Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Murphy and Blumenthal U.S. Senators Chris Murphy and Dick Blumenthal were anxious – perhaps too anxious – to “set the narrative” concerning the strike on   General Qassem Soleimani of Iran, who met an untimely death at the hands of an American drone in Iraq. Soleimani was engaged in his usual business in Iraq – killing Americans. He had, during his years as the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s top general, become proficient in the art, providing IED’s to friendly terrorist groups in all quarters of the Middle East. The state department has said he was responsible for upwards of 500 deaths of American soldiers in Iraq. After washing himself in American blood, Soleimani would duck back into Iran, a safe harbor from U.S. retribution.

Blumenthal and Murphy U.S. Senator Chris Murphy appears to have gotten his twitters in a twist. On December 31, the last day of the old decade, Murphy wrote on twitter: “ The attack on our embassy in Baghdad is horrifying but predictable. Trump has rendered America impotent in the Middle East. No one fears us, no one listens to us. America has been reduced to huddling in safe rooms, hoping the bad guys will go away. What a disgrace.” Shortly after the destruction at the embassy, orchestrated by Quds Force thugs under the direction of Iranian General Qassim Soleimani, the general met an American drone near the airport and quickly assumed room temperature. Trump, spurred on, one may fancy, by Murphy’s hectoring, later boasted that his response to the endangering of embassy officials in Iraq would not be another Benghazi.

Some people think Hillary Clinton and her now faltering husband Bill, both products of the Silly Sixties (SS), are too Machiavellian for their own good . Others think Mrs. Clinton has never shed her admiration for Saul Alinsky, the political guru of the SS and author of “ Rules for Radicals ," whose own ideal of a perfect political and social radical was Lucifer, AKA The Devil, to whom Mr. Alinsky dedicated his hand-book on cultural destruction. A senior at Wellesley College, Mrs. Clinton wrote a 92 page thesis on Mr. Alinsky.  Later at Yale, a nursery bed for U.S. politicians and presidents in the modern age, Mrs. Clinton bent her knee to the radicalism of the day and, some think, began plotting an unobstructed path to the presidency. It’s been a long slog. Her meandering but methodical course has led through hubby Bill, past a few bimboes, through the Secretary of State office by way of  the U.S. Senate, over the smoldering ruins of Benghazi, over the prostrate body...

The media has lost its moral pull. The approval rating of the lowest bottom-feeding politician is several fathoms higher than that of “the media,” according to a September 2016 Gallup Poll . The media, even less than the current Democratic and Republican presidential nominees, simply does not give a hoot about approval polls directed at them, which are worth pausing over none-the-less.

“The government doesn’t care about profits, which is why it’s always in the red. It doesn’t care much about service either, which is why there are long lines at Connecticut’s Department of Motor Vehicles. It cares only about votes.” – The Cynic at the Breakfast Table, a work in progress. On Thursday, Hillary Clinton came to Hartford, not so long ago the murder capital of New England, to agitate indirectly against Democratic presidential rival Bernie Sanders – AND FIRE ARMS. Mr. Sanders is from Vermont and does not suffer from hoplophobia , an irrational fear of guns. In the hinterland of Vermont, guns are used to shoot game; in one-party urbanscapes such as Hartford, guns are used by drug dealers, gangbangers and young school kids to kill rivals and innocent by-standers. Anti-gun Democratic politicians now seek to forestall urban gun crimes by allowing lawyers to sue gun manufacturers – good for the lawyers, bad for law-abiding gun owners and good for politicians wh...

Only a few years ago a politician might have been laughed out of Congress for postulating that the troubles in the Middle East – Islamic irredentism; the emergence of Iran, still considered a terrorist state, as a regional Middle East power; the attempt by Shiites, rebuffed during the Iraq war, to establish a caliphate in northern Iraq and Syria; the threats against the United States and other western nations that pour like a flood of mighty waters from the throats of its former enemies; the scurrying of foreign states once friendly to the United States from a U.S to a Russian protectorate; the sea of women, children and young men murdered, homeless and enslaved Christians, immigrant hordes persecuted by Islamic terrorists now flooding Europe’s shores, largely owing to the recession of U.S. power and influence in the Middle East; all this and more --  were traceable to global warming, the tocsin of a boisterous environmental movement.

