Monday, November 30, 2009

Obama’s last stand

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 11/30/09

To review: Liberal response to the war so far has been resolute support (Bill, Hillary, Biden, Kerry) then resolute opposition (Obama, then later Hillary, Biden, Kerry), then support again in Afghanistan (Obama, Hillary) then indecision (Obama, Biden). This is the way things fall apart. It is good for Mitt Romney who offered principled support throughout. It is good for Ron Paul who offered principled opposition throughout. But it is bad for the Democrats. We could see awaken now a seismic shift in the political flow; a shift away from the relevant countervailing dialog between Democrat and Republican to between two different principled Republican approaches instead.

What Obama needs to talk about in his “big speech” tomorrow night is economy, not Afghanisthan. What we need is a war time economist. Like a war president, but for the economy. The Punjab may be falling apart but so is the American economy. The economy is the greater crisis and the people are getting brittle.

The new push in Afghanistan is Obama’s second phase of denial, health care being the first. He has the issues in complete reverse priority. Health care first, he goes, then Afghanistan and then the economy. It is just the opposite. Economy is first, the war second and health care last and dependent on the outcome of the first two. That he claims now that he is going to “finish this thing,” suggests he is reading that issue of GQ with his picture on the cover and Admiral Mike Mullen’s happy face briefs. That this comes at the critical moment when his approval has slipped to 45% suggests the classic “patriotic war” so favored by Russian czars and commissars to firm up peasant support. The language, “finish this thing,” is pure jive. No one believes it and we are expected when we hear it to enter into that state of agreeable disbelief and patronization that we use with children and innocents. We do not treat children as equals. We do not treat innocents as adults.

But it is a very good day for Mitt Romney. If America wanted a competent war manager she would have voted Romney in in 2008. This will provide invaluable background and market research for him as he eyes 2012. And it will do nothing but swell the Ron Paul ranks of the youngish Republicans; a cake that is rising anyway.

The heartland insurgency which the Pauls, Ron and son Rand, speak to is making the people brittle. Just two years ago it was all middle-class fat and happy walking slowly across the Washington mall or the college campus in a self-satisfied Starbucks-induced trance. Then last year the victorious bliss with a new black president and nothing clouding the horizon but pirates, bed bugs, a plague of suburban coyotes and that feral wolf girl from Alaska who says she travels with God and Todd. Today we read in Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column that there is no love for Obama among Democrats, that questions of integrity are arising among his core professional support and there is throughout “ . . . the growing perception of incompetence.”

So it is getting brittle. Those very vulnerable mall cultures and uptight exurbs – globalization’s transitory, disposable, techno-societies - which seemed to spring up overnight out of the South’s red clay, are beginning to feel the edge of a new rural angst. And they are blaming it on the wolf girl.

Next year, the year after, things could actually start to shred if Obama doesn’t find the path and head the economy in the right direction. This president who so likes to be compared to Lincoln has been misguided by Krugman & Co. The Keynesians have led him into the wilderness. They are Obama’s George McClellan; stallers, busy-makers and in the end, incompetents. He needs to fire them as Lincoln finally fired McClellan. He needs to find an economist like Grant if he wants to be a Lincoln.

Worth noting this week when Obama speaks to our honored soldiers to kick off his new campaign in Afghanistan, an item on page 20 of the New York Times on Thanksgiving day. Ron Paul proved to be a “surprising” presence in 2008, it said, and his son Rand is an “unexpected” candidate in the 2010 Senate race in Kentucky.

Surprising to whom? Unexpected by whom? Obama needs professionals who are not surprised by the life’s predictable vagaries of sin and joy. The fate of the republic depends on it.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Answer to The Hill's "Big Question" today: Is rush to new spending evidence that the stimulus money has been wasted?

