Don Pesci: Trump replenishes Connecticut's treasury as state's cultural reinvention continues

Airline plane engine maker Pratt & Whitney’s headquarters in East Hartford. Its sales have surged with, among other things, government contracts.

While Connecticut Democrats were busying themselves thumping President Trump during the recently concluded elections – the state’s all Democrat U.S. congressional delegation would not shed a tear if U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer were to succeed in impeaching him – Trump has delivered the goods to The Provision State.

The state’s underperforming economy may finally join the rest of the nation, much of which had recovered from the Great Recession many moons ago, in a splendid recovery – just in time too. Economists in Connecticut have not titled the coming jobs boom The Trump Bump, although a recent Hartford Business Journal (HBJ) report, “UTC’s 4Q profits jump 73%; CEO Hayes airs separation plans HBJ” comes dangerously close.

Here is the good news: “Farmington conglomerate United Technologies Corp., which plans to split into three separate companies, on Wednesday said its fourth-quarter profits soared 72.7 percent on booming aerospace sales and a favorable U.S. corporate tax rate.

UTC CEO Gregory Hayes, a smile lighting his face, noted that profits were up and "2018 was a transformational year for United Technologies."

HBJ reported, “The thriving aviation market drove UTC's fourth-quarter surge, Hayes said in a conference call Wednesday morning, with newly acquired Rockwell Collins leading sales growth with $4.9 billion in revenues during the quarter, up 29 percent year-over-year. East Hartford's Pratt & Whitney posted $5.5 billion in sales, up 24.2 percent.”

A rising economic tide, President Kennedy once said, lifts all the boats. And this rising tide, the result chiefly of Trump’s new military procurements, will water Connecticut's parched treasury. A larger employment pie allows state government to engorge itself with new revenue – without raising taxes. It is a win-win for both anti-Trump Democrats in Connecticut like Congressman John Larson and tax-weary citizens of the state still reeling from former Gov. Dan Malloy’s crippling tax increases.

Republicans already are ringing the tocsin: Maybe if we wait a bit, we won’t need those tolls after all. Also, is it possible we may be fondling too often the third rail of New England’s social issues?

Prior to the progressive take-over of Connecticut, the state was prepared to go its own way, luxuriating in its own unique character. Connecticut was for much of its history a refuge from New York’s predatory politics and brutal taxation. All this changed with the advent of former Sen. Lowell Weicker’s successful gubernatorial bid in 1991. Weicker forced an income tax through the General Assembly; the playing field having been leveled, the state found itself in competition with New York City and Boston.

It was no contest, and Connecticut “got its clock cleaned,” a favorite expression of Weicker’s. How, for instance, can Connecticut compete with New York in job poaching?

Connecticut is now in a race to the bottom on so called “social issues.” Bad political models make for bad cultural dives to the bottom. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a nominal Catholic, has now begun a scuffle with his wounded Catholic Church. “Andrew Cuomo,” Fox News reports, “is under fire from faith leaders after he signed a bill into law that legalizes abortion up until birth in many cases.”

Cuomo will have no problem in a fisticuffs contest with his church’s faith leaders. In much of New England, it pays politically to scuff up Catholic doctrine. His real problem will be with pregnant mothers – they are women too – who have consulted ultrasound images and found that late-term fetuses bear a striking resemblance to born babies. But New York, in any case, has taken a great social leap forward, and Connecticut, a national leader on progressive social issues, has a bit of catching up to do. Progressives do not believe in definitional lines – fetus or baby? -- whatever science and common sense suggests.

Connecticut’s own Senator from Planned Parenthood, Dick Blumenthal, has yet to tell us, perhaps because no one has put the question to him publicly during one of his frequent highly scripted media availabilities, why his most cherished industry should be the only one in the United States that remains unregulated. The suit-prone Blumenthal was, for more than two decades as Connecticut’s attorney general, the state regulator-in-chief.

Connecticut’s cultural reinvention is well underway, and the political map has changed as well, mostly owing to the inattention of Republicans and the approval of the state’s left-of-center media. Culture is an Archimedean lever: Give me a place outside the world where I can place my lever, said Archimedes, and I will move the world. This is the progressive order of business; first change the culture and politics will meekly follow in its train.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Don Pesci: Connecticut's rich Democratic politicians

In politics, including in Connecticut, there are two kinds of riches: personal riches – Democrat Dick Blumenthal, weighing in at $67 million, is among the eight richest senators in Congress – and campaign riches.