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy’s immediate reaction to the mass murder of innocent civilians in France by ISIS inspired terrorists was remarkably on-script and unemotional, unlike his earlier reaction to a Ted Cruz inspired video  in which Senator Cruz, a Republican now running for President, boasts that he stood up for Second Amendment rights following the Sandy Hook mass murder. The video, Mr. Murphy said, “makes me want to throw up.” Mr. Murphy’s Democratic partner in politics from Connecticut, Dick Blumenthal, also denounced the PAC video, ineptly inserting himself into the Sandy Hook drama . In that smarmy way oleaginous politicians have of placing themselves center-stage at important events, Mr. Blumenthal strongly suggested he was present when Governor Dannel Malloy told the parents of murdered students and teachers at the firehouse near Sandy Hook Elementary School that their children and teachers would not be coming home again. In truth, Mr. Blumenthal arrived after the anno...

Governor Dannel Malloy, Democratic Party Bigwigs in Connecticut and the members of the state’s all-Democratic US Congressional Delegation are, at long last, in for Hillary Clinton as their Party’s presidential nominee. For weeks, the Democratic crowd had been indifferently plunging their big toes in the nomination pool. Now, in unison, all have jumped in, satisfied that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, a fire breathing progressive, has earnestly decided to withdraw behind the nomination curtain. Fresh from having indicated he would not veto a progressive state budget that effectively violates every important promise he made on the gubernatorial campaign stump – no tax increases, no red ink budgets, no untoward budget gimmickry, and the like – Mr. Malloy now has found time to issue a generic endorsement of Hillary Benghazi.

Only a few days after ABC News celebrity George Stephanopoulos got himself stuck in the ubiquitous Clinton goo, apparently an occupational hazard for friends of Bill and Hillary, Sidney Blumenthal – not to be confused with U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, also a dear friend of the Clintons – found himself stretched on the journalistic rack. Mr. Blumenthal was first outed by a hacker known as “Guccifer,” who posted on-line four memos Mr. Blumenthal had written to Mrs. Clinton, the probable Democratic nominee for president. The e-mails were hacked from Mrs. Clintons’s private, unauthorized server. “Guccifer” apparently has done what all the Republican horses and all the Republican men thus far have been incapable of doing – prying from Mrs. Clinton’s clenched fist some e-mails touching on Benghazi she thought to keep private by operating from a private, and possibly illegal, server.

The news, which was pretty much foreordained, could not have come as a shattering revelation to President Barack Obama’s administration, the Joint Chiefs of Staff  at the Department of Defense or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who this year appears to be running for President of the United states. The story was prominently featured in Malta Today , but that was because the refugees from Benghazi in Libya were pouring into Malta. The Philippines   had already withdrawn from Benghazi. They were, according to a story buried on page A8 in the Hartford Courant , struggling “to evacuate about 13,000 nationals to Malta – this after “the beheaded remains of a Philippine national were found in Benghazi last week and a Philippine nurse was abducted and raped Wednesday," all signs that Islamic militants, as they are sometimes called by the U.S. media, were preparing to add Benghazi to their borderless Middle East Caliphate.

Dick Blumenthal, the nation’s first full time consumer protection senator, has now weighed in on merchants who “may be selling lower quality items produced specifically for outlet stores without properly informing consumers,” according to a Philadelphia television station . The Senator has asked the Federal Trade Commission to examine claims that merchants have misled consumers in their ads. “There’s a lot of evidence,” Blumenthal breathlessly told the television consumer protection watchdog in Philadelphia, “that people shopping at outlet malls or at outlet establishments have no idea that goods and merchandise are made specifically for outlet malls.”

“You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.”  ―  Flannery O'Connor ,  The Violent Bear it Away In September, Connecticut’s Junior U.S. Senator Chris Murphy traveled to New Haven to asperse New Haven mayoralty hopeful Toni Harp with his precious endorsement. Mr. Murphy followed in the trek of Governor Dannel Malloy, who earlier had endorsed Mrs. Harp, whose deceased husband was New Haven’s premier tax scofflaw. Upon Mr. Harp’s leave-taking, his mountainous tax debt, along with his valuable assets, was passed along to his son. Mrs. Harp has disclaimed any responsibility for the tax debt, arguing that her affairs and those of her husband were separated by a Berlin Wall. But there are some in New Haven who think Mrs. Harp is at least morally responsible for the debt to Mr. Malloy’s government.