If you drove south from northern New Hampshire to North Carolina on I 95 as I have done this past weekend, you would see extensive work conspicuously done by women and men in lime green clothing here in the frozen north where almost no one lives. Every road has been resurfaced; the ledges have been torn off the high cliffs by the highways that just last year housed hawks and peregrine falcons, lines have been painted everywhere. Much of this work has been voted down again and again locally as work that did not need to be done, work that we did not want done; labor that we do not respect; work that we do not consider to be real work. Increasingly, the federales need to New Jersey-fy us so as to removeth chill of the cold, clear, northern night and the coyote’s chant that sends the willies up their spines. But there is less than 2% unemployment up here in these parts. This money is a complete waste by nostalgicos channeling the Inner Roosevelt and longing for the days of Woody Gunthrie and Big Bill Broonzy singing folkloric ditties in a box car heading across the western plains on the government’s tab. Commodities guru Jim Rogers, in comparing the Obama spending to that of the Chinese points out that the Chinese are correctly spending infrastructure money by applying it where it is needed for the 130 million new workers recently arrived in the industrial centers. Here it is just tossed anywhere, as if out of an airplane, regardless of need. All patterns of population and economy today point west. When people here in the Land of the Free move they tend to move today to Texas and Alaska. There has been no attempt to follow patterns of rising karma. And then when you get south to New York City, where employment is now most probably above 20% the roads and infrastructure are a mess and not a finger has been lifted. There appears to be no plan whatsoever as Rogers says.

Bernie Quigley
Haverhill, NH

Monday, November 23, 2009

States must prohibit taxation of children

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 11/23/09

Once was we might have called upon Congress when reason and responsibility demanded initiative. But the feckless Pelosi and Reid have expressed such vast irresponsibility in their short tenure that we must look now to the legislative bodies of last resort: The states. First item: The states should prohibit the taxation of children. Centuries ago, as we rose to self governance, a division occurred between feudal countries which placed economic burdens on children by demanding that they pay the debts of their parents or grandparents. In free countries, a child is born free of such onerous debt. It is the hallmark of a free country. But it is no longer the hallmark of our country.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office recently testified before Congress that our fiscal situation has deteriorated rapidly in just the past few years. The federal government ran a 2009 deficit of $1.4 trillion—the highest since World War II—as spending reached nearly 25% of GDP and total revenues fell below 15% of GDP. Shortfalls like these have not been seen in more than 50 years.

Going forward,he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, there is no relief in sight, as spending far outpaces revenues and the federal budget is projected to be in enormous deficit every year. Our national debt is projected to stand at $17.1 trillion 10 years from now, or over $50,000 per American.

“The planned deficits will have destructive consequences for both fairness and economic growth,” he writes. “They will force upon our children and grandchildren the bill for our overconsumption.

But it’s not going to happen. In czarist Russia perhaps. Or Cromwell’s Ireland. But not here.

Friday, November 20, 2009

New Moon: The awakening of the new century’s first generation

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 11/20/09

From my point of view President Obama is the most intelligent and savvy of Democratic Presidents to come to power in the post-war period. He has a sensory intuition which allows him to catch up quickly on things and he is far better at external things than internal things. China ambassador Jon Huntsman, Jr., the best of the current China hands, gives him the highest marks on his visit to China. Even the Campaign for Tibet seemed cautiously optimistic. Obama’s problem is that history has cast his role at the end of a vast epoch. History has made him the last agent of a realm of ideas that are suited to an age long past and a vastly different America. The Democrats and much of the Eastern establishment have a Roosevelt hangover and dwell like Proust in a remembrance of things past. It is exactly like the South that W.J. Cash wrote about in the late 1920s. The South was ready economically to enter the greater world but the honored ghosts of history prevented it from doing so for 20 more years.

Historic periods overlap. Gore Vidal, aged and decrepit, hating America, hating everything, longing for the “gallant” Roosevelt and conjuring the ghost of William F. Buckley, Jr., when he was awarded for “lifetime achievement” at the 60th annual National Book Awards this week, might be seen as the Roosevelt era’s “last Confederate” still waving the red flag after the world has gone on; gone on to Elvis, to Reagan, to Twilight. There were still Victorians long after the age had passed. And when Elvis first rose in the world on The Ed Sullivan Show he still had to contend with Stonewall Jackson over who would represent the post-war South.

