Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

It would be difficult for anyone other than politicians on the right, often the butt of his jokes, to disdain Colin McEnroe. We in the land of Mark Twain do love and forgive our humorists their hyperbole, and Mr. McEnroe is the closest thing Connecticut has to, say, Aristophanes, the famous Greek comic playwright of the 4 th century BC. Time, as we know, is the enemy of sound scholarship. The ruin of Greece has left huge gaps in our understanding of, among other things, Greek comic playwrights. Only eleven of Aristophanes’ 40 plays survive virtually complete. Modern scholarship, which relies on multiple disciplines –archeology, for instance -- to fill in the gaps, shows us an Aristophanes who was an arch political critic, though he wore many masks. In his plays, Aristophanes mercilessly and subversively routed by means of humor the larger and more offensive pretentions of his day. Plato’s beef against Aristophanes was that his play “The Clouds” slandered Socrates and so led to th...

It’s going to be difficult for the usual chatterers to make merry with Christine Ragaglia’s difficulties. True, she’s a Republican, and its always open season on Republicans in Connecticut. But she is also a woman who helped prosecutors put a nail in the devil’s tail. The Rowland prosecution likely would not have been possible without her grand jury testimony. That testimony, put under seal by prosecutors, has now, thanks to some anonymous leaker , become public property. Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, according to an Associated Press report, is promising to “recover millions lost to Rowland-era corruption.” Connecticut’s attorney general, who relies on co-operative witnesses and whistleblowers to secure his convictions, has vowed to “seek relief tailored to the individuals like Ragaglia and others who have betrayed the public trust.” The associated press reporter who was given access both to the sealed -- now, obviously unsealed -- grand jury testimony, as well as Ragaglia’s muc...