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 ...

Both the Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post have published pictures that prompted President Barrack Obama to say he was disturbed by the violence in Iran. The photo below shows a crowd of young Iranians bearing the bullet ridden body of a protestor. When Iranian police elsewhere fired upon a crowd of protestors, the crowd began to chant in unison, “Don’t be scared. We’re all together.” The president had been criticized as being tardy in his response to the Iranian election (read-- fraud). On Sunday, according to a report in Politico , Vice President Joe Biden expressed “doubts” about the election, and on Monday, press secretary Robert Gibbs was battered by a reporter: "... State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said the U.S. is 'deeply troubled' by events in Iran but stopped short of condemning them. “'I haven’t used that word, condemn,"' he [Gibbs] told the State Department press corps. 'We need to see how things unfold.' “'You need to se...

Out of a sense of decency, Sen. Barack Obama has said that the children of politicians should not be hauled into the bloody political ring, even when they embarrass their parents, as children will sometimes do. It is a solid rule to follow: The sins of the children, provided they have reached the age of reason, should not be visited upon their parents – even when their parents are politicians. These glad tidings have not reached some of Obama’s supporters. Immediately after Sen. John McCain announced that he had chosen Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin to be his Vice President on the Republican Party ticket, rumors began to fly. Progressive blog sites not kindly disposed to Republicans – DailyKos, www.barackoblogger.com, The Huffington Post, some in the mainstream media and their local echo chambers – sniffed out a rumor, since shown to be false, that the mother of Mrs. Palin’s newborn Down Syndrome child was her daughter. No self respecting journalist would print such “news” on such sle...

The New Yorker cartoon – on the front page of the magazine, no less – is a monument to tasteless commentary. But there is a difficulty in protesting it. The idea seems to be to satirize stupid commentary on Sen. Barack Obama. The cartoon shows him in Islamic garb: Take that all you people who suppose that Obama is a Muslim, rather than a practicing Christian. His lovely wife Michelle is dressed as a 60’s radical, wearing an afro and carrying a Kalashnikov rifle: Take that all you bottom feeders who have suggested that Michelle lacked pride in her country, and so on… and on. An American flag is shown burning in the fireplace, a slam on opinion from the right that Obama’s failure to wear a flag pin signals an absence of patriotism. Now, all this is not funny. Satire is not supposed to be funny, especially for those who “don’t get it.” And, judging from much of the commentary surrounding the New Yorker’s tasteless cover art, the great unwashed American – who is not a subscriber to the Ne...

The news site of the year, TimesOnLine , is reporting that the surge has succeeded in driving Al-Qaeda from Iraq: “American and Iraqi forces are driving Al-Qaeda in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror.” It may take some time for the good news to trickle down to other news hot spots like The Huffington Post and MoveOn.org. It is rumored that Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama intends to visit Iraq, sometime or other, at which point his aides may disclose the news to him, after which he may -- ahem -- "adjust" his view on the withdrawal of troops without regard to realities on the ground.

Sen. Barack Obama waged a hard-left campaign against Sen. Hillary Clinton and dished her, with much help from hard-leftists both in the media and on blog sites. It is only a slight exaggeration to say he became Clinton in order to up-end her. The quick change artist may have something similar in mind for his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain. The trick, now that Obama is facing a moderate Republican, is to move to the middle without irreparably damaging his support on the left. This can be managed. Obama, whose stern and inflexible views on immediate withdrawal from Iraq solidified his position on the left in the primary, now finds it necessary to adjust that view in the general election. An immediate withdrawal from Iraq in the post surge period, to take but one example of Obama’s recent serial adjustments, was always questionable, except as a primary campaign strategy. But a guy’s got to do what a guy’s got to do. And so now we are told, both by Obama’s handlers and the cheerlead...

The Democrat primary campaign, writes Noemie Emery in National Review , certainly is not without irony: “A campaign in which a feminist trailblazer [Geraldine Ferrero, once a Vice Presidential candidate on the Democrat ticket] is called a racist by a post-racial healer [Sen. and would-be president Barack Obama] who indulges a racist bible thumper [the silver tongued Rev. Jeremiah Wright] is a little too strange for their minds to keep up with, but it is the long termed result of the world they created. They never dreamed that the diversity codes they cooked up could snap back and attack them. But they could, and they have.” “We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue,” Obama said some time before he dismissed his pastor as a crank and a demagogue, “just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro in the aftermath of her recent statements as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.” The “some” to whom Obama was referring were Obama backers, ardent Democrats all. Ferraro, who l...

