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 present state of Iran – calamitous, full of barking imams and led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who recently, at the invitation of President of Columbia University Lee Bollinger, entertained the assembled students with his fictions – is former President Jimmy Carter’s present to the world. Carter facilitated the fall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, once friendly to the United States, now become the Great Satan among Middle Eastern men who like their women wrapped in burkas, like human hotdogs in wool buns. Oriana Fallaci is the first and only woman journalist to pull off her chador while interviewing the Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, Iran’s answer to the Shah, throw it to the ground and declaim, “I will not be imprisoned.” Jimmy Carter is no Oriana Fallaci. After the fall of the Shah, Khomeini, the Lenin of the Iranian revolution, returned to Iran from France, where he had been in exile, and quickly took over. In this he was assisted by then President ...