Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Merrill The last word, or the next to the last word, on Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders’ ill-fated run for the presidency may be that of communist evangelist Karl Marx. In  The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte  Marx writes, “ Hegel  remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” This is the second time Sanders has run for president, succumbing the first time to former Secretary of State in the Obama administration Hillary Clinton and this time to former Obama Vice President Joe Biden. This, his second and one suspects last run for the presidency – Sanders is getting on in years -- may be a tragedy to the youth of the nation, who hung on his every word, but it is a farce for most grownups.

Twain The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it – Mark Twain I’m going to try and say some non-twitter-like, intelligent things about progressivism, Connecticut’s media and what Karl Marx, were he alive today, might call the “correlation of forces” in our own state. By the way, I’m not sure how many people reading this know that for about four years in the 1850s, Marx, then living in London, was the European correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune. He even exchanged letters with President Abraham Lincoln. Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote for a European, not an American audience. Their articles on the Civil War were later collected into a 325 page book, “ The Civil War in the United States.” It might be well to start this discussion with some undisputed claims.

Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders has been puttering in politics only four years longer than U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, and the two may have more in common than most suppose. Both were born in New York and entered politics about the same time, Sanders in 1981 as Mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and Blumenthal in 1985 as a member of Connecticut’s State House of Representatives. Neither political career has been marred by service in the private marketplace. Both are East Coast, secularized, cultural Jews. That is, they are Jews who have shaken the dust of orthodoxy from their feet. Religious discipline is too confining for either, and their attitude toward heterodoxy parallels that of Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick: “Speak not to me of blasphemy, man. I’d strike the sun if it dared insult me.” Blumenthal, in particular is well known as a champion of abortion provider Planned Parenthood. An orthodox Jewish Rabbi once was asked what the position of cultural Jews on abortion was. “...

Bernie Sanders When in 1992 Queen Elizabeth had been asked how she felt after Windsor Castle had suffered a severe fire gutting 100 rooms, she responded, “Awkward.” Moderate Democrats and recovering progressives likely consider Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders’ primary losses to former Vice President Joe Biden a propitious sign. Many Democrats are silently wishing Sanders will have the good grace to slink off silently into obscurity after he had been decisively rejected by voters. The association of the party of President John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt with Sanders’ batty socialist ideas has been awkward. And why, friends of the Democrat Party are now asking, should Sanders cast a shadow over Biden’s presidential prospects when every Democrat’s nightmare, President Donald Trump, is waiting in the wings for four more years?

Campaign money raised by DeLauro and challengers Those of us who paid close attention to the Republican presidential primary of 2016, which gave us President Donald Trump, and the current Democrat primary, which could give the country its first socialist president in Bernie Sanders, though this seems increasingly unlikely, have come away from these rough and tumble experiences thinking that political anarchy in the country’s two major parties is perhaps more ruinous than party bossism. Primaries, it is true, did get rid of the party bosses. Old news hounds will remember with some affection Connecticut Democrat Party boss John Bailey, the last of his kind in the state. All of the stink and corruption associated with party bossism remain, and incumbents are no more likely to be dispossessed of their power in the new system than they were under the iron rule of the bosses. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” the French say -- the more things change, the more they rem...

Blumenthal and Sanders Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders is exciting agita in some Democrat breasts, and he knows it. Sanders, who arrived in Springfield, Massachusetts at the Mass Mutual Center on a wave of primary wins, told enthusiasts in the crowd, “Some of you may have noticed that the political establishment and the corporate elite are getting very nervous. You know what? They have a right to get nervous. We’re going after them.” Sanders has been going after the Democrat political establishment and the corporate elite since his 1988 honeymoon days in the Soviet Union. The political trajectory of the leading Democrat candidate for president was set in the student revolution days of the 70s. Sanders may be the only live-wire protester of that time who has failed to grow up in the intervening years. Marxism is an outworn creed; the Berlin Wall fell in 1989; Fidel Castro’s seemingly endless Cuban Revolution puttered forward when Fidel died, leaving his brother communis...

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.

If you lop off California and New England, you’ve got a pretty good country” – Barry Goldwater To people who have been stung by socialism – ask any American refugee from Cuba, Venezuela, or any of the Baltic States that only recently have thrown off Soviet tyranny – there is not much difference between professed socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Lowell Weicker “If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin” -- Samuel Adams A surprisingly honest Otto von Bismarck is reported to have said of the politics of his own day, “Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.” Ironically, the attribution itself has been called into question.   In any case, the apothem applies with special force to egotistic politicians who garland themselves in glowing personal fantasies. We should believe their own accounts of their own heroic actions, they vainly suppose, because they fervently believe their own accounts of their own heroic actions, which many times are so mixed with fantasies as to be laughably improbable.

'Sentence first -- verdict afterwards '   -- The Queen to Alice in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass It’s difficult to know where to begin with the story “ Blumenthal optimistic about GOP support in Senate for impeachment .” Perhaps one should begin by noting that no Republican in the U.S. Senate is Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi or U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal. Reversing a sustained determination to leave impeachment on the shelf, Pelosi last week announced that the House, now in Democrat hands, has begun an “impeachment inquiry.” There are crucial differences between an impeachment inquiry and impeachment. Impeachment involves 1) the passing of a bill of impeachment in the House, and 2) garnering enough votes in a Senate trial to convict and remove from office the offender, in this case President Trump. Removal from office is the only sanction that applies to impeachment. Honest number runners would rate #2 at zero.