Democrat U.S Sen. Chris Murphy, who complains often enough that hustling campaign dollars wastes time that he might otherwise more profitably spend demonizing the National Rifle Association – which recently signaled its support of a bill championed by Murphy and fellow NRA demonizer Blumenthal, the “Fix NICS Act of 2017”, that would reinforce requirements that federal agencies report all infractions to  the National Instant Criminal Background Check System -- currently has about $6 million in his campaign kitty. Most people could not name Murphy’s likely Republican challenger. None of them have yet hit the $60,000 mark.

Democrat Rep. Elizabeth Esty has $1.2 million in her campaign bank account. Craig Diangelo, a Republican running against Esty, had $57.16 on hand at the end of September.

So then, all the Democrats in Connecticut’s all-Democrat U.S. congressional delegation are far wealthier than their impoverished Republican challengers. U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney – “two subs Joe” – has tucked away $837,805. Rep. Jim Himes, who has no Republican opponent, boasts $2.3 million.  John Larson, representative for life in the gerrymandered 1st District, has pocketed $354,915. U.S. Rep Rosa DeLauro has $64,969 on hand, but that modest figure only hints at a larger story. DeLauro and Larson, both representing gerrymandered districts, have been in the U.S. House for a combined total of 44 years, which suggest that neither of them is reliant on massive campaign war chests to remain in office.

Like Blumenthal, DeLauro is personally rich. Both Blumenthal and DeLauro married well. Blumenthal is married to the daughter of redundantly rich New York real estate magnate Peter Malkin, who owns the Empire State building and other money-making properties. A few years ago, Malkin and his son Anthony took Malkin Holdings public.  According to the New York Post, “the company’s initial public offering raised about $754 million.” It takes money to make money, as the one-percenters say.

DeLauro is married to Stan Greenberg, pollster to Democratic stars. Greenberg’s politically high-profile clients have included such political shakers and movers within the Democratic Party as former President Bill Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore, the late Vice President Walter Mondale and a host of both national and international corporations and issue groups.

The CEO of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, boasts that his firm “is one of the world's premier research and strategic consulting firms. Beyond data, we provide the strategic insight necessary to develop the right messages to achieve our clients' goals. Smarter, faster and committed to our clients' interests: We work harder and think deeper than the rest.”

In off hours, the DeLauro-Greenberg team is The Great Gatsby of Washington, D.C. DeLauro shares her campaign wealth with the Democrat National Committee, which in turn parcels out its contributions, in both money and services, to other worthy and appreciative Democrats, usually incumbents like DeLauro. In turn, Greenberg is showered with business from Democratic politicians, and the bread DeLauro has thrown upon the political waters, as the Good Book says, will be returned to her after many days.

 It may be difficult for some to make qualifying distinctions between this profitable loop and self-dealing, but one may be sure the loop is legal. In addition to prime property in Washington DC, where the DeLauro-Greenberg team holds salons for political activists and seasoned politicians, money buys pro-active legal services from accomplished and wealthy law firms.

Among some more slithery politicians, the phrase “it’s all perfectly legal” sometimes precedes ethically questionable dealings, which is why Honoré de Balzac said, “The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.” Mario Puzo paraphrased the quote and used it to open his novel The Godfather – “Behind every great fortune, there is a crime.”

Because of gerrymandered districts, both DeLauro and Larson will likely keep their seats in Congress in perpetuity. Still, God being just, Ecclesiastics warns us that there will be a final election, a warning that seems to be addressed especially to successful senators from Planned Parenthood:

 “As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb[a] of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything …

“Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Walk in the ways of your heart and the sight of your eyes. But know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.”

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Term limits look better and better in Connecticut

The lame ducks depicted in this Clifford K. Berryman cartoon are defeated Democrats heading to the White House hoping to secure political appointments from  President Woodrow Wilson.

Columnist Jim Cameron in the Stamford Advocate has curtly written off  Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy: “Our governor is a lame duck. Because he’s announced he’s not running for re-election, he has the political clout of a used teabag. And even though he’s our state’s leader for another 11 months, nobody cares about him or his ideas any longer.”

