Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Be The Storm I’d like to thank Mary Ann Turner, the Chairman of the Enfield Republican Town Committee, for inviting me here today. It’s a pleasure to be with you. Enfield, everyone in the room may know, was the place where prominent theologian Jonathan Edwards delivered his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon. The sermon provided one of the sparks that lit the spiritual conflagration later called “The Great Awakening” and was  so fearful and effective a sermon that people in the pews broke out in tears. I think I can assure everyone in the room that my keynote may not have a similar effect. Republicans have just been through a bruising election. I’d like to touch very gently on a few sore topics, but we don’t want to end up at a funeral here. Mark Twain, asked if he had attended the funeral of a man he intensely disliked, replied – No, I didn’t. But I sent along a message to the grief stricken that I heartily approved of the ceremony.

Let’s begin with a logically sound axiom: What you don’t know about moral delinquents – particularly if they are politicians – can’t hurt them. During the administration of John Kennedy, a likeable, highly charismatic president, it was no secret among reporters whose business it was to keep people informed that the president had a woman problem: He liked them – very, very much -- and bedded as many of them as possible. The attitude of the media towards Kennedy’s satyriasis was enlightened: Why make much ado about hypersexual disorder if Kennedy’s affairs did not materially affect his presidency? Suppose Mr. Kennedy had been a genius mathematician. Would his frequent sexual encounters distort the veracity of his mathematical computations? Of course not. Why then make much ado about Kennedy’s erotic liaisons if they did not interfere with the functioning of his office? This separation of eroticism and the man was, during the Kennedy years and before, the operative attitude of...

April 25 was World Malaria Day, reminding us of that wonderful magical chemical DDT, which conquers diseases transmitted by mosquitoes, fleas, and lice, from malaria to typhus, yellow fever, dengue, sleeping sickness, plague, encephalitis, and West Nile Virus. DDT kills a child every 12 seconds and 250 million adults every year; it’s genocide, said Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine’s Art Robinson, and President Bush could reverse it. A Wall Street Journal editorial has supported what Professor J. Gordon Edwards, specialist in DDT, professor of entomology, long suspected—the reason for environmentalists’ opposition to DDT. It decreases deaths, leading to overpopulation and therefore is bad for the environment. In World War I, typhus killed more soldiers than bullets. It was then discovered that DDT has insecticidal properties. It rapidly curbed malaria in the U.S. and Europe. Then came a gifted writer, Rachel Carson, whose best seller, Silent Spring , taught the U.S. that DDT...

Governor of Alaska and Republican Vice President nominee Sarah Palin’s daughter is pregnant and unmarried. True. She and the father of the child expect to be enjoying wedded bliss in the near future. Mrs. Palin’s unaborted Down Syndrome baby was actually her daughter’s baby. Not true. This is medically impossible since the daughter is pregnant with her future husband’s baby. In a similar case, one of the reasons why John Edwards, once considered by Sen. Barack Obama as a Vice Presidential possibility, was not able to marry the woman he putatively impregnated was because he was already married to his cancer stricken wife. Otherwise, like Mrs. Palin's future son-in-law, he would have done the honorable thing and married the mother of his reputed child, if it was indeed his child. Determining the parentage of the child has been made difficult because while Edwards, who claims he is not the father, boasted he would be willing to take a DNA test to validate his claim, the woman he may h...

Bill Curry , now a columnist for the Hartford Courant and once an advisor to the President Bill Clinton and his lovely co-president Hillary Clinton, has chosen Sen. Barak Obama’s Vice President. And the winner is… No big surprise. If Obama, in a rare act of foolhardiness, does choose Hillary as his VP, he will be the only president in history to have had two co-presidents, the second being Bill who was, Toni Morrison reminds us, the first black American president. Kevin Rennie is hot on the trail of U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd. He thinks Attorney General Richard Bluementhal may be interested in getting his paws on recorded phone messages between the senator and his patrons at Countrywide. John Edwards is still blue. But his mistress has refused to supply DNA to clear up a question of paternity, which is the first good news Edwards has had since two burly reporters from the National Inquirer accosted him on a staircase in a hotel where Edwards reputedly was visiting Baby O .