Generations are the engine of history and the channel of historic change and those who look for generational change should get in line tonight to see the opening of New Moon, the second of the series of four new vampire movies. Tickets have been selling out months ahead like a Beatles concert. But when the first movie, Twilight, came out it was called a cult movie and a passing fad. Like they said about the Beatles. Critics said the writing wasn’t any good. Like they said about the Beatles. We are at the century’s turning. It hasn’t turned yet and it won’t for a few years. But it is beginning to rise new against old generations as generations always do, and the old ideas and the old century. In our period, even an old millennium.

When cultural patterns including political ones are established by the old generations, everything that is new “doesn’t fit” and becomes a challenge to the old generations. All at every level of power become priests and defenders of the old in opposition to the new. But we began to see the turning with the Twilight movie, which was widely panned by critics and promotion institutions although the book by Stephanie Meyers had already sold 30 million copies, mostly to young teenage girls. It is the politics of denial. The new are denied entry into territory already controlled by the old people. We are seeing in spades a similar pattern with Sarah Palin. We have been seeing it with Ron Paul as well.

Each generation has its own gods and goddesses: Victoria, Douglas Fairbanks, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Eisenhower, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. They form and fulfill their own generations and place them in sequence to generations past and those ahead. The new gods, Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, awaken the long-awaited fourth post-war generation tonight with New Moon.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

A high stakes Super Bowl . . .

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 11/18/09

Historian Frank Owsley said that the two most representative figures in the Colonial period were Hamilton and Jefferson. But I can’t think of anyone today who represents America better than New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick and Indianapolis Colts former coach Tony Dungy. The New England team logical and decision based, the Indianapolis team a heart-driven, consistent and persistent model of “quiet strength.” Heart won over head late last Sunday night in a game that is still talked about up here, which may have turned the tide for the season. Or longer.

Great things have happened to us here in New England since the Quaternity of Belichick, Brady, Moss and Welker came to us. Having been born and reared up here it feels like we have finally entered the real world. Boston has left behind its key competition with New York which it had for the last hundred years in baseball, for a new competition with Indianapolis. The Patriots/Colts midseason game is being called the “competition of the decade.” It is good for us here because for the first time we no longer look longingly to New York where we always come in second in everything, but to the heartland of America, which we have never really acknowledged before nor felt we belonged. Not a day goes by up here when someone like Boston-area Matt Damon will try to get us to play rugby or do something else as they do it in England, but football has truly brought New England into the American heartland.

Football and all sports are modified contention. The American Indians used sports as a substitute for war; the Canadians last century found that hockey would keep working class French and Irish from killing one. The pioneering psychiatrist Edward F. Edinger said the matrix formed by sports will show the pattern of future history. In baseball, which rose in the Civil War era, the big teams were Boston and New York and they still are today. But in the post-war period football is the American game and the big teams are throughout the heartland; Green Bay, Dallas, Indianapolis and now us here in New England as well.

America is finding a new “center” and that is why perhaps the “beltway” mentality no longer fits the heartland. Our old center kept North and South in equilibrium, but now we are a full country North, South, East and the frozen North. Perhaps it is time to find our new center.

The Nation’s Capital was supposed to be sacred space; the benign, omniscient, impartial Brahma eye of the oculus high on the Capital Dome holding the heart-driven Old South and the head-bound industrial North together in a marriage of harmony and contention. At one time it was, but as Jefferson said, that time would pass and what would follow in its place would be a contentious bureaucracy; a republic of dress up and political pretension. Here’s a thought: Let’s let the Nation’s Capital be hosted instead by whoever wins the Super Bowl this year; possibly Boston/Foxboro, but maybe New Orleans or Indianapolis. And leave it there for a while. See what happens. Start a new century. Start a new millennium. Get rid of the riff raff and get a fresh start.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Katie Couric and Sarah Palin: Will Rick Perry go rogue in 2012?