Malloy’s lieutenant governor, Nancy Wyman, has decided she would rather be spending time with her family than running for governor, which would necessarily entail a hearty defense of Malloy’s ruinous policies.

After two terms making Connecticut great again, Malloy himself has decided to take a hike.

Atty. Gen. George Jepsen, whose time in office was spent avoiding media notoriety -- unlike his predecessor,  Dick Blumenthal, for whom fawning media attention was the River Styx in which he bathed frequently – has called it a day after two terms as Connecticut’s AG. And no, the former chairman of the State Democratic Party has no plans to run for governor. Both Blumenthal and former Atty. Gen. Joe Lieberman used the AG’s office as springboard to a U.S. Senate sinecure.    

Mayor of Hartford Luke Bronin, once Malloy’s chief counsel, having said he would need a couple of terms in office to turn the U.S.S. Hartford around, has rushed into the vacuum created by Malloy’s departure.  Connecticut’s capital is taking on water. Only a few weeks ago, Bronin was palavering with lawyers about a bankruptcy declaration, and if he now feels the governor’s office is a politically safe haven compared to the mayoralty of Hartford, he’s one bright cookie. Most lawyers are not dummies. despite the usual bad rap on the comic circuit. Question: What do you call a lawyer with an I. Q. of 50? Answer: Your honor.

An open Democrat gubernatorial field has yanked Ned Lamont from the shadows. Lamont, a cable millionaire and great-grandson of a late chairman of J.P. Morgan & Co. Thomas Lamont, successfully challenged then U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman in a Democrat primary; he then lost to Lieberman, who successfully defended his seat as an independent in a general election. “Lamont spent $26 million of his cable television fortune on his run for the Senate and for governor,” Neil Vigdor of CTPostreminds us, and Lamont was, of course, supported by former U.S. Sen. Lowell Weicker, who is still recovering from his 1988 loss to Lieberman.

“I just care about whether I think I can make a difference and get this state back on track,” Lamont said. “We’ve got so many amazing assets. We’re just not making the best out of our potential.” Lamont indicated that he would decide by January whether he would throw his hat into the gubernatorial ring. By that time, the floor on both sides of the political barracks will be littered with hats.

These bow-outs of Malloy, Wyman and Jepsen have kicked the doors open on an election that promises to be alarmingly interesting. If anyone wants to know how term limits might introduce into Connecticut’s sclerotic political system the verve and energy of a new day, they have only to look about them. Had term limits been in force midway between Dick Blumenthal’s agonizingly long 20-year term as the state’s attorney general he might have been a U.S. senator or possibly governor more than 10 years earlier; for it is not true that term limits would end political careers. They would simply move the pieces on the political chessboard toward different political functions. PAC committees, easily captured by incumbents, would have to decide, upon a governor or a senator leaving his post, who they might want to corrupt in the future; in the absence of a healthy turn-over in various offices, corruption has become routine, predictable and automatic. Term limits would invigorate political parties, and awaken all the nerve tingling juices of reporters during election cycles.

This is precisely what is happening right now that three prominent officeholders have decided in effect to term limit themselves.

Jepsen’s political career has been well rounded: In 2018, he will have put in eight years as attorney general. But Jepsen also served in the State House for  four years and the State Senate for 12 years. He served as chairman of the  state Democratic Party for two years. These terms in different political offices approximate term limit spans. Jepsen circulated himself through a now sclerotic political system, and no one is complaining that the state Senate, for example, has been irreparably damaged because Jepsen did not spend as much time there as Blumenthal had in the attorney general’s office.

Had term limits been in operation for the last few election cycles, no one in the Democratic Party would be wincing at the prospect that a Bridgeport mayor who spent years in prison for corruption might become the next governor of Connecticut. The gubernatorial field on the Democratic side would now be crowded with recirculated Democrats, some of whom just might be able to pull Connecticut out of its progressive mire by its former moderate and pragmatic bootstraps.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnisf.

Don Pesci: Connecticut's confused moralists

Lincoln quoting Jefferson: “I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just!'’