This Friday, August 8, 2008, Sen. John Edwards, once a Democrat presidential candidate, now a repentant philanderer, announced that he did indeed have an affair with a young lady who filmed his campaign. According to an Associated Press front page story in the Journal Inquirer Edwards has “denied fathering a daughter born to the woman with whom he had the affair, and offered to be tested to prove it… After the story broke Friday, Edwards released a statement that said, 'In 2006, I made a serious error in judgment… I recognized my mistake and told my wife that I had a liaison with another woman, and I asked for her forgiveness. I was honest in every painful detail with my family. I took responsibility for my action in 2006, and today I take full responsibility publicly.'” The cause of Edward’s infidelity was that ol’devil hubris, according to the AP report and Edwards’ statement: “In the course of several campaigns, I started to believe that I was special and became increasingl...

Ugly rumors about ex-presidential candidate and former Sen. John Edwards, he of the perfect hair, that have been in the pipeline for several months are now burbling to the surface. The rumors involve a child Edwards produced with his reputed love interest, Rielle Hunter. Somewhere along the line, the Hounds of Heaven who toil at the National Inquirer , got wind of the affair and decided to pursue Edwards during a tryst he had arranged recently at the Beverly Hilton Hotel with Hunter and their alleged child. Edward's wife, though cancer stricken, valiantly supported him during his presidential bid. Edwards has denied the child is his. “His secret mistress Rielle Hunter and her baby were upstairs," The Enquirer reported, "and Edwards had just spent hours with them in a secret rendezvous. “As Butterfield and Hitchen tried to question Edwards, he ran down a hallway and ducked into a men's public bathroom. The reporters attempted to follow him in and Edwards pushed the doo...

It would be imprudent on Sen. Barack Obama’s part to imagine that racism will take a holiday during his campaign. It is therefore prudent of him to head it off at the pass. At the end of June, after Obama warned a friendly crowd it could expect a resurgence of racism, the Washington Post ran a story about neo-Nazis and segregationist groups spurring racism on internet sites. The presence of some racist bad apples on the internet should not give anyone pause to suppose that the opposition party apple cart is infested with racists and, though it doesn’t happen often enough, even racists are redeemable. Sen. Robert Byrd waved farewell to the Klu Klux Klan long ago and grew up to be, at present, the longest serving senator in the U.S. Congress. Conservatives and Republican well wishers have in their stables many non-racists politicians and political commentators such as Condoleezza Rice and Thomas Sowell, both of whom are African American non-racists. Still less should anyone suppose tha...

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...

What divides the Congress is the attempt by some to transform SCHIP into an expensive precursor of universal government mandated health care -- Senator Trent Lott National health care is a fraction of the cost and has much better outcome [than our present system] -- Noam Chomsky Last week the House of Representatives failed to override the President’s veto of the SCHIP bill for the second time. He objects because the bill is a step towards more socialized medicine, because it is too expensive, because it is supposed to be for poor children but allows adults and families with income at 400% of the poverty level ($83,000) to enroll. . Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards call for universal coverage, which is well received. Listening to the presidential candidates debate, the audience may believe that there is only one type of insurance, universal, and that it is free. But universal is not free and not the only choice. The issue is not settled, only ignored by the C...

Concerning the strike authorized by CBS News writers this week, four questions quickly rise to the surface: 1) Will the Democrat candidates for president support the strike by refusing to cross picket lines? Yes. Who among the candidates has lent their support to the unionists? Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd and John Edwards all have pledged their support, though it may be a measure of the esteem in which Connecticut’s own Dodd is held that the story from Politico , “CBS strike could put debate in disarray,” mentions Dodd only fleetingly. Dodd has yet to rise much above 3% in most polls, and his coverage in the national media is correspondingly slight. 2) Will the strike and the reluctance of leading Democrats to cross picket lines affect the debates? Yes. Clinton, the front runner, has issued a statement that said, “It is my hope that both sides will reach an agreement that results in a secure contract for the workers at CBS News, but let me be ...

