Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The impeachment of President Donald Trump has blotted out lesser news stories. Journalistically, the impeachment circus has become the sun that, early in the morning, hides the stars behind a veil of bright light. But the stars twinkle, never-the-less. According to most polls, former Vice President Joe Biden will eventually become the White Knight facing the Republican’s Black Knight, Trump, whom Democrats, during their somber impeachment process, hope to remove from office before the 2020 elections. This fugitive “hope” is doomed to be crushed by the numbers. Democrats simply do not have the numbers in the U.S. Senate to boot Trump out of office before the national elections and, in politics, numbers rule.

The Middle East, we are told, is complex. That is true, but there is little point in making the complex more complex. We in the West should remember that partisanship and corruption grow in the crevices of complexity. If there were little confusion, we would have no need of experts to smooth a path for us through the complexities. The simplest explanation for an occurrence is usually the best. We should apply Occam’s Razor, which holds that the more assumptions you must make, the more unlikely your explanation, to all complex conundrums.

Why Connecticut Republicans lose elections There is always a great deal of disagreement within political parties. But that is the dark side of a revelation, and the revelation is this:  members within political parties  agree  on most important matters. So let’s begin by describing broad areas of agreement.

Connecticut Democrats ran against Trump in the last off-year presidential election, and he was not on the ballot. There were no ringing defenses of Trump among Connecticut Republicans, who tend to be rather shy on the subject of Trump’s accomplishments, the most important of which involves jobs produced in Connecticut by Trump’s aggressive military procurement policy. Electric Boat, Sikorsky and Pratt & Whitney are producing jobs and hiring new workers at a record pace, all of which will, during the next 20 years, produce tax revenue for a state still mired in a recession that ended elsewhere in the nation about 10 years ago. Despite Connecticut’s 30-year-long descent into economic turmoil, Connecticut progressives did very well in the 2018 elections. Hard won Republican gains in the General Assembly were wiped out, and the progressive caucus in the Democrat dominant General Assembly is now approaching 50 percent. In 2020, Trump will be on the ballot in Connecticut, desp...

A recent Hartford Courant-Sacred Heart University poll demonstrates that Governor Ned Lamont, as well as Democrats in the General Assembly, have intractable policy problems. Lamont’s policies are largely the same as those of former Governor Dannel Malloy, whose poll ratings were abysmally low when he left office after two terms. The latest poll results blow out of the water an always dubious theory that Malloy’s disapproval poll numbers, hovering around 25 percent during his two-term administration, were low because the former governor was a bristly character. Lamont, Malloy without the quills, everyone will agree is far more eupeptic than Malloy. Lamont’s approval rating remained at 24%,” the Courant story   notes, “but 47% of respondents said they disapprove of how he is handling his job, a seven-point increase from a poll conducted in May. Twenty-nine percent said they were unsure about how Lamont is doing.”

It is no longer true, as your mother may once have told you, that you are judged by the company you keep. Former President Barack Obama had a few diamonds in the rough on his friends list. There were the Chicago terrorist bombers Bill Ayers , a former leader of the Weather Underground, now an American elementary education theorist, and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, responsible for bombings of the United States Capitol, the Pentagon, and several police stations in New York, as well as the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion that killed three of its members. Dohrn left a position in 2013 as “Clinical Associate Professor of Law" at the Northwestern University School of Law. Far from being a repentant sinner, Ayres told the New York Times in 2001 "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Ayers and Obama served together on the board of directors for the Woods Fund of Chicago, their terms overlapping for three years, and Ayres is credi...

The recently re-installed Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, will be the featured speaker at the Connecticut Democrat’s annual fundraising dinner. Pelosi is known, among other things, for her ability to bring home the bennies, and Connecticut Democrats no doubt will be happy to receive them – not that the state’s Democrat Party is, by any measure, a poor waif begging for pennies on street corners. The Annual Gathering of Democrats used to be called “The Jefferson, Jackson, Bailey Dinner.” But Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, author of the Declaration of Independence, and Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States, generally regarded as the father of the modern Democrat Party, were both booted from the marque some years ago because both were slave owners. Jackson, in addition, displaced Native Americans from their ancestral homelands in what later became known as “ The Trail of Tears .” Upon ejection, the Ha...