During his political career, which spans four decades, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal has been storming moral mounts and shaking his fists at the gods. At some point, the gods of Western morality may respond.

Blumenthal’s reaction to American Nazis in Charlottesville was commendable and necessary; in any denunciation of Nazism, there must be no ambiguity – no moral confusion. There are indeed degrees of evil in the world. The bank robber who murders a teller commits a greater evil than the bank robber who simply robs a bank.

However, using the greater evil to excuse the lesser cannot be defended on moral grounds. The Antifa movement, like the American Nazi movement and the KKK, uses violence as a means of moral suasion. The Nazis and the members of the KKK who hijacked a protest over an attempt to remove a statute of Robert E. Lee from a park in Charlottesville should have been unreservedly condemned for who they are by all people whose moral sense is not impaired by political considerations.

These two groups have been with us a long time; we know them, and we should not pretend to forget or forgive the unrepented sins of their dark past. Both groups have bathed in blood up to their knees. The anti-black, anti-Semite, anti-Catholic KKK used to hang or terrorize its victims; these days, they are content to defame and rouse public opinion against them. German Nazis persecuted and murdered Jews; these days, American Nazis accuse Jews, who they falsely believe are animated by anti-patriotic globalist pretensions, of capitalist greed.  The shadow of Buchenwald falls over all of this, and although David Duke is not Himmler – because there are differences in moral degrees of evil -- the seeds of the greater evil are sown in the ground of the lesser evil.

The Antifa movement – so called anti-fascists who have adopted the Stormtrooper tactics of Fascists -- should be roundly denounced for who they are by those who regularly storm moral mounts and shake their fists at the gods whenever television cameras are rolling. The Antifa movement has long been infiltrated by anarchists; in the anarchist dystopia, such senators as Blumenthal would be unnecessary excrescences.

Even for those who agree there is a moral order of greater and lesser evils, Blumenthal’s too ardent support of the more indefensible practices of Planned Parenthood is difficult to justify on moral grounds. Blumenthal's position on late term abortions, Orthodox Jews would say, is morally indefensible. Even a Reform Jew like Blumenthal may be uncomfortable with the killing of nearly born babies and the selling of their body parts to doctors, a process, some may think, that comes uncomfortably close to morally noxious Nazi practices?

The moral position on abortion – most especially partial birth abortion -- of 3rd District Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro also is confusing, which is why, she laments in her recent book, “The Least Among Us: Waging the Battle for the Vulnerable,”  her bishop removed her as a trustee of her Catholic High School.  Scandal in the Catholic Church is synonymous with sowing moral discord in the minds of Catholics. And Catholics who are public figures, so long as they remain in the faith, have a moral duty to maintain Catholic religious convictions in a morally confused universe. If they break with their Church on important matters of doctrine, a devil word in the modern period, they cannot maintain communion with the believing church, lay or clerical.

Of course, DeLauro has little use for bishops and little understanding of the historic opposition of her Church to the grave sin of abortion. She believes as a professing Catholic -- “My faith has always been important to me…” – that abortion has, within her Church, completely taken over “the conversation on faith in politics.” And she is inching toward a wholly indefensible moral position that important moral issues should be decided by the state, not bishops or rabbis.

DeLauro seems unaware that Catholic opposition to abortion and infanticide during Imperial Rome was the lever that freed women from a crushing paternalism in which the paterfamilias of a Roman family exercised complete dominion over the life and death of his unborn and born children. Abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, not uncommon in the Roman Empire, are becoming more common in the Western world as Christian perceptions are replaced by a morally neutral secularism, both in Europe and America.

The modern notion of human equality, unknown in the Roman Republic, descends from Biblical doctrine: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28).” And the highly romantic notion of the love of children also has its roots in Christian faith, “But Jesus said, suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:14).”

In Heaven, one hopes, abortion is frowned upon, as it is among bishops in DeLauro’s church. There, one hopes, Nazism, Klu-Kluxery, Antifa fascism and anarchism will not gain a foothold. Here below, the usual strife continues. Flawed moralists continue to belch fire from their secular pulpits. Medical practitioners, unbound by the Hippocratic oath – noxamvero et maleficium propulsabo: “I will utterly reject harm and mischief”— perform partial birth abortions, after which dismembered baby parts are auctioned off, while politicians, wrapping themselves in moral mantels, wink behind the curtain.