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 11/16/09

We will learn one thing from Sarah Palin’s new book, Going Rogue: She will not be humiliated; she will not be intimidated; she will meet you head on. This should be considered in answering The Hill’s Pundit Blogger Armstrong Williams’ question whether there will be a dark horse Republican candidate in 2012. Conditions are almost perfect for a dark horse because an original, new conservative theme has developed this past year and that theme has a rising spirit attached to it: Former Alaskan governor and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. She could well be the candidate in 2012. But this is a movement forming and not yet fully formed. When it is fully formed a new champion – a dark horse – may arise.

Katie Couric will get her fair share in Palin’s book. Couric is the major networks’ official greeter. She is a gatekeeper. Her role is archetypal rather than journalistic. When she embarrassed Palin by insinuation and mnemonic slander (“. . . not one of us”) implying that she never read a newspaper, she turned Palin away from the door. She unofficially granted permission from the networks and sent forth the winged monkeys – Tiny Fey, Letterman, etc. – allowing them free fire character assassination.

The interview Couric did with Palin will be considered a milestone of journalistic history. In previous elections we had pack journalism but what happened in 2008 might be called horde journalism. The 2008 election reminded Johns Hopkins professor and frequent Wall Street Journal commentator Fouad Ajami of the “politics of crowds” in places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, “ . . . of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini.”

Couric and the networks intentionally set out to subvert a Presidential race by destroying one of the candidates. The networks – and the NYTs and the Washington Post – had already decided by mid July when McCain was 15 points behind Obama where the election would go. The celebrations for the first black president were all prepared and the invitations had already been sent out. Suddenly, with the arrival of Palin, they were dead even. It changed everything.

Palin’s was a dynamic new voice in America, potentially one as vital and relevant as Andrew Jackson’s. Couric should have been fired, instead she was honored and rewarded by Princeton University and she mocked Palin throughout the event in her bright red dress. Possibly no incident in the post-war period showed the full convergence of the networks, the press, academia, undergraduate bloggers by the millions, virtually all of Hollywood and the entertainment industry, converging on one point with Couric leading the charge. And now it is revealed in her new book that Palin’s own Republican apparatus was a coat carrier and appeared to help in the herding of the Obama horde to Mile High Stadium by intentionally subterfuging Palin.

The country needed a break and Barack Obama, bright, young and black, would be the antidote to a few grim years. Now the young President is thin and prematurely graying. At this point it is fair to say he does not appear to know how to be President and America’s health, welfare and possibly freedom are dangerously destabilized. A year on, we are beginning to hear the phrase, how did this happen?

The unprecedented, uniform, institutional contempt by the press for Palin had an empowering effect on the heartland. They – the New York and Washington political industry - hated Sarah Palin because they hated the rest of us who live in the hills and hollows where Johnny Cash wandered it was said. In subtle but pervasive ways this is true.

But in the past year we have watched history rising against this background. It is still not yet formed but in the next year it will begin to find form. By 2012 it will be in coherent shape. What is forming is a concoction of Ron Paul and Austrian economics, the April 15 demonstrations against the bailouts and the deficits and the subsequent town hall demonstrations. These rude awakenings began to find legitimacy in NY 23 when Doug Hoffman gained support as a Conservative Party candidate and when Tim Pawlenty, governor of Minnesota, offered his support. The unapologetically conservative candidate’s win by 17% in the governor’s race in Virginia suggests that substantive change is at hand.

In a word, the times have awakened but they have not yet fully formed. Everything is changing and change requires new people. The newest Gallup numbers show independents leaning to the GOP by 52% to 30%. The traditional Republicans are like the elegant jazz musicians of the 1950s, suddenly faced with the new music of the Sixties. Newt Gingrich will try to present himself as the new guy and so will others, but they are the old jazz musicians. Tim Pawlenty is new, Sarah Palin is and so is Rick Perry and these are perfect conditions for a dark horse.

