primary candidate makes on the campaign trail “ain’t worth a pitcher of warm p**s,” as FDR’s Vice President John Nance “Cactus Jack" Garner once said of the vice presidency. Garner, incidentally, was not a cynic. He served in Congress for 30 years, two of them as Minority Leader and two as Speaker of the House. He ran for president against Roosevelt but released his delegate to FDR at the nomination convention, for which he was awarded the warm pitcher of p**s. He opposed Roosevelt’s decision to run for a fourth term, challenged FDR for the party’s nomination, lost, and thereafter retired to his Texas homestead, regaling the locals with colorful stories abou...

The following story first appeared on Ron Winter's blog, A Winter's Soldier Story . It is reproduced here with permission because I like good political literature. The 13th Candidate: Enfield CT, GOP Victory Provides Template for National Campaigns Enfield Connecticut is a village/small city with a cohesive downtown area surrounded by tracts of open space punctuated by subdivisions. A large shopping mall anchors the commercial district, Interstate 91 bisects the community on its way from Hartford to Springfield, Massachusetts, providing quick access for the struggling industrial base, and the Connecticut River establishes Enfield's western border. The population of 45,000 residents is a relatively stable blue collar/white collar mix, and at election time most candidates are known to the voters for their other activities in the community as well as their politics. Like many similar communities across the nation Enfield is facing serious financial issues from burgeoning schoo...

“Tell the truth,” says the poet Emily Dickenson, “but tell it slant.” The poetry resides in the slant. Bill Curry , a liberal Democrat who twice ran for governor and now writes a column for the Hartford Courant, is Connecticut’s politician poet in residence. Personally, I’ve always considered it unfortunate that Curry had not prevailed over former Gov. and felon John Rowland. Had he won in one of his two attempts to be governor, the state almost certainly would have been spared a messy gubernatorial prosecution and threatened impeachment, and not only because Curry can be as honest as the day is long – when it suits his purpose – but also because the state’s liberal press is somewhat laggard in the matter of applying to Democrats the lashes it distributes with such relish to Republicans. I do not doubt – as have said or intimated many times in this space – that Rowland got what he deserved, and before commenting further on Curry’s column on “Scooter” Libby, I wish to state without equi...

A threatened veto – no matter the bill – is always an invitation to the opposition to strut their views, which will have no live consequences because a veto is, among other things, a prophylactic that prevents the germination of consequences. Therefore, a pre-announced veto by Rell on bills to legalize the marriage of gays is a most welcomed opportunity for the opposition to ventilate their views and snag a few votes from gays and their supporters. Though the veto makes winning on the issue unlikely rather than impossible– the Democrats do, after all, have a veto proof margin in the legislature -- the supporters of the vetoed measure have everything to win and nothing to loose. The likelihood of another bill legalizing marriage for gays has re-opened the debate on gay marriage. Talk show host and columnist Colin McEnroe was first out of the gate in support of gay marriage. A Yale graduate and an Illuminati, McEnroe advances a compelling argument that might serve to open a reasonable de...

It may be a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Here is a solid block of fascist rhetoric from the Lyndon LaRouche stormtroopers, posted on the LaRouche internet site: “On Oct. 31, at one of the conferences jointly organized by the United States Embassy in Berlin and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, on the coming American Congressional election, a key operative in the fascist network which, in the United States, has called for the mass murder of Muslims, is being featured. The panel will feature Peter Ross Range, the editor of Blueprint—the magazine of fascist Joe Lieberman's Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in the United States. The event is being chaired by senior Social Democratic Party figure Karsten Voigt. “The fascist credentials of the DLC are straightforward. Founded with Buckleyite right-wing mafia money, the DLC promotes Cheney-Bush imperial war policies, under the name "Democratic." Thus, it finds itself a useful tool of the Bush Administration, in dep...

It seems like only yesterday that special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald was homing in on Karl Rove. Top vice presidential aide I. Lewis Libby, second in command to Vice President Dick Cheney, was said to have leaked the name of Valerie Plame to a reporter and blown her CIA cover, apparently in retaliation for a piece written in the Wall Street Journal by her husband, Joe Wilson, that questioned President Bush’s rational for prosecuting a war in Iraq. Plame was a CIA analyst and not an undercover agent at the time her name was released. But this made no difference. Hot on the chase and anxious to bag Cheney and Rove, the mainstream media devoted an ocean of ink to the subject, and it was widely speculated that Libby was executing a dirty trick on the Wilsons on orders from Rove, the Svengalli of the Bush administration. It all turned out to be a lot of sound and fury , signifying nothing . According to recent more accurate reports in the New York Times, it was not Libby, but rather R...

One can well understand why U.S. Rep Nancy Johnson would wish to put a ten foot pole between herself and Jack Abramoff, the beltway lobbyist and wheeler dealer recently sentenced for sleaze peddling.The once powerful Republican Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, Tom DeLay, this morning announced he will be resigning his seat, news reports indicate, because he failed to put a ten foot pole between himself and Abramoff. And so, smeared by a MoveOn.org ad that “links” Johnson with Abramoff, the Johnson campaign called upon her likely Democrat opponent, Christopher Murphy, to condemn the add. The “link” between Johnson and Abramoff is more than tenuous; it is non-existent. Johnson had never accepted money from Abramoff, unlike Democrat Party Chairman Harry Reid who, according to a February Associated Press report , “collected nearly $68,000 in donations from Abramoff’s firm, lobbying partners and clients” over a three year period. The MoveOn.org ad “links” Johnson with m...