Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

If you want a functioning First Amendment – which prevents Congress or state legislatures (or college administrators?) from making laws and regulations prohibiting free speech – you must suffer the demagogues to come unto you. The First Amendment is the baby, the demagogue the bathwater, and you do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is because we wish to preserve the right of statesmen to speak freely that we tolerate the demagogue. It may be important to point out that the word “demagogue” did not always have a negative connotation. The demagogue in ancient Greece and Rome was one who was uniquely able to speak to the populace in terms they might understand; he was the vox populi . In a society rigidly separated by class – rich and poor, privileged and non-privileged, free and slave – Greek and Roman demagogues were what today we would call populists, a term of approval in some quarters. The first notable Greek cynic, Antisthenes, a student of Socrates, wou...

According to a piece in Time , Pope Francis is, on the matter of Syria, allied with the angels of peace: “Pope Francis’ response to Syria is in line with how his predecessors handled international conflicts. Pope Benedict XVI expressed concerns over the military intervention in Libya. Pope John Paul II continually and strongly spoke out against the US-led war in Iraq. The US and the Vatican squared off during the 1989 Panama invasion when Dictator Manuel Noriega took refuge in the Vatican embassy.” There is nothing surprising in the pope’s declaration. The possible persecution of Catholics, should President Obama intervene militarily in what has now become a religious war between Islamic sects in Syria, adds yet another dimension to the pope’s plea for peace. Somewhat like Chicago politicians, radical Salafists in the Middle East – i.e. members of the Muslim Brotherhood – are not inclined to let a crisis go to waste.

Over at Slate magazine , not a conservative publication, Christopher Hitchens, not a disreputable neo-con, speculates that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the target of two 500 pound bombs, was not an innocent bystander in the war against the West being prosecuted by Islamic Salafists. The guy who sawed off the heads of two American prisoners, Hitchens writes, …contributed enormously to the wrecking of Iraq's experiment in democratic federalism. He was able to help ensure that the Iraqi people did not have one single day of respite between 35 years of war and fascism, and the last three-and-a-half years of misery and sabotage. He chose his targets with an almost diabolical cunning, destroying the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad (and murdering the heroic envoy Sérgio Vieira de Melo) almost before it could begin operations, and killing the leading Shiite Ayatollah Hakim outside his place of worship in Najaf. His decision to declare a jihad against the Shiite population in general, in a document o...