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act ” -- George Orwell George Orwell, like Jonathan Swift before him, is one of those large writers who simply straddle ideological categories. He was fortunate enough – or unfortunate enough, depending on one’s point of view – to have been born in what the ancient Chinese call “interesting times,” the bloody and totalitarian 20th century. The revolutionist speaking truth to power often appears among us with a rope braided by the reigning powers draped about his neck. He steps towards gallows with a wan smile on his face.

While President Barack Obama was doubling down on his discredited narrative concerning the attack by terrorists on the Benghazi consulate, in the course of which Mr. Obama’s personal minister – that is what an ambassador is; the personal minister of the president – was murdered, it was revealed that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had targeted Tea Party groups for what may turn out to be punitive audits.

A dung beetle would strain himself pushing around a misdirection so massive. Even Jonathan Karl of ABC News has taken notice , and he has nothing kind to say about Obama administration “talking points” on Benghazi. Mr. Karl, it should be said, is not part of the putative conservative conspiracy against progressive Democrats. Concerning the CIA “talking points” that then Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice pushed on several news outlets shortly after the American Consulate was overrun and destroyed by Islamic terrorists, Mr. Karl notes that “ ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.”

“Terrible. I cry every night. I don't sleep at night. I need answers… Why was there no security for him? When they were supposed to have security and the security that they did have was called back. It just -- things do not add up and I'm just told lies.” So said Pat Smith, the mother of Sean Smith , a State Department information officer, one of four Americans murdered in Benghazi. The enduring agony of Mrs. Smith recalls the advice given by the blind prophet Tiresias to an obdurate King Creon in Sophocles’ “Antigone.” Self-will must bear the guilt of stubbornness. Yield to the dead, and outrage not a corpse So long as the truth is scorned, Ambassador Chris Stevens and the brave people who died with him at the consulate in Benghazi will not be quiet in their graves. Honor must have a voice. The shattering truth about Benghazi will be told; blood will tell it. Whether the telling will change much is quite a different question. Power does have its privile...

There will be a bottom to Benghazi when the laggard main stream media gets to the bottom of it. The very latest news on the attack on the American embassy in Benghazi is that “ four career officials at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have retained lawyers or are in the process of doing so, as they prepare to provide sensitive information about the Benghazi attacks to Congress,” according to Fox News, which has been unrelenting in its coverage.

The following Blog was written by Bob MacGuffie of Right Principles . Mr. MacGuffie is associated with Connecticut’s burgeoning Tea Party Movement In the wake of our national ticket's loss I've heard some erratic and erroneous criticisms and suggestions from Republicans, which if followed would be injurious to the conservative movement. Too many are buying into the deception propagated by Liberal commentators - that Obama's election represents an historic strategic shift in the electorate founded in a fundamental demographic change. Make no mistake, this was only a tactical win . When the campaign itself credits acres of its paid telemarketers in Chicago calling every conceivable ethnic, racial, and gender niche in only nine states, promising whatever each marketing niche desires, you are tactical, and not strategic.

It would be a disgrace to journalism in Connecticut if questions concerning the murder of a U.S. ambassador attached to the consulate in Benghazi were not put to all the members of Connecticut’s congressional delegation, preferably before Connecticut voters march to the polls to decide who among the candidates for Congress this year are best fitted to represent them.

I am about to compliment Fox News. And just to set the record straight before someone feels compelled to distort it, I should mention that “Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes From A Blue State” carries all the blogs and columns I have written   in the course of 18 years, some 1,947 separate entrees. Many of the columns have appeared in various Connecticut newspapers. A search for “Fox News” on that site produces a scant 11 hits. So then, this writer has not been much in the habit of citing Fox. That said, the Fox News reports on the destruction of the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya by Salafist terrorists has been more than exemplary. These are the kinds of reports that occasionally are noticed by the Pulitzer board. And that is especially the case when good reporting is not picked up by other media outlets. Several observations may reasonably be drawn from the information provided by the Fox news reports: 1) that the Obama administration knew or should have known on the seco...