Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

“ The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones ." So said Mark Anthony in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Cesar” during Cesar’s funeral oration. Anthony, who took no part in the assassination of Cesar, the bloody work of Brutus and others, all honorable men, was determined that the good Cesar did should not be buried with his bones and that the evil done by his assassins should not outlive them. U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s farewell speech before the senate serves a like purpose. Farewell speeches by senators of long standing and exit interviews recorded in newspapers are like brief autobiographies, and there never yet was an autobiographer who was not the hero of his own reminiscences. Eventually, the encomiums are overwritten by sober historians far removed from the partisan atmosphere that colors all the deeds, evil and good, of their subjects. Mr. Dodd’s errors in office lie just beneath memory’s skin . His three decades in the senate are hard...

In the wake of the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, not to mention derivate failures such as Wall Street and Main Street, the conflict of interest prize of the decade must go to New York US Rep. Barney Frank. “It’s absolutely a conflict,” said Dan Gainor, vice president of the Business & Media Institute. “He was voting on Fannie Mae at a time when he was involved with a Fannie Mae executive. How is that not germane?” The Fannie Mae executive was Frank’s domestic partner Herb Moses. Frank met Moses in 1987, the year Frank uncloseted himself as a gay, and the two lived together in a Washington home until they broke up in 1998. Moses was not without a sense of humor. In 1991 he wrote in the Washington Post, “I am the only member of the congressional gay spouse caucus. On Capitol Hill, Barney always introduces me as his lover.” Both Frank and Moses assured the Wall Street Journal in 1992 that there was no funny business going on, conflict of interest wise, but skeptics were doub...