Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

"We have a very fundamental disagreement here. You see this is what happens when you rush. …When you are trying to fly the plane and build it at the same time … you move too quickly, and you end up with controversies” -- Sharon Palmer, president of the American Federation of Teachers Connecticut. Hours after a USA Today columnist draped around Governor Dannel Malloy’s shoulders the mantle of Roger Sherman, the Connecticut delegate to the Constitutional Convention responsible for offering the “Great Compromise” that unified the convention and paved the way to a ratification of the U.S. Constitution, a wing came off Mr. Malloy’s educational reform plane. “This month,” USA Today proclaimed, “Connecticut Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy signed into law a compromise bill that could be a blueprint for meaningful education reform in the other 49 states. The bill, which passed with near-unanimous support from Republicans and Democrats, is a broad attack on the state's troubled p...

USA Today has provided some chop quotes from various news outlets commenting upon the Spitzer mess. Most of the commentators have been so scrupulous in avoiding all talk of the sanctity of marriage that they have fallen headlong into a vat of secular verbiage. This avoidance is the obverse of sanctimony, but it really amounts to the same thing. Even atheists can be sanctimonious, and Spitzer fell from grace this time because he was not sanctimonious. The Daily News allowed that Spitzer’s fall from grace chipped away at his “moral authority.” Character and honesty are important, and “his blithe willingness to order up a hooker by telephone revealed an abysmal and disqualifying lack of judgment.” Ah, so that’s what it was, a lack of judgment. Only in the age of Madonna -- no, not that one -- can you have moral authority without having morals. Spitzer also lacked “perspective,” which “cast him into a freefall in the polls.” He showed his “dark side” to an ever recoiling New York. The pa...