The press today – and by that I suppose we shall have to include such organs of the media as YouTube and MyLeftNutmeg – is exceedingly concerned with moral reprobation. For those who do not know, MyLeftNutmeg is a hard hitting leftist blog site in Connecticut. It’s good to be hard, bad to be soft. I do not mean to single out my honorable brothers on the left here for… well… moral reprobation; all this is merely by way of example. MyLeftNutmeg receives the bulk of its political ethic, such as it is, from other blog sites, MoveOn.org and the Huffington Post, for example; proving, once and for all, that the press – or the media, as some would prefer – is 10% thought and 90% repetition. It is important not to underestimate the power of repetition -- as a propaganda tool. Lenin said that if you label something effectively, you do not have to argue with it; this includes both people and propositions. People who have been labeled effectively within the past month include the not-so Reverend ...

The jury sitting on the meaning of the Iowa and New Hampshire canvasses is now in. The Journal Inquirer Following Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire win, the editorial page editor of the Journal Inquirer unburdened himself in the form of a “Memo to Barack: This will not be easy.” The editorial makes the following points: • Barack has had to fight for what he is and has, while Hillary has had both her senate seat and her senate re-election “handed to her.” • Hillary was President Bill Clinton’s “consort.” The words “wife” or “First Lady” apparently are not in the editor’s lexicon. • The Clintons were not civil to the newly elected George Bush. The editorial page editor, who has been around for awhile, was uncomfortable with early Polls after Iowa showing Barack defeating Hillary by 10 percentage points. • “You mess with the Clinton’s at your peril.” • “The Clintons see the presidency as their due - their property. Theirs. Their whole campaign has been: Restore the monarchy.” • The Clinton’...

Progressives now have weighed in on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Colin McEnroe , on his blog To Wit, wrote: “I'm not sure I understand the prominent placement of all the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. There was never much doubt that he played a huge a role in planning the 9/11 attacks. Hadn't he even boasted of that before capture? “Now we've had him for four years. We've tortured him. He's confessed to the 9/11 crimes and a host of other plots, including the killing of Laura Palmer on 'Twin Peaks.' Why is this big news? He actually claims some remorse over civilian casualties. Which is more than I ever remember hearing, oh, for example, Bush say about what we are pleased to call 'collateral damage.' A sorry state of affairs when an evil terrorist mastermind seems to have more human perspective than the POTUS. “Anyway, I saw '300' last night, and I'm pretty sure Xerxes is behind at least some of this stuff.” Well now, let’s see. When Khalid Sheikh ...

As if losing were not humiliation enough, The Harford Courant this morning mainlined more bad news into the anti-Lieberman camp over at the Huffington Post and DailyKos, two liberal blog sites full of foaming at the mouth pro-Ned Lamont progressives: It turns out that the good old USA thinks Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman (ID-CT) is more loveable and cuddly than either New York Sen. Hillary Clinton or Massachusetts Senator and perennial presidential hopeful John Kerry. According to a national Quinnipiac poll that measures the affection of people towards their leaders, Lieberman falls just a step behind that loveable mushball ex-President Bill Clinton, who came in at number 5; Hillary followed at 9; Lieberman was 6 and Kerry, alas, was at the bottom of the barrel, a lowly 20. Rudolph Giuliani topped the list at numero uno; Nancy Pelosi ranked 12 and Bush 15. According to the Courant, “Lieberman scored well among almost every constituency in the Quinnipiac poll, which surveyed 1,623 ...

Jane Hamsher , always brimming with the testosterone of progressivism, takes aim over at firedoglake, the blog site she maintains, at two impertinent revolutionists who have strayed from the fold. “If you'd been sitting in Le Pan Quotidian restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard yesterday afternoon you would have seen me pitch back in my chair and howl with laughter when Digby told me John WATB Harris and Jim "Pool Boy" VandeHei were leaving the WaPo to honcho a groovy new interactive news media site: "'Harris and VandeHei note that their move is tied to a new vision of political reporting. It uses every medium on the web — text, video, and interactivity — to pull back the curtain on political stories and narrow the gap between reporters and their audience.' “Tears…tears…oh lordy, it's just too funny…I can just hear the sales pitch for this future dinosaur (probably the same one they made for Hot Soup): ‘We'll tap the great untapped center, the people ...

Anonymous said... He's going to give the Iranians a reason not to build a nuclear bomb Like what, give the Ayatollah his lapsed membership in the Round Hill Club? -- Connecticut Local Politics The anonymous blogger has a point: Most terrorists are fairly hard-headed, and there may be no permanent solutions in the Middle East, only a past soaked in blood and a doubtful future. Diplomatists talk as if it is possible to negotiate the suicide pack off the chest of the suicide bomber. They are wrong. The post-primary blogs have a different tone and message than the pre-primary blogs, which suggest considerable movement in Connecticut’s political templates -- for primaries are different than general elections. Primaries are intra-party struggles for prestige and power; general elections are much broader in scope and purpose. In showing Sen. Joe Lieberman the door, Lamont supporters – a Pequod crew of anti-war protesters, energetic college and high school students, gone-to-seed-former sha...