Palin will be there as she was at the beginning. But Rick Perry, governor of Texas, was also with this movement from the very beginning. He is highest ranked and most respected of the new people advancing the new ideas. He would be the likely dark horse to consolidate and legitimize these issues – bring form to the formless - if this movement is to go forward. While the others are demure and cosmetic, Perry speaks clearly. He recently told a gathering in Texas that Obama was “hell bent” on socialism, raising a startled “oh my!” from the punditry fashionistas. This is what is required at beginnings. But Virginia’s new governor-elect Bob McDonald can now be seen in the wings as well.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Katie Couric and Sarah Palin: Will Rick Perry go rogue in 2012? - this is an unedited draft

We will learn one thing from Sarah Palin’s new book, Going Rogue: She will not be humiliated; she will not be intimidated; she will meet you head on. This should be considered in answering the question posed by Armstrong Williams here whether there will be a dark horse Republican candidate in 2012. Conditions are almost perfect for a dark horse because an original, new conservative theme has developed this past year and that theme has a rising spirit attached to it. Former Alaskan governor and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin is the rising spirit, although she may not be the dark horse candidate.

Katie Couric will get her fare share in Palin’s book. Couric is the major networks’ official greeter. She is a gatekeeper. Her role is archetypal rather than journalistic. When she embarrassed Palin by insinuation and mneumonic slander (“. . . not one of us”) implying that she never read a newspaper, she turned Palin away from the door. She unofficially granted permission from the networks and sent forth the winged monkeys – Tiny Fey, Letterman, etc. – allowing them free fire character assassin.

The interview Couric did with Palin will be considered a milestone of journalistic history. In previous elections we had pack journalism but what happened in 2008 can only be called horde journalism. The 2008 election reminded Johns Hopkins professor and frequent Wall Street Journal commentator Faoud Ajami of the “politics of crowds” in places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, “ . . . of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini.” Couric and the networks intentionally set out to subvert a Presidential race by destroying one of the candidates. The networks – and the NYTs and the Washington Post – had already decided by mid July when McCain was 15 points behind Obama where the election would go. The celebrations for the first black president were all prepared and the invitations had already been sent out. Suddenly, with the arrival of Palin, they were dead even. It changed everything.

Palin’s was a dynamic new voice in America, potentially one as vital and relevant as Andrew Jackson’s. Couric should have been fired, instead she was honored and rewarded by Princeton University, mocking Palin throughout the award ceremony in her bright red dress. Possibly no incident in the post-war period showed the full convergence of the networks, the press, academia, undergraduate bloggers by the millions, virtually all of Hollywood and the entertainment industry, converging on one point with Couric leading the charge. And now it is revealed in her new book that Palin’s own Republican apparatus were coat carriers and appeared to help in the herding of the Obama horde to Mile High Stadium by intentionally subterfuging Palin.

The country needed a break and Barack Obama, bright, young and black, would be the antidote to a few grim years. Now the young President is thin and prematurely greying. At this point it is fair to say he does not appear to know how to be President and America’s health, welfare and possibly freedom is dangerously destabilized. A year on, we are beginning to hear the phrase, how did this happen?

In the past year we have watched history rising from the unformed. It is still not yet formed but in the next year it will begin to find form. By 2012 it will be in coherent shape. What is forming is a concoction of Ron Paul and Austrian economics, the April 15 demonstrations against the bailouts and the deficits and the subsequent town hall demonstrations. These rude awakenings began to find legitimacy in NY 23 when Doug Hoffman gained support as a Conservative Party candidate and when Tim Pawlenty, governor of Minnesota, offered his support. The unapologetically conservative candidate in the governor’s race in Virginia winning by 17% suggests that substantive change is at hand.

In a word, the times have awakened but they have not yet fully formed. Everything is changing and change requires new people. The newest Gallup numbers show independents leaning to the GOP by 52% to 30%. The traditional Republicans are like the elegant jazz musicians of the 1950s, suddenly faced with the new music of the Sixties. Newt Gingrich will try to present himself as the new guy and so will others, but they are the old jazz musicians. Tim Pawlenty is new, Sarah Palin is and so is Rick Perry and these are perfect conditions for a dark horse.

