19 January—The Borough of Litchfield Board of Warden and Burgesses’s ad hoc mouthpiece Thomas Gerarde ludicrously opined last week (Tie a yellow ribbon round the lawyer’s neck) that BOLBOWAB’s decade-old compromise permitting the yellow ribbons to stay in place was not binding because the officials who signed off on it were no longer in office.

That naturally brings to mind Adolf Hitler’s excuse for rearming Germany when he came to power in the early 1930s. Remember World War I? You’ll recall that the Allies—the good guys, including the United States—just managed to defeat the so-called Central Powers—Germany and the other bad guys, the Ottoman Empire (Turkey-plus), Bulgaria, and Austria-Hungary.

The Treaty of Versailles formally ended World War I hostilities between Germany and the Allies, while the other bad guys signed separate treaties that largely fiddled with geography. (With all the PC crap taught in schools these days, kids probably are never taught anything like that.)

As happens in such cases, the victors made the terms. And, of course, one of the terms of Versailles required Germany to disarm.

But after Hitler finessed himself into the chancellorship, he insisted that he was not bound by any of the post-war treaties because they had been executed by a government other than his own. So Germany rearmed and did lots of other things she wasn’t supposed to do, some in stealth, others brazenly, as if to tell the world what to do with itself.

Whom does that remind you of?