If You Ask Me

The fate of America’s oldest, continuously published newspaper, the 256-year-old Hartford Courant, is in the hands of a man accused by 21 United States senators of “the reckless acquisition and destruction of newspapers,” including some of the nation’s best.

This will be the 21st presidential election in my lifetime and I can remember all of them, though I admit I can’t recall all that much about the first one when I was 3.

Twenty years ago, on Oct. 1, 2000, I wrote a column in this newspaper “congratulating” four of Connecticut’s six members of the U.S. House of Representatives on their “splendid victories” a month before they were actually reelected.

‘I have voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980, including voting for Donald Trump in 2016.” 

When you see a lead sentence like that on an op-ed column, the next sentence will most certainly begin with the word “But.”

Preoccupied as we are with a worldwide plague and an economic collapse, we the people have so far managed to contain our enthusiasm for President Trump’s planned statuary park for American heroes.

No matter what happens in the coming months—to the pandemic, the economy or race relations — this country cannot take four more years of the division that Donald Trump’s presidency has foisted upon us.

Some of the students who spent their college years learning to oppose freedom of  speech that isn’t their own have graduated and are now promoting their heresy in other institutions, most notably the press.

And sadly, they have been successful at The New York Times, of all places. 

Seventy-two years ago this month, on June 26, 1948, President Harry Truman went against the advice of his top military aides and ordered “that there should be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin,” thereby ending racial segregation in the nation’s m