Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The phrase is French -- La Trahison des clercs”, meaning roughly the treason of the intellectuals. This particular phrase, launched by Julien Benda in 1927, could only have popped out of a French head. Benda’s beef was that the intellectuals of his day were placing the virtue of action above the necessity of lucid thinking. Opinion makers, Benda feared, were allowing political commitment to strangle thought. As Roger Kimball put it in a  1992 essay in the New Criterion , "Benda claimed, politics was THE ideal of disinterestedness, the universality of truth: such guiding principles were contemptuously deployed as masks when they were not jettisoned altogether. It was in this sense that he castigated the ' desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action .'” When intellectuals abandon “the universality of truth” for political reasons, they are guilty of intellectual treason. During Benda’s own day, politicians were wearing convincing but false mas...

U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions soon will assume his duties as President Donald Trump’s Attorney General. His nomination was opposed by leading Democrats in the U.S. Congress chiefly because he was not Eric Holder.  At one point during his cross examination of Sessions, U.S. Senator and mud thrower from Connecticut Dick Blumenthal subtly suggested that Sessions might have a soft spot in his heart for the KKK. Blumenthal noted that Sessions had received some awards during his twenty years in the Congress, among them an award from the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the latter of which Blumenthal noted is classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, according to a story in the Washington Examiner . "Given that you did not disclose a number of those awards,” Blumenthal asked, “are there any other awards from groups that have similar kinds of ideological nega...

Hilaire Belloc's Advice to the Rich: "Get to know something about the internal combustion engine and remember -- soon you will die." The brief pre-Christmas homily on money, politics and Christianity found below is long overdue. I can’t be sure that the sort of millionaire who supports antagonistic politicians, always anxious to hang him with the rope he so credulously delivers, is a patriot or a scoundrel. I do know that, generally, money covers a multitude of sins. Jesus was indifferent about politics, economics and what we would call sex: He knew the road to Heaven was not paved with gold or worldly glory or condoms. He forgave the sins of the flesh readily, having first made inflexible demands upon the spirit, but the materialist itch, He intimated often enough, could be a hindrance. More than 2,000 years after God was nailed to a cross – “Were you there when they crucified my Lord? -- it still is more difficult for a rich man to pass easily into Heaven t...

The state Senate last night approved a budget along party lines. Voting against the budget were all 12 Republicans and 1 Democrat; 22 Democrats voted for the budget. The $37 billion budget increases spending over a period of two years by $800 million, according to one report . An amusing moment occurred when Democrats claimed to have cut the budget by 35%. Their “cut” refers to an accounting decrease in the current services budget. That budget projects future increases; a lower than expected increase is counted among Democrats as a “cut.” In reality, the budget increases spending by $1.8 billion. “Don’t spend your money before you’ve got it” was sage advice offered us by our parents in our golden youths. In “cutting” the future services budget, Democrats have “saved” money they have not yet appropriated. Over in the House, a dissenting Democrat, Rep. Linda Schofield of Simsbury, voted again the bill, along with about a dozen of her colleagues. A weary Schofield explained, “I’m tired,...

Hilliare Belloc’s advice to the rich – “Learn something about the internal combustion engine, and remember: Soon, you will die.” Caligula So, I have become a ghost, the nearest I shall ever be to a God again; for, in life, I was a God. Divinity, you know, is the highest form of politics. What is higher or nobler than a God? … But wait: Nobility has nothing to do with it, as if nobility and Godliness could ever share the same frame; a God is above that sort of thing … As a former Emperor – now, God and ghost – everything to me was permissible, and understandable. I comprehend by grasping my subject from the inside; nothing was alien to me. I am solid as earth now, though I know it does not seem so to you, because I know everything; I am in everything, and everything is in me. That is how I know; through a process of identity and self revelation. I become the thing I want to know – say, a tree, or a young boy, or a virgin – and then, at will, I revert to Godliness. You, on the other ha...