I’d like to thank Dennis Swanton for inviting me here.  I want to touch on two areas of interest tonight, national and state government --they impinge on each other -- and end with a prayer to God to save us from ourselves. Otto von Bismarck used to say “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” Let us hope it’s true. We’ll need a little divine intervention if Connecticut is to survive as a prosperous and welcoming state.  If you feel inclined to chuckle along the way, don’t restrain yourselves. Laughter is therapeutic. I’m hoping we might be able to bat around some questions in the Q&A that will follow. “All politics is local,” said Speaker of the US House Tip O’Neill. The phrase is pretty common, though it is most often associated with O’Neill, President Ronald Reagan’s Democrat counterpart in the glorious -- for conservative Republicans -- 1980’s. In many other ways, the 80s were a painful regurgitation of the 60s.  I’m ...

There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet… In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.   -- T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock The title of the story, “ As Democrats drift left, liberal firebrand Rep. Rosa DeLauro finds herself squarely in the center ,” was unintentionally confusing.

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...

John Larson fulminating A Hartford Courant statehouse reporter, Daniela Altimari, has had the intestinal fortitude to question Democrats in the U.S. Congressional Delegation concerning an attack upon the insurance industry in Connecticut. The title of her piece, “ With thousands of jobs at stake, Medicare for All is a complicated issue for Democrats in Hartford, the ‘Insurance Capital of the World’ “ is a bit cumbersome, but it frames the issue perfectly. First up at bat is Rep. John Larson, the congressman for life in Connecticut’s 1st District, an impregnable Democrat fortress. Larson says he does not believe that Medicare For All should eliminate the insurance company product. And he is quoted in the piece: “Hey, Medicare for All, that’s a laudable goal. It’s something people can wrap their arms around. But like anything else, there’s a lot of detail that goes with that.” One of the details that goes with that is the certain destruction of insurance as we know it in Conne...

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...

State Representative Josh Elliot, a progressive Democrat from Hamden, views the state budget as “a moral document that can be used to create a more equitable and fair society,” the Hartford Courant tells us. The paper quotes Elliot on the point: “Are you taking an economic frame and saying ‘what can we do to grow GDP at all costs?’ … Or are you taking a moral and ethical frame and saying ‘what can we do to build up a just society?’ And I think those two questions are at loggerheads right now.” There is a welter of confusion here. The point Elliot appears to be making is that progressives like himself view the economy as having a moral dimension lost to free-marketers, i.e. redundantly rich capitalists concerned only – note the devil word “only” -- with growing the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It would not be possible in Elliot’s view for a free-marketer like, say, Fredrick Hayek, author of “The Road To Serfdom” -- a ruthless attack against the collectivist ethos that informs ...

A piece by Keith Phaneuf in CTMirror, “ Who pays the next CT tax hike? Democrats must answer question soon ” presents half of the right question.   Listening to Democrats in the General Assembly in this the winter of our discontent leaves the impression that one has heard half a conversation. The debate in the General Assembly and, unfortunately, in the media, ALL OF IT, is about discharging deficits through tax increases. But a deficit, like a coin, has two sides. And a “comprehensive solution” to our problems that shows only one face is no solution. If the level of spending in Connecticut continues to increase at a rapid rate – and that will assuredly happen if Connecticut continues to pursue a course all too familiar ever since former Governor Lowell Weicker forced his income tax down the throat of a somewhat resistant legislature in 1991 – and if the underside of the getting and spending coin continues to remain face-down on Connecticut’s table, then tax increases are i...

“If you want a vision  of the future, imagine a  boot  stamping on a human  face  – forever” – George Orwell. CBS News has announced that Vermont’s Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders’ "Medicare for All" bill would, according to Sanders himself, "get rid of insurance companies and drug companies making billions of dollars in profit every single year." The bill is a universal health care, one size fits all, tax financed, proposal. Connecticut's U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, CTMirror reports , was one of 14 co-sponsors of Sanders’s bill. “In my view,” Sanders said of his bill, “the current debate over 'Medicare for All' really has nothing to do with health care. It’s all about greed and profiteering. It is about whether we maintain a dysfunctional system which allows the top five health insurance companies to make over $20 billion in profits last year.” But, of course, the Sanders bill has everything to do with health care. If adopted into...

“ O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams ” – Shakespeare, Hamlet Dick Blumenthal, Connecticut’s progressive US Senator, is inching dangerously close to socialist Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). The distance between progressive radicals and socialists is now hair thin. Early in February,  Blumenthal Tweeted , “Climate change is an existential crisis. I’m proud to co-sponsor the  #GreenNewDeal —affirming our commitment to develop a plan to tackle the devastating effects of climate change, create high-paying jobs in renewable energy and address disparities in communities affected by pollution.”

A Republican American story notes, “A top Democratic lawmaker is sponsoring legislation to raise the state sales tax from 6.35 percent to 6.85 percent to help cities and towns.” The top Democrat lawmaker is, of course, President Pro Tem of the State Senate Martin Looney, well positioned to sweep dedicated funds into the general fund, the graveyard of noble Democrat intentions.