Armstrong asks who is the dark horse. Palin will be there as she was from the beginning. But Rick Perry, governor of Texas, was also with this movement from the beginning. He is highest ranked and most respected of the new people advancing the new ideas. He would be the likely dark horse to consolidate and legitimize these issues – bring them to form - if this movement is to go forward. While the others are demure and cosmetic, Perry speaks out. He recently told a gathering in Texas that Obama was “hell bent” on socialism, raising a shocked “oh my!” from the punditry fashionistas. This is what is required at beginnings. But Virginia’s new governor-elect Bob McDonald could now qualify as well.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

The Vatican Wants to Believe

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 11/11/09

The questions of life’s origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe deserve serious consideration, says the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observation. Fox Mulder couldn’t have said it better. Has Father Funes been watching The X Files? The Vatican is calling in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and it implication for the Catholic Church.

Not that I know anything about this, but it has been my assumption that Catholics, Buddhists, Mormons, and the faithful of most all other religions believe in extraterrestrials, thus the winged beings on all of those stained glass windows. And “the Father” who art “in heaven.” And the Three Pure Ones, the deities of the East, said to live somewhere beyond the Big Dipper. And Kuan Yin and Andromeda and those three great pyramids in Giza, simply representatives of the more subtle consciousness of three of the stars in Orion’s Belt as any kid who just saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen could tell you.

Father Funes, if he is following the zeitgeist, may be a little behind the times. The Western mind has been heading to space since Buck Rogers or maybe as Walt Whitman said, since the beginning. The Star Wars and Star Trek epics brought the high water mark of this psychic adventure.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell said our journeys to space are a search for God but the epic journeys today are all of returning to earth. And what is kind of fascinating is that as the pop culture epic returns to earth from space, it appears to be landing in the Vatican. Sky walkers and Jedi have yielded the cultural ground to Templars and Cardinals in Dan Brown’s novels and movies like The Da Vinci Code and many other books and movies. The Vatican is even suggested in the blockbuster Twilight sequel, New Moon. And Fox Mulder’s guides and mentors in the recent X Files movie are no longer the three hippie scholars, the Lone Gunmen, well crafted in the last episode of the TV series as the Three Magi, but a Roman Catholic priest.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Will Levi Johnston save us from Sarah Palin?

by Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 11/10/09

When the great historian Robert Massie, author of Dreadnaugh, went back to find the root of the Second World War, the Great War and the rise and fall of Victoria, he found the singular warrior of Britannia who, in one astonishing afternoon in 1805, turned Napoleon’s fleet away from England, Lord Nelson. We face tough times ahead in the world again today. Unfortunately we have no Nelson. But we do have Levi Johnston. Possibly he will save us.

Not since Jon Gosselin has there been such a man. The press covers him like a blanket because they see the potential. He holds the power to save us from Sarah Palin. And, like Nelson at Trafalgar, he is quite possibly our last line of defense. It almost seems like that economic meltdown of September, 2008, began because of her. It occurred only days, minutes practically, after McCain announced her to be his VP. And everything has changed since then. Like she’s a white she devil or something. Suddenly a live, feral wolf girl rises up out of the northern forests, like those vampires of Twilight. A character threat to all we have gotten used to: to the Bidens, the Clintons, the Bushes and all the women in the room who come and go speaking of Michelangelo. This could ruin everything.

And she’s agile. She maneuvered past the first line of defense, Katie Couric, Charles Gibson, the New York Times Frank Rick and virtually all the women who work at the Times and the Washington Post. She outshined Tiny Fey. And William Shattner, drunk or sober, could not stop her on the late night talk shows. Then she single-handedly ruined David Letterman. Ruined his entire career. It was like some witch curse. But it must be said that she did not act alone in this. She had help: Glenn Beck.