Not a church going man, Abraham Lincoln, quoted from Thomas Jefferson, not a church going man, in his Columbus, Ohio, debate with Steven Douglas: “… there was once in this country a man by the name of Thomas Jefferson, supposed to be a Democrat -- a man whose principles and policy are not very prevalent amongst Democrats today, it is true; but that man did not take exactly this view of the insignificance of the element of slavery which our friend Judge Douglas does. In contemplation of this thing, we all know he was led to exclaim, 'I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just!' …  He supposed there was a question of God's eternal justice wrapped up in the enslaving of any race of men, or any man, and that those who did so braved the arm of Jehovah -- that when a nation thus dared the Almighty every friend of that nation had cause to dread His wrath. Choose ye between Jefferson and Douglas as to what is the true view of this element among us.”

Lincoln’s audience applauded this sentiment of a frail man leaning for support upon the crutch of an eternal truth. How often, we should ask, do the political heirs of Lincoln and Jefferson tremble when they consider that God is just?

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based essayist.

Don Pesci: These progressive Conn. pols are libertarian about two grim things

The Republican plan to abolish and replace Obamacare has now collapsed. After much huffing and puffing, Republicans pulled their replacement plan, such as it was, shook the dirt of medical-care reform from their feet, and vowed to move on to the next big issue -- tax reform. One imagines U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D.-Conn.), who made some frantically intemperate remarks in the House before the Republican replacement plane crashed and burned, was delighted.

 U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D.-Mass.), move over: Mrs. DeLauro has now become the chief progressive maenad of Congress. She brought to her performance suitable demagogic props, a large sign that said “Get Old People,” the words arranged horizontally and the first letter of each word – G-O-P – in fierce bold script. C-Span captured the historic moment here. Mrs. DeLauro was not wearing her pussy hat at the time; so the members of the House were spared that indignity.
 

Seen from a progressive bubble, Obamacare is a crashing success. It is, in fact, a political success but a real-world wreck from within, and it has been so from the beginning. Obamacare has never been more than a program hardwired to fail that would lead, when it did fail, to universal health care, a nationwide government healthcare program palely imitating European models that would drive many insurance companies -- unable to compete with a tax-supported, progressive driven healthcare system – out of business.

Under a universal healthcare system one fourth of the economy in the United States would move from the private to the public sector, and insurance companies in Connecticut would become boutique providers serving rich people – mostly wealthy Republicans who, in DeLauro’s view, want to Get Old People (GOP). Mrs. DeLauro’s gerrymandered lair is Connecticut’s 1st District, an impregnable progressive fortress; so then, she need not fear that she will be undone politically by championing a lost cause.

And Obamacare is a lost cause. Even in her home state, insurance providers have pulled out of the program with their pants on fire; premiums have skyrocketed across the nation, and the coroner has been sent an e-mail.

The authors of the U.S. Constitution supposed that legislators would be unwilling to pass ruinous laws under which they themselves would suffer. How quaint! Barack Obama himself is now wealthy enough to buy retirement properties worth millions anywhere in the world the chooses to live, in or outside the United States; socialist Bernie Sanders owns three houses; millionaire Connecticut U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal had money enough to send his children to expensive private schools that many of Mrs. DeLauro’s constituents could never afford.

Politics has been good for Mrs. DeLauro and her millionaire husband, Stan Greenberg, both of whom own expensive property in the Washington Beltway, where they entertain similarly minded progressives in lavish splendor that might bring a blush to the cheek of the Great Gatsby.

It may strike some hearty rationalists as unseemly that two millionaire politicians who favor partial birth abortion and euthanasia – which clips life it its beginning and end – should profess such a touching concern for old people. Only on questions of life and death are Mrs. DeLauro and Mr. Blumenthal, the Senator from Planned Parenthood, excessively libertarian. Blumenthal, who never met a regulation he didn’t like, would leave Planned Parenthood – which makes most of its profits from abortion – as the only unregulated big business in America.

China still pursues a policy of forced abortion; in that totalitarian country women, liquidated as infants in the womb, are perceived as somehow less valuable than men. International Planned Parenthood has in fact been working hand in hand with the population control program in China, almost since its inception. China joined the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) in 1983.

