Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Mr. Pesci, I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but… The choices for President this year are almost equally nauseating. I know you make it a practice not to endorse politicians for office, but I am going to ask you, point blank, whether you intend to vote this year for the rock or the hard place. I can only hope you will not retreat into the usual cowardly formula: voting is a sacred and secret right, like a skull and bones pledge, bla, bla, bla… It is a choice all of us MUST make this year, since we live in a time in which both indifference and cagey answers are impossible. Not to choose is to choose. So then, who is it to be, Hillary or Trump? Like the rest of us this year – a pivotal year in our politics, you say – you do not have the luxury of anonymous indifference. You MUST choose – no “if, ands or buts.” Wishing you the best, The Devil You Know.

The Hillary Clinton Presidential campaign is now in full farce mode. Anthony Weiner, sent to the curb by his long suffering wife Huma Abedin, Clinton’s closest aide, is back -- in a manner of speaking. FBI Director James Comey, who previously gave Clinton a pass on criminal violations involving the improper use of a private server, has now advised relevant members of Congress that he is supplementing his previous testimony. Here is Comey's letter in full:

Matthew Corey is the Republican Party’s sacrificial lamb this year in the 1 st District’s U.S. Congressional contest ( “Sacrificial lamb,” a term derived from Abrahamic religion traditions in which a lamb is prized as a highly valued possession and then sacrificed to a higher power ). Mr. Corey is running in a gerrymandered district that Republicans last held in 1957. In fact, the District has been a Democratic satrapy for all but six years since 1931. The demography of the District is a very picture of fate as it was understood by the ancient Greeks – powerful, tragic or comic and always inescapable. The voter breakdown in the District runs like this: Democrat active voters 156,784; Republicans 71,932; Unaffiliateds 172,626.  The Harford Courant, not unexpectedly, has recently sprinkled its endorsement over Democrat U.S. Representative John Larson. Two days before aspersing Mr. Larson with journalistic holy water, the paper encouraged the nation t...

Bill Buckley was once asked what the real Dick Nixon was like. “Which one,” he responded? “There are about four of them.” There are a few Hillary Clintons jostling against each other in her capacious public persona. The Great Email Spill of 2016 has tossed on the shore a few dead personas.

The controversy several years ago centering on the question “Is the fetus a person?” was not settled by appeals to religious conscience; it has been settled, not to everyone’s satisfaction, by 1) technology and 2) the common sense Americans are often praised for.  Common sense is, after all, a sense, very much like the other senses through which we receive the world in all its gore and glory . Ultrasound shows us that the fetus at later stages in a pregnancy moves and reacts to attempts to snuff out its life by an abortion provider – in consultation, of course, with his sometimes uninformed victim, the prospective mother of the child, prospective because the abortion is also, sadly, an un-mothering. The late term fetus, reasonable people sense, is clothed in personhood. Only one who holds extreme views on abortion would deny this. The late term fetus – some dare call it a child -- is certainly not a part of the woman’s body, as for example her liver, which can nev...

In Dan Carter, who is challenging Dick Blumenthal for a seat in the U.S. Senate, the State Republican Party may have found its “happy warrior,” a title the Democratic Party once bestowed on Hubert Humphrey. Looks and presence in politics are not everything, but they are not nothing. U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, whether he is debating or attending a garage sale, manages to look like the Old Man of the Mountain before the slide. Stiff, foreboding, resolute, unbudgeable – most especially on the matter of partial birth abortion, parental notification and the selling of baby parts, all issues that place him very far from his Connecticut constituents. And he is preachy, the very image of a Harvard-Yale educated aggressive Attorney General on the hunt for delinquent business owners, thought abortion in its grosser forms is the one profitable business in the United States that Blumenthal adamantly refuses to regulate.

Democratic sappers in Connecticut have devoted themselves to undermining the re-election efforts of State Senator Art Linares, who is running on the Republican ticket in Connecticut’s 33 rd District, by tying him to Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump. A group of women has stepped forward to accuse Mr. Trump of having molested them some years ago. Will the gambit work? Possibly. Democrats committed to returning to the White House a First Husband plausibly accused of rape seem to think so, and they have invested some money in the project.