Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

In mid-May, David Hawkins of Roll Call threw a bouquet of compliments at U.S.  Senator Dick Blumenthal: “But Blumenthal’s profile has never been as prominent as in the past week, after he declared that the firing of James B. Comey as FBI director has created ‘a looming constitutional crisis that is deadly serious’ and ‘may well produce impeachment proceedings, although we’re very far from that possibility.’” The reader will note Blumenthal's adjectives. A "looming' crisis cannot be "deadly." The "crisis” is "looming" because we cannot be certain it is a crisis, except in Blumenthal's fevered imagination. And if we are "very far” from the possibility of a crisis, in what sense may the crisis be fairly described as a crisis? Note the "may" standing guard over this sentence: the crisis "may well produce impeachment proceedings,” or the crisis – but is it a crisis? See above -- may yet produce egg on Blumenthal’...

Since the sixties sexual revolution, which overthrew the pre-silly sixties traditional morality of the Western World, everyone has become an expert on the subject of sex. The moral questions that tormented St. Augustine – who was not, by his own admission, a saint – are easily answered today by asking the question, what would I do in circumstances A or B? In the era of unorganized religion, we all have out private codes. If I were President of the United States, would I have seduced an aide in the White House when, on one occasion, I was chatting with a high Israeli official on the phone? Probably not. Would I have bitten Juanita Broaddrick’s lip in the process, so she says, of raping her? Not in the cards. If I were a self-infatuated real estate mogul in New York, would I have bragged about my conquests of married women to Billy Bush, then the host of Access Hollywood, little thinking that my every word would surface eleven years later in a Presidential campaign? Nope. If I wer...

For thirty years and more, Republicans in Connecticut have been fleeing with their pants on fire what the Democrats call “social issues,” a flight from the political battlefield – and reality – that has abandoned all the social turf to progressives, some of whom are radical social engineers with knives in their brains. It is a serious mistake to suppose that President Barrack Obama has twice won office because his economic vision was superior to that of his Republican opponents, John McCain and Mitt Romney. Mr. Obama’s two elections were won on social issues, largely because Republicans refuse to engage Democrats on matters other than the domestic economy.

In the first few weeks of his presidency, Barack Obama has been, true to his word, an active president. He produced a “stimulus package” that represents a massive intrusion of the federal government into the private market place, an extension of a program hastily developed during the last frenetic days of the Bush administration. He has taken steps to keep his campaign promise to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, though it is still undecided what do with “detainees” such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed , the mastermind of the 9/11 attack on New York. The President has sent former diplomatic wunderkind George Mitchell to the Middle East to broker a peace between warring factions in Israel. And he has shown that his Middle East policy prescriptions during the campaign were serious by opening an entente with the Arab World. Iran, very much a part of that world, promises to be his stone of stumbling. The US-based International Institute for Strategic Studies on Wednesday conclud...

The Herald Tribune is reporting that Ingrid Mattson, president of the Hartford based Islamic Society of North America and one of many religious leaders chosen to speak at Washington's National Cathedral as a part of President-elect Barrack Obama’s inauguration, has an Hamas connection through the Holy Land Foundation, a group that has contributed money to Hamas: “Mattson has been the guest of honor at State Department dinners and has met with senior Pentagon officials during the Bush administration. She also spoke at a prayer service at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. “But in 2007 and as recently as last July, federal prosecutors in Dallas filed court documents linking the Hartford, Conn.-based Islamic society to the group Hamas, which the U.S. considers a terrorist organization. "Neither Mattson nor her organization has been charged. But prosecutors wrote in July that they had "a wide array of testimonial and documentary evidence expressly linking" th...

The problem with Sen. Chris Dodd’s view of the world – and even more so his views on foreign policy – is that there is no “is” there. In foreign policy issues, Dodd proceeds as if the ideal universe he wishes to establish on earth, mostly by diplomatic means, is the reality; when, in fact, the real world, especially in the Middle East, is riven by religious zealots impervious to diplomacy whose world view is shaped by dreams of a Islamic caliphate that will extend from the shores of Tripoli to the halls of Montezuma. Improbable as it may seem, in the real world of Osama bin Ladin and his intellectual offspring, the Islamic revolution will not be complete until Dodd’s two charming daughters are wrapped in burqas and Dodd himself, a putative Catholic, is taxed for his non-belief. That is the way things were in the good old days of the 10th century, and terrorists in and outside of Iraq are striving to reestablish their supremacy over the West – which is to say, over everything to which D...