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...

Christopher Hitchens , every conservative theist’s favorite atheist, was a masterful writer. What one loses when a good writer dies is a piece of the future. Life goes on without you. Wouldn’t it be enlightening, to say the least, to know what Mr. Hitchens might have written about, just to pick at random one prickly current event, the recent loss of the United States’ most advanced drone to Iran? Now that his voice has been stilled, we shall never have the piece in hand. Others, no doubt, will take up the slack, but a valuable slant on things, what Soren Kierkegaard used to call “a point of view,” is now lost – because the viewer is irretrievably lost. “To philosophize,” Miguel de Montaigne said, “is to learn how to die.” Montaigne invented the essay; Hitchens perfected it.

Religious people – people who actually practice their faith – may be forgiving for being somewhat bewildered by the suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Enfield, possibly because they know that their religion is only indirectly connected to places where religious services are held. A real atheist like Christopher Hitchens might approve of the ACLU suit, which seeks to prevent students in Enfield from attending graduation services at First Cathedral in Bloomfield, for its nuisance value alone. But he probably would reject as an outdated medieval superstition the unstated claim that gives moral unction to the suit. What harm could possibly come to an atheist or agnostic who attends a graduation, purely a secular activity, in a building in which religious services have been held? Buildings are not sacred objects; still less are they professors giving off notions that might ensnare the non-religious. A building of brick and mortar is not an idea....

Christopher Hitchens , proclaimed with some fanfare by Gore Vidal as his literary “heir,” buries the master in Vanity Fair and plays taps for the old crank.

Santa Claus Is Coming To Town. Liberal heartthrob Ned Lamont , the Greenwich millionaire who, hand in hand with agents of Lowell Weicker, tried and failed to off Sen. Joe Lieberman, has written in The Hartford Courant a “Recovery” opinion that contains the following sentiment: “But every state is lining up to sit on the lap of the federal Santa Claus and say whether they've been naughty or nice. So, Connecticut better be prepared to explain how our projects can put people to work in year one, how they make us more competitive in the long term, and how we can pay our share of the cost.” The subliminal message of Lamont’s lucubration is: “We’re broke, let’s spend money in the expectation of a gift from Santa.” Jodi Rell sat on Santa’s lap during this year’s governor’s conference and found it cushy. The occasion was celebrated in a Courant editorial : “Mr. Obama singled out Republican governors, whose number includes Mrs. Rell, in extending ‘the hand of friendship’ on Tuesday. His Li...

And here, on the Larry King program, Christopher Hitchens, who supported President Elect Barack Obama in the general election, thinks that the Hillary appointment as Secretary of State is a “no win” choice for Obama. Hitchens argues that Clinton carries lots of dirty underwear into the office, will serve as a co-president rather than as one among a “team of rivals,” a term popularized in the new book on Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin, is overly ambitious and is not fit for the position. Hitchens' critiques are generaly comprehensive. Paul Begala dissents and offers assurances.

The Guardian , a British newspaper, is reporting that New York Sen. Hillary Clinton will accept the cabinet position offered her by President-elect Barack Obama. The diminutive French President Nicholas Sarkozy says that what the world needs is a modern equivalent of Bretton Woods; he draws a sharp rebuke from Pat Buchanan . Democrats, under the leadership of the resourceful Nancy Pelosi , have been unable to persuade outgoing president George Bush, not a tightfisted guy when it comes to bailing out FOD’s (Friends of Democrats), to load the US auto industry with tax dollars, wealth that the industry intends to spread around to workers who are far from poor. But Nancy promises to revisit the issue once Republicans vacate the halls of power. Another British publication, the MailOnLine , has some vivid shots of the outskirts of LA being burnt to a crisp. And British import Christopher Hitchens , America's favorite atheist, is still roving the countryside scaring the wits out of Cat...

This is why Christopher Hitchens is such a lovable atheist: Asserting in Vanity Fair that the United States now has entered it’s “banana republic” phase, Hitchens writes, “And am I the only one who finds it distinctly weird to reflect that the last head of the Federal Reserve and the current head of the Treasury, Alan Greenspan and Hank “The Hammer” Paulson, should be respectively the votaries of the cults of Ayn Rand and Mary Baker Eddy, two of the battiest females ever to have infested the American scene? That Paulson should have gone down on one knee to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as if prayer and beseechment might get the job done, strikes me as further evidence that sheer superstition and incantation have played their part in all this. Remember the scene at the end of Peter Pan, where the children are told that, if they don’t shout out aloud that they all believe in fairies, then Tinker Bell’s gonna fucking die? That’s what the fall of 2008 was like, and quite a fall it was, at that.” ...