Blumenthal sworn into office by Biden in a mock ceremony The leading Democrats scrambling up the presidential campaign greasy pole are former Vice President in the Obama administration Joe Biden, 29 percent in a Quinnipiac poll, followed by Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders, 19 percent in the same poll, both of whom have had past sweet and sour relationships, none of them the subject of congressional hearings,  with communist Russia. President Donald Trump continues to be slammed by Democrats owing to his still alleged warm relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, collusion with the Ruskies having been put in the cooler after the Mueller investigation, but these two… not so much. Biden’s questionable relationship with Ukraine, a country that had in the past locked horns with Russia numerous times – in 1932, Joseph Stalin created a man-made famine to haul Ukraine into the Soviet orbit – recently re-surfaced in a New York Times piece that is certain to catch th...

Government begins to be a bother when it uses the power of the state to prohibit normative behavior. The primary instrument of compulsion in this case is – and should never be – the tax code. Ordinary people who would not know a political ideology from a lamppost may be forgiven for reacting normally to a government that uses the tax code to shape behavior. And yet this practice has become as common as table salt, which some people believe should be taxed exorbitantly because it isn’t good for you.

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.

U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal thinks Donald Trump Jr. may have colluded with Russian operatives to deny Hillary Clinton the presidency. Other leading Democrats have asserted that President Donald Trump is a traitor. Blumenthal believes that recent emails may demonstrate " bombshell evidence of criminal intent " on the part of Trump Jr. But then, Blumenthal believes lots of things. There was a time when he believed he had served as a marine in Vietnam, but he didn’t. In the absence of a crime, there can be no criminal intent – just unfulfilled intent. There is little question that Trump Jr. and other Trump operatives intended to receive and possibly make use of promised data dirt damaging to Hillary Clinton when the Trump amateur opposition research team met with a Russian lawyer who failed to deliver the dirt.

In mid-May, David Hawkins of Roll Call threw a bouquet of compliments at U.S.  Senator Dick Blumenthal: “But Blumenthal’s profile has never been as prominent as in the past week, after he declared that the firing of James B. Comey as FBI director has created ‘a looming constitutional crisis that is deadly serious’ and ‘may well produce impeachment proceedings, although we’re very far from that possibility.’” The reader will note Blumenthal's adjectives. A "looming' crisis cannot be "deadly." The "crisis” is "looming" because we cannot be certain it is a crisis, except in Blumenthal's fevered imagination. And if we are "very far” from the possibility of a crisis, in what sense may the crisis be fairly described as a crisis? Note the "may" standing guard over this sentence: the crisis "may well produce impeachment proceedings,” or the crisis – but is it a crisis? See above -- may yet produce egg on Blumenthal’...

Mark Twain used to say that a lie can fly half way around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on. Almost from the beginning the “dossier” on Trump – actually, a cluster-muck put together by a paid opposition researcher, apparently an ex-British intelligence officer -- was rejected by news outlets that like to think of themselves as champions of truth. Good for them. It had been shopped around to various newspapers that had declined to bite because much of the information in the cluster-muck seemed either implausible or unverifiable.  Even BuzzFeed, which printed the damning dossier, had doubts. But the news outlet was determined not to let doubt kill a good story. And so, along with feeble disclaimers, BuzzFeed provided the dossier to the general public.

The media has lost its moral pull. The approval rating of the lowest bottom-feeding politician is several fathoms higher than that of “the media,” according to a September 2016 Gallup Poll . The media, even less than the current Democratic and Republican presidential nominees, simply does not give a hoot about approval polls directed at them, which are worth pausing over none-the-less.

