Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Q: I find this line in one of your recent posts : “The political response to Coronavius has returned us to pre-Magna Carta days. Quite suddenly, the three branches of government, once constitutionally separated, have collapsed and been subsumed by chief executives unchallenged by legislatures or quiescent courts.” Would you care to expand on that? A: I’m not sure any expansion of the idea it would matter a bit. The posts found in Connecticut Commentary are columns still sent to a number of Connecticut papers. The columns are not being picked up any longer. Nor, I should point out, are columns written by Chris Powell, a thorn in the side of the state’s unitary media. Elsewhere I’ve said that modern journalism is ten percent thought and ninety percent repetition. Powell is a ten percenter; something in the man does not love nonsense. But, as you might imagine, his ten percent is not often repeated in the state’s media echo chamber. The Register Citizen papers used to run both ...

Nephew Craig and Don Q: You have been writing about politics in Connecticut for forty years. Happy fortieth!   You are, by your own account, a small fish in a small pond. What keeps you going? A: I’m tempted to respond as another journalist, Chris Powell, did when I asked him that very question.   I was marveling that he had written editorials and columns long before my appearance on the scene. And yet, I said to him, even though much of what you have written is lucid and politically necessary as a corrective tonic, only a handful of thoughtful people seem to be paying attention. What keeps you going? Chris has a sharp sense of humor, rarely visible in his writings. “Spite,” he said. Spite, like other human virtues, is useful. It’s difficult to write, day after day, about the obtuse human carnival without feeling a bit spiteful. But I’m certain that what keeps him going – though retired, he’s still slogging away -- is his sense of humor, indulgent but arousing. H...

The publication in the New Haven Register of one of my columns produced a letter of protest on 4/12/17 from climate scientist Michael Mann. Both the original column and Mann’s response may be found in Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes From A Blue State here “ The Curse Of Victimology .” The gravamen of the column and blog, put in a single sentence, is this: Scientific matters in dispute should not, and perhaps cannot, be decided by courts. The blog and column also touches on victimology. Corollary: Courts should not be used by “scientists” as a thumbscrew to silence legitimate scientific inquiry.

“The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice” --  A Defense of Humilities, The Defendant, 1901,  G.K. Chesterton Small “o” orthodox Christians of a certain age will be familiar with the cardinal virtues. They are: prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice – all under attack by a secular culture that, judging by Hollywood or Washington DC standards, appears to have won the battle. But, never fear, the four cardinal virtues form the breastplate of a church against which, its founder once proclaimed, the gates of Hell shall not prevail. The Cardinal virtues, St. Augustine tells us, better enable us to pursue the good life: “To live well is nothing other than to love God with all one's heart, with all one's soul and with all one's efforts; from this,  it comes about that love is kept whole and uncorrupted (through temperance). No misfortune can disturb it (and this is fortitude). It obeys only [God] (a...

“If you don’t know where you are, how can you get to where you’re going? That’s why you’ve got to take stock of yourself every so often” – a waitress to a customer in a diner. Q: You’re getting on in years; isn’t it time for some sort of summing up? A: I don’t see any pressing need. Q: You’ve written a great deal about politics in Connecticut… A: … most of it lying dead in newspaper morgues… Q: Maybe so, but a record has been established in Connecticut Commentary for those who wish to consult it. Has anything changed because of your writing?

Dedication -- To My Nieces and Nephews Prologue: A Little Knowledge I want to warn you from the very beginning: A memoir is very much like a confession, and you must be wary of people who write confessions. They are rarely sincere about their failings or themselves in their narratives because they cannot bear to be sincere about themselves in their lives. Everyone quotes Socrates’ famous apothegm: Know thyself. Few are willing to trace his self-knowledge to its bitter end in forced suicide, and fewer still practice what he preached. In the 21 st Century – Your century, my dear nieces and nephews – it may not be necessary to know oneself at all. In any case, perhaps it is better to concentrate on others. My century – the 20 th , the bloodiest in the history of the world, full of introspective maniacs – had its fill of self-regarding “men like gods.”

Juliana Simone, for nine years the host of the Barkhamsted Republican Town Committee's political interview show "Conservative Chat and Chairman of the BRTC since 2009," has invited me to make a few impromptu remarks during the town’s biannual fundraiser on September 30. If anyone following Connecticut Commentary attends the event, please coral me and say hello. I’ll be touching briefly on a few topics I’ve written about recently. There are some things I will not have time to address. Allow me to do so here.

