Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Freedom of speech is not going away in the United States of America . It’s gone -- Ben Stein . If you enjoy diaries and are unfamiliar with Ben Stein’s, you will find it in The American Spectator, monthly. Bright, light, and fun—but not the latest, which he entitles “Outraged Sadness.” It is in the April issue. Stein is an actor, writer, lawyer, and son of esteemed economist Herb Stein. He and his make-up artist were chatting while he waited for his turn before the camera. He told a joke in which Barack Obama figured. Unbeknownst to them, someone was taping them. Next day he was summoned to the front office. The executives were scandalized at his “racism.” A fighter against racism even from childhood, he was outraged. “Can’t talk about that.” There are already many things we no longer are free to talk about. Examples: Stein gives the example of Global Warming. “The debate is over. The issue is settled.” Gore gave the message to the eager media. The media passed the mess...

Former President Bill Clinton, as everyone knows, is the best metaphysician in the Democrat Party. A metaphysician is someone who devotes himself, day in and day out, to the meaning of the word “is,” as in “Hillary Clinton is not a war hawk.” At least not today. She was a war hawk after 9/11, when a few peaceable followers of Mohammed, blessings be upon him, drove two planes loaded with non followers of Mohammed, blessings be upon him, into the Twin Towers in New York, a state now represented in congress by Hillary. Or was she? Bill says “no.” “I don’t have a problem with anything Barack Obama [has] said on this,” said the former president on a conference call while speaking to hundreds of supporters -- Barack, by the way, says “yes,” Hillary was a tempestuous war hawk after 9/11 -- but “to characterize Hillary and Obama’s positions on the war as polar opposites is ludicrous. “This dichotomy that’s been set up to allow him to become the raging hero of the anti-war crowd on the Interne...

Very likely the answer to Islamic terrorism, when it arrives, will have a spiritual component. Terrorists in Syria, Iran and Iraq are driven by a vision of conquest and glory, as was Mohammad in the 10th century. The West, outwardly materialistic and secular, is driven by a different vision. As Islamic purists might see it, we are the flesh, they are the spirit, and the two are at war with each other. Profound secularists in the West and terrorists in the East do not understand that for much of human history the two have commingled and informed each other. A war between the flesh and the spirit in which one of the two permanently vanquished the other would lead to a tyranny of angels or devils. The struggle before us in the 21st century occurs in a theatre of thought and action in which lions may lay down with lambs, provided there is no final victory between, to put it in modern terms, the claims of science and the claims of religion. But in the mean time, terrorists are roving the wo...