Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Crisis at the Border January to June It’s a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there. U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, the closest Connecticut will ever get to a political saint, visited the U.S. Mexico border near the end of July and arrived home to plaudits . Blumenthal is used to plaudits. One can count on the fingers of one hand the number of criticisms the left leaning Blumenthal received when he was Connecticut’s attorney general, a post he held in good odor for more than twenty years. But then, Blumenthal was expert in the ways of media, having been in his college years an editor of the Harvard Crimson. His media releases during his days as attorney general, liberally studded with explosive adjectives and disguised rhetorical IED’s, read as if they had been written by the New York Times editorial board.

"We're careening, literally, toward a constitutional crisis. And he's [Judge Gorsuch] been nominated by a president who has repeatedly and relentlessly attacked the American judiciary on three separate occasions, their credibility and trust is in question" Blumenthal on CNN  President Donald Trump is irascible and prone to childish fits of personal outrage, but his dealings with the judiciary are not quite as bloodcurdling as those of President Andrew Jackson, the founder of the modern Democratic Party.

When former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hobbled out of President Barack Obama’s cabinet, Mr. Obama found the perfect replacement in John Kerry, who believes that one cannot be both a patriotic Israeli Jew and a democrat; the reader will please note the lower case “d” in democrat. Mr. Kerry would not wish to suggest that individual Jews cannot be Democrats, because that would cost the Democratic Party of which he is a member both patronage and votes. Saying just the right thing at just the right moment is not Mr. Kerry’s strong suit, nor for that matter is diplomacy, effective in foreign policy only when it is attached to strength and honor. In this, Mr. Kerry is a chip off his chief’s block. Having failed diplomatically in Iraq, Mr. Obama withdrew American troops from the country, creating a vacuum that eventually was filled by what Mr. Obama called “a JV team.” That would be ISIS, which now has a presence in multiple countries in the Middle East and the North African...

Yesterday’s question concerning the war in Iraq – “Are we winning or losing?” – has given way to today’s question – “Is Iraq Vietnam?” The question arose because President George Bush in a recent speech at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention hinted that a retreat from Iraq would be attended by consequences similar to the retreat from Vietnam. "One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam,” Bush said, “is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens.” This has prompted a “discussion” – really, more like a bar room brawl – that Bush cannot win. A quick glance at the discussion on the weekend following Bush’s analogy will show why. The Hartford Courant and one of its lead commentators – Bill Curry , once an advisor to former President Bill Clinton, once a student anti-Vietnam war protestor – were very quickly out of the gate. Mr. Curry has told us that in writing his columns he often consults with name Carolyn Lumsden , now the Editorial page editor of...

" Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, Lest the marrow of your blood run cold " – from the fairy tale “Mr. Fox.” U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd has not been able to move much above one percentage point in presidential preference polling. That places him roughly twenty nine points below that of President George Bush’s approval rating, now bottoming out at 30%. Dodd is disappointed at his fellow Democrat presidential wannabes. After all the huffing and puffing since Dodd’s party took over the House and Senate, the Dems in the U.S. Congress have failed to produce a bill (or an indictment of impeachment) forcing the president to withdraw troops from Iraq by next March, Dodd’s preferred withdrawal date. The date itself is unimportant. The idea is to nudge the already stumbling Bush into the fiery pit. However, none of the serious Democrat presidential contenders want to be responsible for a loss in Iraq, proof, if any were needed, that the Dems do not believe their own pre-election rhetoric....

In a Journal Inquirer editorial, Keith Burris, the paper’s editorial page editor, labored to explain why a crowd composed of veterans attending Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry’s appearance in East Hartford was so pitifully thin. “Is the Lamont campaign staff trying to fill halls?” Burris wrote. Burris speculated that the Democrat Party in East Hartford may have been negligent. Couldn’t they have swelled the crowd by compelling students to attend as a part of their civic classes – not a bad idea, actually. Kerry was praised in the editorial for his efforts to end the war in Vietnam – not a bad idea either – nor did he shrink from mentioning the Vietnam war: “He said, in fact, that this war (in Iraq) is even worse, because Vietnam should have taught us to avoid a war like this one. He implied that this war was built upon even more lies than Vietnam. And he said the biggest lesson of Vietnam is that the government owes the public, and the men it asks to fight, the truth.” Indeed, the truth...

The paradigm for war protesters who believe that Bush’s war in Iraq has become a “quagmire” and a “civil war” is, of course, Vietnam. Somewhat down in the polls, anti-war candidate for the U.S. Senate Ned Lamont has decided to play his “Vietnam card.” And if Iraq is Viet Nam, there must be in the script that runs like a golden tread through the Lamont campaign a dark-jowled Tricky Dick Nixon stomping the stage with his hobnailed boots. After all, Lamont’s senatorial ideal is ex-governor and former U.S. senator Lowell Weicker, who earned his senatorial spurs by declaiming against anti-Vietnam war candidate Joe Duffey, the Democrat nominee for senator in 1970. Democrat Sen. Tom Dodd, Sen. Chris Dodd’s father, was the petitioning candidate in that race. Weicker, a wealthy Republican candidate from Greenwich, later changed his mind about Vietnam. Weicker and his former chief aide, Tom D’Amore, are advising the Lamont campaign. The guy in the hobnailed boots, the Nixon stand-in, is present ...

What comes after a speedy withdrawal of troops from Iraq -- a measure favored by Cindy Sheehan and zanies on the left – is the whirlwind. There are only three options: 1) Immediate withdrawal. 2) The Bush plan: the introduction into Iraq of democracy. The Bushies think that if democracy can be transplanted to Arabia and if the tender shoot takes – a big "if" – the plant may spread to Syria and Iran. Democracy, an invasive plant, is non-aggressive, or at least less aggressive than militant Islam. 3) The ostrich option: bury your head in the sands of Arabia, cross your fingers and hope for the best. Immediate withdrawal, al la Vietnam, leaves all our allies, overt and covert, perched on the roof, waving to the helicopters that will take them to the next safe haven. But the next haven will not be safe for long. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad , the democratically elected president of Iran, longs for the return of the Mahdi and thinks he sees his figure approaching in the smoke and ashes of ...

The whole gang was there at the Carpenters Union Hall in Hartford's South End to wish Sen. Joe Lieberman a happy 64th birthday and to banish the ghost that for nearly a month had been haunting the Democrat Party. The ghost’s name is Ned Lamont, a Greenwich millionaire, anti-war enthusiast and possible primary opponent. Weeks earlier, supposing some difference between the two Democrat senators on the Iraq war, the Hartford Courant began to arrange the “debate” shown on Fox News’ “Between the Lines.” The differences between the two senators, as it turned out, were slight. Both agreed that the United States had entered the war on faulty premises, largely owing to bad intelligence and false assumptions. Weapons of mass destruction – what Aristotle might have called the proximate cause of the war – were nowhere to be found. Some have suggested that Iraqi chemical weapons had been shuttled off to Syria prior to the invasion. Others have suggested that Saddam Hussein was intent on deceivi...