Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

On Monday (February 6, 2017), the Harford Courant printed a long, 1335 word op-ed column written by U.S. Senator Chris Murphy that previously had appeared in the Huffington Post, “ Trump’s Reckless Path Towards War .” http://www.courant.com/opinion/op-ed/hc-op-murphy-trumps-reckless-iran-policy-0206-20170203-story.html This is the lede to the column: “Since the inauguration, the White House has taken several ham-handed escalatory steps that bring into question whether  Trump  and his most radical advisers are begging for war with Iran. This would be a disaster of epic scale, perhaps eclipsing the nightmare of the Iraq War.  Republicans  and  Democrats  need to start viewing President Donald Trump's actions and words as a possible accidental or intentional prelude to major conflict, and take steps to counter this dangerous slide to war.” Almost every sentence is parsable. Taken as a whole, the piece amounts to a pawn house of campaign talking ...

The media has lost its moral pull. The approval rating of the lowest bottom-feeding politician is several fathoms higher than that of “the media,” according to a September 2016 Gallup Poll . The media, even less than the current Democratic and Republican presidential nominees, simply does not give a hoot about approval polls directed at them, which are worth pausing over none-the-less.

Governor Dannel Malloy, approval rating 24%, is fast becoming the Donald Trump of Connecticut politics. Known among some commentators as “the porcupine,” largely because of his bristly nature, Mr. Malloy recently unloaded on Governor of Indiana Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s Vice Presidential choice. Mr. Trump very likely will be the Republican Party nominee for President once the Republican presidential nominating convention has concluded its business, and Democrats across the nation are even now busily arranging their bumper-sticker responses. Mr. Malloy, head of the National Democratic Governors Association, has jumped far ahead of the pack. If Donald Trump is looking for someone who is willing to discriminate,  Mr. Malloy told the Hartford Courant hours before Mr. Trump had publicly announced his Vice Presidential choice, "he couldn't do any better. If you want to bring back discrimination in America, the Republicans have a ticket for it." Mr. Malloy added, “I thi...

Hillary’s enemies, the so-called vast right wing conspiracy to deny her the presidency, are not all members in good standing on the right. Shortly after FBI Director James Comey failed to pronounce a doom on her, Mr. Comey having declined to prosecute Mrs. Clinton on criminal charges, the vast left wing Clintonista conspiracy began salting the political theatre with the absurd notion that she had been exonerated. Not everyone on the left bought into the “Hillary is blameless” bit. Colin McEnroe poured scorn on the notion  in his regular Hartford Courant column:

“The government doesn’t care about profits, which is why it’s always in the red. It doesn’t care much about service either, which is why there are long lines at Connecticut’s Department of Motor Vehicles. It cares only about votes.” – The Cynic at the Breakfast Table, a work in progress. On Thursday, Hillary Clinton came to Hartford, not so long ago the murder capital of New England, to agitate indirectly against Democratic presidential rival Bernie Sanders – AND FIRE ARMS. Mr. Sanders is from Vermont and does not suffer from hoplophobia , an irrational fear of guns. In the hinterland of Vermont, guns are used to shoot game; in one-party urbanscapes such as Hartford, guns are used by drug dealers, gangbangers and young school kids to kill rivals and innocent by-standers. Anti-gun Democratic politicians now seek to forestall urban gun crimes by allowing lawyers to sue gun manufacturers – good for the lawyers, bad for law-abiding gun owners and good for politicians wh...

Only a few years ago a politician might have been laughed out of Congress for postulating that the troubles in the Middle East – Islamic irredentism; the emergence of Iran, still considered a terrorist state, as a regional Middle East power; the attempt by Shiites, rebuffed during the Iraq war, to establish a caliphate in northern Iraq and Syria; the threats against the United States and other western nations that pour like a flood of mighty waters from the throats of its former enemies; the scurrying of foreign states once friendly to the United States from a U.S to a Russian protectorate; the sea of women, children and young men murdered, homeless and enslaved Christians, immigrant hordes persecuted by Islamic terrorists now flooding Europe’s shores, largely owing to the recession of U.S. power and influence in the Middle East; all this and more --  were traceable to global warming, the tocsin of a boisterous environmental movement.

At the cusp of the New Year, lame duck President Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union Address. The real state of the union is in disarray, and here in Connecticut many nutmeggers are living lives of quiet desperation: “Dark Clouds, Sunny Speech” ran a page one, top of the fold headline in a Hartford paper. Dark clouds indeed! The national economy continues to under-perform, and some economic tea leaf readers see yet another recessionary bump in the road. Mr. Obama has added $8 trillion to the union’s already unsupportable national debt, quickly approaching $19 trillion.  After two terms of visionary hope and change, the U.S. Congress has fallen to Republicans. Reports of al-Qaida’s demise, loudly trumpeted by Mr. Obama during his second presidential campaign, have been greatly exaggerated. Mr. Obama has turned over to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the butcher of Ukraine, the U.S.’s Middle East portfolio. Libya – the Democrats' Iraq – is under siege by ISIS...

US Senator Dick Blumenthal and Hillary Clinton were Yalies together back in the day. On Friday, April 10, Blumenthal “gushed” over his old Yale compatriot, according to an item by Neil Vigdor of the Hearst Group : “Blumenthal gushed Friday over Clinton’s political stock, ahead of the former secretary of state’s announcement Sunday that she is running for president in 2016. “’She literally can make history,’ Blumenthal told Hearst Connecticut Media. ‘How many people have been a presidential spouse, a senator in her own right and a distinguished secretary of state with a record of representing a major state (New York) and our nation abroad? By any measure, she is very seriously and significantly qualified, especially as compared to some of the other contenders.’

The UK’s Daily Mail reports that “Libyan leader…” – actually, he’s a dictator – Muammar Gaddafi left Libya with his pants on fire and now is on his way to Venezuela, where Venezuelan leader – actually, he’s a dictator – Hugo Chavez rules the roost. The country is now left in the hands of this young lady… …a considerable improvement. UPDATE Mr. Gaddafi is still hanging on. The Michael Jackson of Middle East autocrats was shown in a recent photograph sporting a Minnesota flap eared hat and carrying a spiffy white umbrella. He appeared in Tripoli, where dead bodies litter the streets, to speak to the nation on a government run station for a brief 20 minutes, which is unusual for him; like most autocrats, Mr. Gaddafi is loquacious. In his speech, he vowed to take the streets back from “the terrorists,” one of whom is pictured above celebrating the country’s liberation from… well, the country’s chief terrorist.