Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Connecticut’s Republican Party Nominating Convention has in its wisdom nominated Matt Corey to run against U.S. Senator Chris Murphy who, along with his compatriot in the Senate, Dick Blumenthal, has been "efforting," as the leftists say, during the entire first year of the Trump presidency, to subvert a national election.  To date, they have been far more successful in their efforts than the Russians. The hangman, special counsel Robert Mueller, has been for months braiding a noose behind the scenes. Both Murphy, up for re-election this year, and Blumenthal have pilloried nearly all of Trump’s cabinet appointments, including recently installed Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, a position once occupied by Hillary Clinton, whose campaign for the presidency was, we are invited to believe, torpedoed by Russian spooks in league with Trump.

Chris VanDeHoef has crossed the i’s and dots the t’s of newspaper consumers in Connecticut who suspect that the press showers favors on left of center Democrats. According to a piece in CTMirror , founders of a new SuperPAC committee that will be showering favors upon Democratic Party nominee for the U.S. Senate Chris Murphy “include Chris VanDeHoef, a lobbyist who is executive director of a media trade group, the Connecticut Daily Newspaper Association, and Kevin Graff, who became a Hartford lobbyist after stepping down last year as chief of staff of the state Senate Democratic majority.” Joining the Murphy mutual admiration society is Jeffrey Garfield, who retired in 2009 after more than 30 years as top dog at Connecticut’s Elections Enforcement Commission. Reporter Greg Hladky in CT.com , a site affiliated with the Advocate chain of newspapers, took Mr. Garfield to task for embracing a disease formerly scorned by both Mr. Garfield and Mr. Murphy. It may be important to...

Rich Lowry of National Review examines U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s journey from Iran critic to Bush critic. Former Mayor of New York Ed Koch gets it right. Dana Milbank a columnist for the Washington Post thinks the invitation to Amadinijad has served a useful purpose: Now we know he’ a jerk. Arthur Herman of the New York Post disagrees. Over at Slate magazine, Annie Applebaum tells us that Amadinijad’s goal was “to undermine the American and Western democracy rhetoric that poses an ideological threat to the Iranian regime.” And, to judge from the home town press , he may have succeeded.

When media folk want to validate their prejudices, they commission a poll to verify them, a junk in, junk out phenomena. It is a foolhardy fallacy to think that people believe everything they read. The opposite may be true: We are dealing with a readership that has “come of age” and tends to be hypercritical. But you cannot form a sound opinion around an empty space: People cannot mentally grope data that has never registered in their minds. The media’s sins of commission pale in respect of their sins of omission. And, of course, if it’s not there, a poll cannot measure it. Here is a harmless example: In September, a political commentator wrote a column asserting that Cindy Sheehan’s protest against the war in Iraq was rendered ineffective because people were too easily distracted. The column was titled, “Weather Distracts Nation From Iraq War.” “As a nation,” the commentator wrote, “we seem to be unable to pay attention to more than one thing at a time. Iraq, Iraq - whoa! Look at thos...