In December of last year, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers wrote a letter to President Donald Trump calling for “a full-scale investigation of International Planned Parenthood to determine the exact nature of its operations in China… Transparency is demanded by the fact that IPPF receives taxpayer dollars from the United States and other nations as well.  I believe it is impossible to partner so closely with the Chinese Communist Party’s forced abortion machine without being complicit in its atrocities.  This is especially the case when this year we learned that the number of abortions in China is not 13 million, but a staggering 23 million a year.”

What a pity the group did not address its petition to Mrs. DeLauro, defender of the poor and oppressed, or Mr. Blumenthal who, as the Senator from Planned Parenthood, may possibly exercise more leverage with the IPPF than does Mr. Trump and the entire Republican Party which  -- as we all know, thanks to Mrs. DeLauro’s campaign bumper-sticker outburst in the House – wishes to oppress if not euthanize their grandmothers.

Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net) is a political and cultural writer who lives in Vernon, Conn.

Don Pesci: Yes, mass-murderer acted on Islamist principles

Regarding the murder of 49 people and the death of the Islamist murderer, Omar Mateen, and the wounding of more than 50 others in the Orlando gay club:

Dots were quickly connected.  On June 8, Channel 3 in Las Vegas reported:

“A pro-Isis group has released a hit list with the names of more than 8,000 people mostly Americans.

“More than 600-people live in Florida, and one security expert believes that many of those targeted live in Palm Beach County and on the Treasure Coast.

“The ‘United Cyber Caliphate’ that hacked U.S. Central Command, 54,000 Twitter accounts and threatened President Barack Obama is the same pro-Isis group that's reportedly created a ‘kill list’ with the names, addresses and emails of thousands of civilian Americans.

“Reports of the list came to light online when Vocativ reported the list was shared via the encrypted app, Telegram, and called on supporters to kill.

“Former FBI agent-turned lawyer Stuart Kaplan says the threat is especially alarming, because the people on this list are civilians who don't have the security necessary to protect themselves.

"’It's going to create some hysteria,’ " he said.’’

But there was little hysteria in Hartford or Washington, D.C., or indeed within the legacy media, which generally has supported the gay community at home. Islamists have long viciously targeted homosexuals.

Murderous assaults against gays, Christians and Jews abroad do not inspire hysteria. Routine vicious assaults, both at home and abroad, trigger the usual emotional delays while facts are sifted. Is there a connection between the reality-denying Islam of President Obama – peaceful, joyously accommodating to Christians, Jews and gays – and the vicious assaults on all three groups in areas of the world where Islam is most faithfully practiced?

Who will dare say? Really, it’s anyone’s guess. By all means, let us gather together all the facts. Reports immediately following the slaughter of gays in Florida warned against drawing premature conclusions. People are hard at their posts even now, sifting facts – preparing their political briefs, deflecting responsibility from responsible parties to, say, the National Rifle Association.

In Connecticut, the usual pro-gay politicians released the usual media releases, and then returned to their comforting illusions. Hysteria has a way of quickly dissipating in the land of the free and the home of the brave: One day it’s this, another day that. Christian churches are burned, those considered kafir, infidels, by faithful Muslims are beheaded; Coptic Christians, a Christian remnant founded by the Apostle and Evangelist Mark, have nearly been exterminated in the Muslim world; Islam waves its bloody sword in the Middle East and northern Africa; Islamic warriors kill non-Muslims who refuse to bow to the sword, rape and enslave their women, abduct and re-program their young children. This is Islam, says Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder and leader of ISIS.

Although al-Baghdadi is not a graduate of prominent Islamic seats of learning such as al-Azhar University in Cairo or the Islamic University of Medina, in Saudi Arabia , he is, according to Aaron Zelin of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an Islamic minister “more steeped in traditional Islamic education than either al-Qaida's past and current leaders, Osama Bin Laden and Aymen al-Zawahiri, both laymen, an engineer and doctor, respectively.”

This is not Islam, says Mr. Obama, a past guest lecturer at Harvard Law School, about which Bill Buckley, one of the fathers of the modern conservative movement, once said, “I’d rather be governed by the first 1,000 people chosen at random from the phone book than by the Harvard Law School faculty.” So, take your pick.

