Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Nancy Pelosi Your mother used to tell you, whenever you slipped out of your groove, “Watch your manners!” And Bill Buckley reminds us that the trouble with bad manners is that they sometime lead to murder. Manners have taken a beating in modern times. Some, mostly bad mannered Democrats, will place the devolution of manners on Trump alone, but the death of manners has been a long time coming. Good manners have died  the death of a thousand cuts. Twice Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi and President Donald Trump have been kicking each other in the shins for the entirety of the Trump administration. Now Trump has fallen ill with Coronavirus, which looms large in the Democrat imagination, right up there with the Black Death. Pelosi, about whom her daughter once said “She’ll cut your throat, and you won’t even know you’re bleeding,” has invited us all to pray for the President’s health, according to an Associated Press story. What curses the lady may have uttered in private ...

The new “never-Trumpers” are mostly Democrats. The last significant remnants of formal Republican opposition quickly melted soon after Donald Trump thumped Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in an election that, despite all the post-election caterwauling about Russians possibly manipulating ballots in favor of the nouveau conservative Republican, was won handily by Mr. Trump. Jonah Goldberg of National Review got it right. “Never Trump” may have been appropriate for some on the right who supposed Mr. Trump was a member of a different tribe. But now, “Never Trump is over. Never Trump was about the GOP primary and the general election, not the presidency. The Left wants to claim it must be a permanent movement, denying the legitimacy of Trump’s election forever, or we were never serious. Well, that’s not what we — or at least I — signed up for.”

"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley" – Robert Burns President Elect Donald Trump, who knows Linda McMahon more intimately than U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, has appointed the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)  to head the Small Business Association (SBA). Mrs. McMahon twice ran for high political office in Connecticut, losing to then Attorney General Dick Blumenthal in 2010 and to Chris Murphy in 2012, but not before she slathered the political landscape with nearly $100 million. It was noted at the time that wrestlers sustain injuries and Mrs. McMahon had a yacht. If Mr. Blumenthal, slightly edging out Nancy Pelosi as the eleventh richest U.S. Congressman   in a body swelling with 268 millionaires, showed any anxiety that his election would turn on Mrs. McMahon’s millions, no worry wrinkles appeared on his placid brow during the campaign.

Matthew Corey is the Republican Party’s sacrificial lamb this year in the 1 st District’s U.S. Congressional contest ( “Sacrificial lamb,” a term derived from Abrahamic religion traditions in which a lamb is prized as a highly valued possession and then sacrificed to a higher power ). Mr. Corey is running in a gerrymandered district that Republicans last held in 1957. In fact, the District has been a Democratic satrapy for all but six years since 1931. The demography of the District is a very picture of fate as it was understood by the ancient Greeks – powerful, tragic or comic and always inescapable. The voter breakdown in the District runs like this: Democrat active voters 156,784; Republicans 71,932; Unaffiliateds 172,626.  The Harford Courant, not unexpectedly, has recently sprinkled its endorsement over Democrat U.S. Representative John Larson. Two days before aspersing Mr. Larson with journalistic holy water, the paper encouraged the nation t...