Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The state of Israel must survive, and this is not a walk in the park. Israel is surrounded by noxious Arab powers that long for its utter destruction, the most ambitious of which is Iran, now on the path to becoming a nuclear tipped hegemonic power in the Middle East. Once the enemy of the United States, Iran is a fierce and energetic enemy of both Israel and the United States, which it regards as “The Great Satan.” Since the fall of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country has become both more Islamic and belligerent. These two, a puritanical reform of Islam and an increase in theologically inspired violence, seem to walk arm and arm together in this sorry veil of tears.

Yes, pretty much. Socialism arrived in the West with the Christian message, packed inside an embarrassment of Beatitudes. There are two sets of Christian Beatitudes. Mathew (5:1-12) is toothless, because none of the blessings in Mathew are accompanied by the stinging curses found in Luke. Luke (6: 20-26) is red in tooth and claw. “Blessed are ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God… But woe to you that are rich: for ye have your consolation.” And there is this hard beatitude to swallow: “Blessed shall ye be when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you and shall reproach you and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of Man’s sake… Woe to you when men shall bless you; for according to these things did their fathers to the false prophets.” That last might serve as a testament useful to column writers. You cannot go far wrong when you take up arms against the world, which belongs to Satan and for the moment, at least in Connecticut and Washington DC, to the Democ...

It is not at all surprising that former senator and governor Lowell Weicker, the prime mover in the enactment of an income tax that has doubled state expenditures, should now be spending his twilight years in retirement bemoaning – high taxes. Weicker’s entire public life has been wasted in attempts to pound square pegs in round holes. In addition to high taxes, Weicker also is troubled by what he perceives as a dangerous and possibly unconstitutional religious resurgence in America, an alarming turn towards faith that apparently has not affected public education administrators in Maryland who, eyes cocked in the direction of mischievous suits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, have developed curricula pointedly not mentioning that the Puritans were preeminently a religious people who often thanked God for their good fortune – as was the case during Thanksgiving. “Too many Americans,” Weicker writes in Northeast magazine, a Hartford Courant publication, “have the view that...