It may surprise some that, Palin and Beck, one man and one woman from the bush working virtually alone, could successfully evade the entire institution, but that shows the insidious guerilla stealth of these people.

Is seems now the networks and the press have found the solution and thank God for that. Levi Johnson. Not since they joined forces with the government at the beginning of the war on Iraq have the press and the networks been so resolute and united in their efforts. After his big interview in Vanity Fair he has been everywhere. He’s all over the TV, buffing up and getting ready for his big photo shoot at Playgirl. He has never really done anything in his life so far – I think he’s only 12 – but he did manage to get a 17-year-old-girl pregnant and walk away from it. Happens. Too bad. But these are not Lord Nelson’s times. These are Oprah times.

He says he knows things. We already know a lot. She shot a moose. And she ate it. And the ever-vigilant Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post has uncovered this: Someone gave her a grouty Garfield calendar for Christmas and she keeps it on her desk. He says he’s got the goods on her. He knows thinks about Sarah Palin that will end the curse; end the swine flu, stop the drought, restore the dollar and return manufacturing from China. He used to live near her and went to her house once. Let’s hope he is right. He is our last line of defense against Sarah Palin. He is our only hope.

Sunday, November 08, 2009

Barney Frank is a pig

by Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 11/08/09

Speaking of self esteem issues, only an overweight career buffoon who proudly and conspicuously talks like a duck to display his endemic contempt for the world west of Boston would say that some of the people at the rally “ . . . appeared to have been the losers in the 'Are you smarter than Michele Bachmann contest?'"

Thinking we are really smart is part of the curse of being a non-Yankee in New England. Time has long passed us by, even the real Yankees. But also for us immigrants and outlanders who likewise wear the regimental tie although we bought it at Quincy Market. We have not been important since 1865. New York, the Empire State, conquered us when it conquered the South. Our second-most perceptive observer beyond the Celestial Bard wrote in The Bostonians that after the Civil War the only man of character he could find up here was a Confederate officer visiting from Texas.

Boston has always been a magnet for losers seeking status. But we are history’s side meat. That is what the Curse is about. New York has all the money. They have all the talent. Those who strive to be great move there. Those who strive to appear great move here. They have Jeter and Johnny Daemon and Norman Mailer and Nobel laureates in hard stuff like physics just pouring out of the Bronx and Brooklyn. And we have Barney Frank. So we pretend we are smart and urbane. Pity the poor immigrant, just over from Ireland, Poland or up from New Jersey; most all of us up here in these crabby little towns with cramped streets pretending to be the new tall white people. Pity the poor immigrant, said Bob Dylan, he wishes he were dead.

We have been taking a beating since we arrived at the public theater that is Boston (and Taunton and Fall River and New Bedford) so short a time ago. We came from nothing and rode the post-war wave of prosperity to insecurity; craving the status of the gentry but retaining all of the clutching needs of our factory worker grandparents. So afflicted with the class burden of “urban Irish” (or Poland or New Jersey) that when an old uncle of mine retired from his government job and his brother from the liquor store and none of his relatives were cops any longer he took an apartment across from the Harvard Yard gates and pretended to be a Harvard professor for the rest of his life.

The anguish of drunken fathers and uncles and all the dead and dying babies, the broken mothers – half the women in the family dying of TB and brown lung and despair; the tasteless boiled cabbage on Sunday afternoons in rooms that smelled of the dead and echoed the absence of Ireland in the sad faces of so many, many, many spinster aunties praying the rosary. An Irish pol in the old days, cigar and drink in hand, diamond pin in the tie and high collar would show his swagger by announcing that he got his kid into Harvard through political influence even though the Irish boy was as dumb as a post. The dumber the boy gotten into Harvard, the higher the status of the father.