Q: It may or may not have been the most significant presidential debate in living memory, but it certainly was the most touted presidential debate in “Click Nation USA.” What are your general impressions? Cynic: In Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” one character says to another, “I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and really being good all the time; that would be hypocrisy.” Neither of the presidential candidates this year needs worry about that. Hillary Clinton’s presentation, more than Trump’s, was unbearable pretentious. She needed to confess but boasted instead of her essential goodness. She is not a good person – never has been, never will be. But she is a Democrat and, in our time, political affiliation is a substitute for moral rectitude. Q: Is she evil? Cynic: No, she lacks the energy to be evil. The root is old and dry. Vladimir Putin is evil. That little runt in North Korea is evil. Donald Trump bubbles wi...

Note: Sad to say, it is becoming increasingly impossible to talk about issues vital to the country without mentioning, if only in passing, leading Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, a media sponge far more absorbent than Connecticut’s  own U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal. Trumps supporters are enthusiastic, but some Republicans are riven with nagging doubts. I have tried in the Q & A format below to say some few things about current presidential nominees, both Republican and  Democratic, always  bearing in mind the useful advice offered by Connecticut’s own Mark Twain: “When in doubt tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.”    Q: Who are the Trump Supporters?

At the cusp of the New Year, lame duck President Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union Address. The real state of the union is in disarray, and here in Connecticut many nutmeggers are living lives of quiet desperation: “Dark Clouds, Sunny Speech” ran a page one, top of the fold headline in a Hartford paper. Dark clouds indeed! The national economy continues to under-perform, and some economic tea leaf readers see yet another recessionary bump in the road. Mr. Obama has added $8 trillion to the union’s already unsupportable national debt, quickly approaching $19 trillion.  After two terms of visionary hope and change, the U.S. Congress has fallen to Republicans. Reports of al-Qaida’s demise, loudly trumpeted by Mr. Obama during his second presidential campaign, have been greatly exaggerated. Mr. Obama has turned over to Russian President Vladimir Putin, the butcher of Ukraine, the U.S.’s Middle East portfolio. Libya – the Democrats' Iraq – is under siege by ISIS...

Progressives, who sometimes have great difficulty making proper distinctions between populism and progressivism, may want to take a gander at populism Trump style, which appears to be a toxic combination of demagoguery laced with ineffable stupidity. Here is the sad tale according to Charles Cooke of National Review : “US presidential hopeful Donald Trump has said it is a “great honor” to receive a compliment from Russian President Vladimir Putin. The property tycoon hailed Mr. Putin as a man “highly respected within his own country and beyond”. It comes after Mr. Putin said Mr. Trump was a “very colorful, talented person” during his annual news conference...

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy’s immediate reaction to the mass murder of innocent civilians in France by ISIS inspired terrorists was remarkably on-script and unemotional, unlike his earlier reaction to a Ted Cruz inspired video  in which Senator Cruz, a Republican now running for President, boasts that he stood up for Second Amendment rights following the Sandy Hook mass murder. The video, Mr. Murphy said, “makes me want to throw up.” Mr. Murphy’s Democratic partner in politics from Connecticut, Dick Blumenthal, also denounced the PAC video, ineptly inserting himself into the Sandy Hook drama . In that smarmy way oleaginous politicians have of placing themselves center-stage at important events, Mr. Blumenthal strongly suggested he was present when Governor Dannel Malloy told the parents of murdered students and teachers at the firehouse near Sandy Hook Elementary School that their children and teachers would not be coming home again. In truth, Mr. Blumenthal arrived after the anno...

By redefining a treaty – a major foreign policy agreement among more than one nation – as a “deal” President Barack Obama spared himself the necessity of acquiring a majority of Congressional votes to affirm the non-treaty. His redefinition presses a finger down on one of the scales of justice. A treaty would have required a two-thirds vote of approval from the U.S. Congress. Mr. Obama’s initial plan, it may be recalled, was to treat the Obama/Kerry/Khamenei deal as a simple agreement that required NO Congressional approval at all.  The present arrangement serves much the same purpose: It lowers the approval bar and creates the illusion of majority assent on what is, for all practical purposes, a treaty that, for political reasons, has been redefined to secure Congressional affirmation.