There have been in recent days two notable defections to the Obama camp. Christopher Buckley crossed over in a piece he wrote for National Review, the conservative journal of opinion founded by his late father, William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley’s spot in the magazine thereafter disappeared. According to Buckley, he though it better to remove himself; he was not kicked to the curb. Such things do not happen at National Review, a genteel publication with a stiletto in its belt. The second notable defection is that of Christopher Hitchens, a friend of Buckley’s. It is not known at this point whether both agreed to jump into the fire together or whether their joint defections were serindipidous. Hitchens is a little hard to pigeonhole. At various points in his pilgrim’s progress through this veil of tears, he has been a Trotskyite, a far left writer for The Nation magazine, not generally regarded as a conservative publication, an atheist and an ardent supporter of the war in Iraq. Here Hitche...

It’s one thing to deny the existence of God and incur the relatively harmless wrath of theists. It’s been a long time since thumbscrews were applied to atheists. It’s quite another thing, much more dangerous, to assert that women as a species don’t need to be funny largely because beauty is magically attractive to men whose senses of humor are equally attractive to women. Hitchen's theory is that beautiful women simply don’t need humor; men need it to attract women. This mode of reasoning is full of logical pitfalls. If Hitchens is right, how does one account for non-beautiful women in his Darwinian universe, not to mention humorless men? But notice how the agile Hitchens overleaps these obstacles in this following – dare we say it? –fetchingly humorous clip:

The view concerning Iraq from Britain appears to be, according to a shrewd analysis in Prospect magazine, cheerio. To be sure, the analysis is somewhat old. “Mission Accomplished,” by Bartle Bull, appeared in the magazine in October, weeks before the New York Times acknowledged that that times in Iraq, they are a’changing -- for the better. The glad news in the Times appeared in its inner pages. We don’t want to frighten the kids now, do we, with the possibility that the surge in Iraq has succeeded ? Not all the American press was missing in action? For years, the New York Times, which long has appeared to neo-conservatives as a propaganda annex of the Democrat Party in retreat, had dwelt with feverish anxiety on the signal failures of President George Bush’s policy in the Middle East. If information were money, it would have been possible for any objective observer to warn the paper that it was too heavily invested in an American defeat. The tide in formerly unlivable hotspots in Ira...

The irrepressible Christopher Hitchens points a crooked finger at the China, Iran, Cuba, Darfur connection, and manages at the same time to drop a kind word on the Bush administration.

God being unavailable – see atheist writers Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins on this – Americans naturally are anxious to bring History to their side. In the post-Hegelian world, History has been deified, has a voice and speaks to us. “This, damn it all,” a blogger wrote following General David Petraeus’ report to Congress, “actually is Bush’s fault for going to war with Iraq in the first place when there was no legitimate reason to do so. That, I guarantee you, will be history’s judgment.” These lines appeared in defense of Sen. Chris Dodd’s view of the Middle East and History. After General Petraeus’ appearance before congress, Dodd said in one of his press releases: “The fact that there are questions about General Petraeus’ report is not surprising given that it was brought to you by this White House. In contrast, independent report after report indicates that the whack-a-mole strategy has made this the bloodiest summer of the war. And by the General’s admission, the so-call...

The problem with modern atheism is that it has no positive content. It’s the phallus of Old Greek comedy applied to religious precepts. Christopher Hitchens, author of “God Is Not Great,” and Richard Dawkins are very good at swinging that thing, usually at literalist faiths. Dawkins argues that theology is vacuous; he means non-materialistic. Hitchens is likeable; even those who heartily disagree with his point of view appreciate his fidelity to the Western Enlightenment period, which was also, at least in its later stages, profoundly anti-religious, if not atheistic. But the wit and charm of Hitchens’ atheism changes nothing. There is and can be no “there” there in atheism, and one grows suspicious of Dawkin’s apologetic note when he softly criticizes the ravages of Lenin and Stalin -- who were simply atheistic banditos with guns. There is something wrong with the analytical acuity of critics who are overly severe with Mother Teresa but go soft and squishy on Stalin and Hitler, both ...

Sex (And Shotguns) In The City Leave the guy alone . “Judge, I was just walking to my neighbors house to borrow some sugar for my coffee when, all of a sudden, my morning reverie was disturbed by this gang of cops who descended upon me like a swarm of locusts.” Bad news for the Bushwackers According to Gallup , the president’s positives are nosediving up. How It’s Done Under The Rock From the authoritative Howard Kurtz, Washington Post muckraker: “One month after rekindling their partnership, Moldea learned that Sen. David Vitter's number had been found in the phone records of the escort service run by the alleged D.C. Madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey. This was no coincidence, as Moldea had just agreed to write a book with Palfrey. He promptly leaked the Vitter calls to Time. And when the Louisiana Republican preempted the magazine by apologizing for having sinned, Moldea made sure Flynt got credit by leaking word of his role to ABC News.” The Flynt mentioned in Kurtz’s account is porn...