Pesci Q: Before we get to the particulars, the details where the devil lives and breathes let me ask you some general questions. A: Sure. Q: When did you first start writing for newspapers? A: I remember my first or second column for the Journal Inquirer (JI). I’m not sure of the exact date. It was a column on Thurman Milner, who was then running as mayor of Hartford on the Democrat ticket. Milner won the contest about 40 years ago and became the first black mayor of a major city in Connecticut. Q: Do you remember what the column was about? A: I do. It has long since been consigned to the newspaper morgue at the JI. Q: Curious that you remember. A: No one forgets the circumstances involving the birth of their first commentary. The mayoralty race was well underway when the JI stumbled upon some questionable credentials presented by Milner. He had flourished a certificate from “Roachdale College.” The paper discovered the certificate was produced as a result of a dormitory ...

U.S. Senator Chis Murphy plans to travel to Europe on an apology tour, according to a brief notice in  a Hartford paper. “Over the last several months,” Mr. Murphy wrote in a media release, “our European allies have raised legitimate concerns about the nature and scope of U.S. intelligence programs, and I agree that at times, U.S. surveillance programs have not been conducted with the appropriate restraint and security, both in the United States and in Europe. While foreign citizens do not enjoy the same constitutional protections as American citizens, the United States should have processes in place that assure non-U.S. citizens that all possible steps are being taken to limit the scope of our surveillance programs so that we are targeting only the information absolutely necessary to find and catch individuals who pose a security threat to the United States and our allies. My goal for these meetings will be to help cement the overall relationship between the United S...

Q: The death penalty was abolished by the Senate on April 5. It’s a virtual certainty that the House also will approve the Democrat inspired bill. Do you feel safer? A: Can’t say. Part of the abolition bluster was that the death penalty did not prevent murders, always a questionable assumption. Q: “Bluster?” What ever can you mean? A: It was never a serious proposition, just a useful piece of propaganda. Q: But the polls! A: Think of what is meant when it is said that a punishment deters crime. How do you collect reliable data showing that the death penalty – or, indeed, any punishment – deters an action? Reliable data retrieval showing that the death penalty has deterred Mr. Smith from murdering Mrs. Smith cannot be collected from Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith is invisible. And if he’s smart, he will choose to remain invisible. The pollster can’t find him.   Mr. Smith is not likely to step out of the shadows and volunteer that he was contemplating the murder of his wife. The po...

Chris Powell is the managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester and writes a regular column for the paper. In the course of our conversation on poverty and social disintegration, Powell made reference to a column by Mona Charen that fairly summed up his general feelings. Charen's column details some complacency-shattering statistics: “The illegitimacy rate among all Americans has been rising for decades. In 2012, we reached a grim milestone: The majority of births to women under the age of 30 are now outside of marriage. Among blacks, 72 percent of births are to unmarried women. And while some unmarried mothers go on to marry the fathers of their babies, it's rare in the African-American community, where only 31 percent of couples are married. (In 1960, it was 61 percent).” Pesci: What you call “social disintegration” and others on the left call “poverty” is particularly insidious in cities. My own feeling, though you may disagree, is that even liberals tend ...

Ross Garber waited quite a while before expressing his interest in running for attorney general as a Republican. This sort of thing may be inconvenient to party nominated candidates, but so long as it’s still a free country, Mr. Garber is free to be his potty old self, and everyone else in the party should be prepared to humor him. But Mr. Garber now has chosen to wrest votes from attorney general party nominee Martha Dean through a series of “swift-boating” ads. “Swift-boating” is a term that came into currency during the presidential run of Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts when it was felt by Kerry’s supporters that his opponents were pumping false and toxic ads into the political bloodstream. Garber so far has released, a little more than a week before the primary, two swift-boat ads, either one of which is worthy of the most shameless of ex-President Richard Nixon’s worst subalterns. The Garber-garbage ads tears out of context a Dean quote suggesting an honest discussion conc...

Monday, March 23, 2009 1:37:56 Dear Mr. Pesci, I write regarding a gross factual error in your recent column in the Greenwich Citizen on a proposed bill concerning the finances of the Roman Catholic Church. Your column completely misstates and misrepresents my position on this proposal. In fact, the position you attribute to me is the exact opposite of the one I have taken. Neither I nor my office played any role in drafting or introducing this legislation, nor were we consulted before it was submitted or raised for a hearing in the General Assembly. When asked about the proposal, I have stated consistently and repeatedly that it appears to violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing freedom of religion. Far from seeking the powers or role such a proposal might authorize, I have explicitly rejected them. Fortunately, the proposal now appears to be dead, its supporters having effectively withdrawn it. I respectfully request that you issue a correction and edit an...