Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

So then, everyone knows that Governor Dannel Malloy will not be on the ticket in 2018. Like another big tax and spender before him, former Governor Lowell Weicker, Malloy has chosen to skedaddle after having imposed on possible voters both the largest and second largest tax increases in Connecticut history. But – where to? Rumor, the Hartford Courant said , is now moving like a raging fire among “lobbyists, state employees and political insiders that Malloy would step down before his term ends in January 2019 and allow Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman to become governor. Malloy, under the scenario, would then take a high-ranking position at the University of Connecticut or another college.” Malloy was called upon to deny these possibilities, and he did so with his usual aplomb.

People in Connecticut may be suffering from something worse than progressives who are striving mightily to destroy the state. They may be suffering from a sort of moral atrophy. G.K. Chesterton addressed the question of moral atrophy in the following few lines about Pimlico, a town in England that, in Chesterton’s day, was what we might call a hopeless case: “Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing – say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne of the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico; in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico; for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico; to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico w...