If you are an accolade of one of our more modern secular faiths -- say, the ministerial alliance of MoveOn.org or the Non-Sectarian, Non-Religious Atheists Association of Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens -- whether you like Barack Obama or not, and there is a there there to like, will depend less on Obama and more on your own deeply held secular and/or anti-religious beliefs. If you think the whole religious business is hokum, you will not appreciate Obama’s brand of hokum. In the anti-religious theatre of thought and action, it is not possible to loathe the war but love the soldier. Hitchens, for one, cheerfully threw off that imposture when, shortly after the death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, he vigorously and publicly attacked the corpse. A convert to America from Merry Old England, Hitchens is in some ways more American than apple pie; so, for that matter, was DeToqueville. As a confirmed atheist, Hitchens has never been comfortable with religious prattle. Since hypocrisy remains the o...

We often say here in America that politicians with a past are carrying a lot of baggage into office with them. Hillary Clinton’s baggage, as everyone who has not slept through the past two decades may have realized, is husband Bill. And no, I am not referring to what the press used to call in Bill’s Monica Period the president’s sexual “peccadilloes.” We like to turn our pages on our pasts, and America is after all the land of second chances. Most Americans were quite willing to forgive Bill his “indiscretions” about five minutes after the cigar incident. The few women in Bill’s past who were crying “infidelity” – and in at least one case “rape” – were dismissed, even by the feminists, as implausible publicity hounds. No, all that lies in a past that, despite William Faulkner’s misgivings, is over. Faulkner said the past was not over, “It is not even past.” Hillary’s big problem is with husband Bill’s warmongering. In a review of two recent books on Hillary, “Hillary Clinton: Her Way” ...

The pity of it is there is no one on God’s side to answer Christopher Hitchens , the author of “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” the latest and best in a long series of books recently published by ardent atheists. One thinks, almost involuntarily, of the cartoonish marginalia of William Blake’s poems, showing a long like of kings ending in a turd. Standing at the end of the line of distinguished atheist authors is the insufferably haughty Richard Dawkins, author of " The God Delusion ," who has suggested that atheists denominate themselves “brights,” so as to distinguish themselves from such "non-bright" thinkers as Blaise Pascal and Thomas Aquinas. “What an asshole,” Mark Warren commented on Dawkins in a review of Hitchens’ book in Esquire magazine. Brevity really is the soul of wit. Pass over Dawkins and “the wishfully thinking " The End of Faith ," by Sam Harris,” an atheist neuroscientist, Warren advises, but do not deny yourself the...

Americans do tend to let their sympathies and myths run away with them. Appearing on the Colin McEnroe show, Nixon gunner and Watergate star Lowell Weicker admitted he was wrong. At the time of then President Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon, the senator said, he was outraged. But he was wrong, Weicker generously admitted: Ford was right to pardon Nixon. Weicker was his usual expansive self: "Now, let's get to the big issue, which is the pardon of Nixon. I mean, I was pissed when that happened. Obviously, I had passionately involved myself in Watergate. It sort of had taken two years of my life to get out of that difficult time. It turned out alright, but nobody knew that at the beginning. And here comes the president to be pardoned. Well, I made my feelings known in no uncertain terms. But I'm going to tell you... I'm going to do something you rarely hear Lowell Weicker do:I was wrong, he was right. I mean, we had gone through Vietnam; we had gone through Watergate. I me...

There are two kinds of realists, Christopher Hitchens reminds us in a suburb analytical piece printed in Slate magazine, an on-line publication: real realists and fake realists. “Many people write as if the sectarian warfare in Iraq was caused by coalition intervention. But it is surely obvious that the struggle for mastery has been going on for some time and was only masked by the apparently iron unity imposed under Baathist rule. That rule was itself the dictatorship of a tribal Tikriti minority of the Sunni minority and constituted a veneer over the divisions beneath, as well as an incitement to their perpetuation. The Kurds had already withdrawn themselves from this divide-and-rule system by the time the coalition forces arrived, while Shiite grievances against the state were decades old and had been hugely intensified by Saddam's cruelty. Nothing was going to stop their explosion, and if Saddam Hussein's regime had been permitted to run its course and to devolve (if one ca...