Omar Mateen, a radicalized American Muslim, left a 911 message praising al-Baghdadi on the day of the slaughter, a bloody theo-ideological fingerprint that only the willfully blind will ignore – or cleverly discount by turning the religious sacrificial lambs to other purposes. Obama, moments after the slaughter, said of Mr. Mateen, “This was a person filled with hatred.” Wrong: Mr. Mateen was filled with a holy purpose.

Hillary Clinton, the almost certain Democratic nominee for president, thought, post-slaughter, that this might be a propitious time to talk about gun control. U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy has twice condemned Congress, silent on the matter of gun control. Previously, on the occasion of yet another mass-murder of civilians by two Islamic terrorists, Mr. Murphy offered tweeted condolences to terrorist victims in San Bernardino – but no prayers.

To those praying for the victims, Mr. Murphy showed the back of his hand: “Your ‘thoughts,” he tweeted, “should be about steps to take to stop this carnage. Your ‘prayers’ should be for forgiveness if you do nothing -- again.” All the pointless prayers and thoughts, Mr. Murphy wrote, were a mask for inaction, and “wholly insufficient.” Mr. Murphy announced that he was a veteran of Sandy Hook.

 “And what’s so offensive is in the wake of another mass shooting, we have a gigantic menu of policy options that are at our disposal to try to cut down on this carnage. And we’re not pursuing any of them. We’re just absolutely frozen. Listen, maybe I shouldn’t tweet in anger, but I’m angry that we’re not doing anything to try to stop this.”

And here we are yet again. Apart from passing federal laws that are, to use Mr. Murphy’s words, a mere emotional sop and “a mask for inaction,” what action should the United States take against ISIS that might “stop this?”

Presidential emoticons – the shooter was “filled with anger” – have never warded off attacks committed by terrorists faithful to the revelations of Mohammed, peace be upon him, a live and pertinent connection regularly discounted as irrelevant by Mr. Obama. The shooter, bending his knee to Minister al-Baghdadi and faithful to the Koran, was performing a religious duty. Almost all the sahabas, the companions of the prophet Mohammed, assign deadly punishments for sodomy. Some agree that homosexuals should be burned and stoned, other that they should be thrown from a height and then stoned; most agree their punishment should be death.

Mr. Mateen legally obtained his weapons because at one time he was a security agent. One can be almost certain that gun sales among gays in Orlando, and elsewhere in the nation, will spike after the most deadly terrorist  mass shooting yet in the United States. That is exactly what happened after the Cheshire and Sandy Hook killings in Connecticut.  In any case, no law promulgated by Mr. Murphy could deprive a faithful observer of the Koran and the Hadith on Sodomy of an overriding religious obligation.

How about this: Suppose we kill ISIS, utterly destroy its presence in northern Iraq and North Africa by any means necessary – and destroy it in such a way that ISIS itself will  know it has been destroyed, a more efficacious solution than gun control. Naturally, this cannot be done by sending drones to snuff out al-Baghdadi. It would require lots of American boots on the ground – and the vigorous support of Connecticut’s two U.S. senators, Mr. Murphy and Dick Blumenthal, who tweeted moments after the attack on gays in the United States, “… my heart breaks for the families of loved ones lost or injured.”

Yes, ISIS has left broken hearts – real broken hearts – all over the world. Why should Orlando, Connecticut, or any other convenient target chosen by a militant, unmolested Islam escape the sword of that religion, which has nothing to fear but fear itself? Does Mr. Blumenthal seriously think that ISIS fears his broken heart?

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn-based political writer.

Don Pesci: Nader's nattering in Conn.

  VERNON, Conn.

Ralph Nader once again is prowling the countryside saying things that are not so much wrong as passé. He does this because he himself is passé. Consumer advocacy, Mr. Nader’s specialty, reigns supreme everywhere in Connecticut, which only a short while ago sent to Congress the nation’s first consumer-protection senator, Dick Blumenthal, a little stiffer than Mr. Nader, but made from the same ideological cloth.

Not having kept up with the times, Mr. Nader seems to be laboring under the illusion that both major political parties in the United States “continually reject even considering cracking down on corporate crimes, crony capitalism or corporate welfare.”