The Journal Inquirer has reported that U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd is worried about unintended consequences and seeks to act responsibly. Dodd was not worried that a plan he supports to withdraw American troops from Iraq by March would be attended by unsupportable consequences. The senator was taking about friendly contributors to his campaigns. “Managers and partners at private equity firms, whose personal income-tax bills could double under proposed legislation,” the paper disclosed, “continue to be among the biggest contributors to U.S. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd's quixotic bid for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Federal Election Commission records show.” During Sunday’s televised presidential debate, Dodd allowed that he “might” join the three Democrat presidential frontrunners -- Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina -- in supporting “some version of proposals to hike taxes on highly-compensated dea...

The malaria epidemic is like loading up even Boeing 747 airliners each day, then deliberately crashing them into Mt. Kilimanjaro -- Dr. Wen Kilama When I heard about the attempts of Western countries and green groups to ban DDT while thousands were suffering from malaria I became almost speechless with anger. . . . It is revolting that the people wanting to ban DDT pretend that they somehow have people’s best interest at heart and are acting for the greater good. Green groups, governments, and donor agencies have assumed the moral high ground and yet their actions kill. -- Richard Tren In 1962, Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” mortally wounded pesticides and particularly DDT. 1n 1972 William Ruckelshaus, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, administered the finishing blow by banning DDT. In foreign la...

Camille Paglia , whose enticing column appears in Salon, an on-line publication, does not dread going where even dark angels fear to tread. Here is Paglia commenting on Hillary Clinton’s less than adroit handling of David Geffen’s defection from the Hillary camp: “What in tarnation was the Hillary Clinton camp thinking when it threw a tantrum about Hollywood producer David Geffen making a few critical remarks about her to a fagged-out media scold? Most people in this country have never heard of David Geffen and don't give a damn about whether or not he defects to Barack Obama.” The “fagged out media scold” is none other than New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. Paglia praised Obama’s “lofty assertion of statesmanlike unconcern” and then drove the shaft home: “Hillary didn't help herself with her over-the-top sermon at the First Baptist Church in Selma, Alabama, two weeks ago. Her aping of a black Southern accent from the pulpit was so inept and patronizing that it should ge...

ISI Books, an imprint of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, has just released an authoritative reprint of Orestes Brownson’s The American Republic , which is, in addition to De’Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and the much thumbed Federalist Papers , the most important post Civil War primer of American political thought. Brownson, whose father lived in the Waterbury area before he moved his family to New Hampshire, was the principal autodidact in an age of autodidacts. Standing at the bridge of the modern age and more familiar than other men of his time with the European godfathers of the modern era--Transcendentalism can be traced directly to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the German romantics--Brownson went through the defining movements of his day like a hot knife through butter. American Transcendentalism was an eclectic stew of oddments: Its moralism may be traced to the Puritans; it’s concept of intuition and the notion that the individual enjoys direct access to divine...

It’s a little surprising, what with all the political wags in the state, that no one yet has suggested Sen. Chris Dodd may have had a Damascus road experience in Damascus while cannoodling with that consummate liar Syrian President Bashir Assad. Dodd now is positioning himself for a run for the presidency, already crowded on the Democrat side with anti-war candidates. Like Dodd, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden and North Carolina Sen. John Edwards all voted in favor of the war at first; but, now that the war has soured, all favor some form of withdrawal and redeployment. How to distinguish oneself in this pea pod of anti-war presidential contenders presents a dicey political problem. Dodd’s most recent view on the Iraq war was summarized in an op-ed piece he wrote for an Iowa paper : Troops engaged in Iraq, Dodd wrote, should be re-deployed “to the Syrian border, to stop the flow of terrorists; to the north of Iraq, to better train Iraqi security forces; ...

It is not at all surprising that former senator and governor Lowell Weicker, the prime mover in the enactment of an income tax that has doubled state expenditures, should now be spending his twilight years in retirement bemoaning – high taxes. Weicker’s entire public life has been wasted in attempts to pound square pegs in round holes. In addition to high taxes, Weicker also is troubled by what he perceives as a dangerous and possibly unconstitutional religious resurgence in America, an alarming turn towards faith that apparently has not affected public education administrators in Maryland who, eyes cocked in the direction of mischievous suits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, have developed curricula pointedly not mentioning that the Puritans were preeminently a religious people who often thanked God for their good fortune – as was the case during Thanksgiving. “Too many Americans,” Weicker writes in Northeast magazine, a Hartford Courant publication, “have the view that...