Not at all true. In fact, the fight against crony capitalism may play a significant part in the Connecticut gubernatorial race this year.  Guess which one of the parties has rejected crony capitalism? Hint: It isn’t the party of Jefferson, Jackson and  the Nutmeg State's late and iconic Democratic boss, John Bailey. Is it not curious that the sharp-sighted Mr. Nader could have failed to notice that real capitalists have an aversion to fake capitalists?

In a column that appeared in The Hartford Courant, Mr. Nader, who appears to be supporting Jonathan Pelto for governor this year, asks rhetorically, “What if they [both major political parties] reject a proven, superior way to educate children? What if they refuse to consider an end to unconstitutional wars or to a grotesquely twisted tax system favoring the rich and powerful — to name a few of the major agenda items not even on the table for discussion by the two parties?”

Apparently, Mr. Nader’s “superior way to educate children” is the same as Mr. Pelto’s superior way to educate children -- which, for reasons not mysterious, is the same as the education lobby’s superior way to educate children. This method involves unlinking education outcomes and salaries, the rejection of testing to measure educational outcomes, and supporting without question or hesitation extravagant union demands, however much they strain taxpayers' ability to pay.

It may surprise Mr. Nader, but Steve Forbes -- to be sure, a successful businessman (via  his family's Forbes Magazine) and therefore suspect -- long ago supported a flat tax that even redundantly wealthy progressive tax supporters such as Warren Buffett would pay. Other Republicans favor a fair tax. The idle rich love progressive taxation because they alone are able to afford pricey tax lawyers to exploit a tax code awash in exceptions, which is why, come to think of it, Mr. Buffett’s  effective tax rate is less than that of his secretary.

Republican libertarian heartthrob Rand Paul, who most recently has called for demilitarizing the police -- police, mind you -- is the opposite of a warmonger, and the U.S.  Constitution has played a major role in Tea Party gatherings. One gasps at the thought that in some important respects Mr. Nader may be at heart a closet Randian Republican.

Mr. Nader’s fire in his column is pointed in two directions: at the Journal Inquirer newspaper,  of Manchester, which from time to time has spanked his backside, and at the notion that spoilers are spoilers.

Jon Pelto, for most of his life a Democrat, has entered this year’s gubernatorial contest as an Independent. Some reporters and commentators have noted that Mr. Pelto might well end up “spoiling” the campaign of Gov. Dannel Malloy, who prevailed over his Republican challenger, Tom Foley, in his first gubernatorial campaign by an uncomfortable razor-thin margin.

  In preference polls, Mr. Malloy noted recently, the needle hasn’t moved a jot since the first Malloy-Foley gubernatorial campaign. Mr. Foley once again is challenging the sitting  progressive Democratic governor and, marvel of marvels, the notion has been bruited about that Mr. Pelto’s Independent campaign might “spoil” Mr. Malloy’s progressive re-run against Mr. Foley – meaning that Mr. Pelto may draw a sufficient number of votes from Mr. Malloy so as to cause him to lose his gubernatorial election bid. A similar brief has been filed against Joe Visconti, once a Republican and now an Independent who is challenging Republican Party hegemony on the right.  Among some eccentrics on the left, the irascible Mr. Nader in particular, it has now become inadvisable to state the bald truth – which is this:

Jon Pelto’s presence in the gubernatorial race is designed to move Mr. Malloy further left, while Mr. Visconti’s presence in the gubernatorial race is designed to move Mr. Foley further right. Neither of them have a snowball’s chance in Hell of becoming governor. If either of them were successful in actually winning the gubernatorial contest, the victor will have been a successful spoiler.

The chief defect in Mr. Nader’s complex character is that he does not know when to stop protesting; this is the disabling defect of the entire Western World since the beginning of the Protestant Revolution, which helped lead to the Enlightenment. The protesters do not know when they have won; they continue protesting until all their gains have been lost.

Mr. Nader lives in Connecticut, the most progressive state in what used to be called, before the near total victory of the administrative state, the American Republic. He has won. He should go home, pop a beer, watch a ball game, and celebrate the destruction of the Republican Party in Connecticut.

Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net) is a  political columnist who lives in Vernon, Conn.