But not nearly so bad as the pitiful yearnings of the “secondos” grasping at Harvard and Congress – those second generation or later immigrants today yearning to be just like the tall and long in the tooth at Harvard; striving for the patrician grace and the easy self assurance of the lanky Galbraith, still at his desk at 100, the temeritous vigor and vivid, cold eye of Kennan who lived to that age as well, and the eternal, vigilant focus of Eisenhower. But finding only unfulfilment in what we are not. The pitiful underlying reality is that the patricians saw us coming and turned the plantation over to us, as the planters did with the slaves in the South, moving to Texas to follow oil or to the Pacific Palisades with their oriental mistresses.

Only one in a hundred survived, said Pat Moynihan. And that one, like Pauli Walnuts, was imprisoned on the edge in his ethnic gulag and terrified of “Elvis land” and the plain talking folk from the heartland like Michelle Bachmann. The price was high, and for those pretenders in Congress and those still striving at the gate at Harvard, it still is. The price is Barney Frank.

Thursday, November 05, 2009


The South has Won

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 11/05/09

One key fact explains the present that has come to us in Tuesday’s election: A deeply conservative Republican explaining himself without apology has won the Old Dominion by 18%. Virginia is bright red. It will be this way in Texas too where the conservative, Rick Perry, is ahead of the moderate, Kay Bailey Hutchison, by 12%. It will be this way now throughout the South. It will possibly be like this in all the red states reaching as far north as Alaska and back east to the outer agrarian regions like NY 23 where Amish buggies travel in traffic. But the South IMO, from Richmond all the way to Dallas will be red for a long time. Possibly a hundred years. Possibly a thousand years. The South has won. The South has beat the devil.

George Allen, the Republican governor from 1994 to 1998, carried Virginia through an age of transition. But he was all hat and no cattle; a Reagan imitator, a Californian and a celebrity son who didn’t have a clue as to the values of the South and Virginia. I worked in his bureaucracy and from top to bottom it was incompetent, imitational and simply oppositional. Mark Warner, a Democrat who was voted by Wall St. to be one of the country’s best governors, brought Virginia an auspicious beginning.

A rare Yankee-born politician, Warner actually liked the people he had come South to govern. And they liked him as well. When Senator Jim Webb came on board in 2006 there was between them the potential to restore old Southern Democratic values of family, community and hard, hard labor on Daddy’s farm and football practice after school without whining. Us commie, heathen, horse worshiping Yankees could truly delight in hearing the Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain boys singing Angel Band at their pep rallies and the best of us joined up. Mudcat Saunders, advisor to Webb and Warner, made a good connection and brought out a South that could awaken and fulfill us head-bound outsiders. Truth is, they liked Webb, a well-known novelist, better in the urban enclaves like Alexandria than they did in his western Virginia home place.

Mudcat’s book, Foxes in the Henhouse: How the Republicans Stole the South and the Heartland and What the Democrats Must Do to Run 'em Out, written with Steve Jarding, brought the very smartest advice to Democrats hoping to do well in the South. But about 70% of the way into the text the authors gave a warning which should have been on page one: If the Democrats ignored the South, they said, the price would be high. There was a countervailing text by Thomas F. Shaller, an academic in Maryland who writes for Salon and The Nation: Whistling Past Dixie: How the Democrats Can Win without the South.

They could and they did in 2008, but as Jarding and Saunders warned, the price now will be high. The auspicious revival conjured and cultivated by Saunders and Jarding and brought to fruition through the good work of Warner and Webb is as of Tuesday, I believe, gone with the wind.

American history post-war and now hereon into the future will have been hinged on one critical turning. In 1981 82% of my old neighbors in Tobaccoville, North Carolina, changed their registration from Democrat to vote overwhelmingly for a Republican, Ronald Reagan. That moment can be seen now as a beginning. And as of Tuesday, there will be no turning back.

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Utopian politics right and left: The Age of Hysteria

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 10/03/09

The Red Book, magnum opus of the pioneering Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung has for the first time appeared in print, thanks to the Rubin Museum in NY and a tenacious Philadelphia psychiatrist. Before he died in 1961 Jung predicted what might be called an age of hysteria ahead as we approached the millennium year 2000. Time will bear him out. As we know from ancient Egyptian history, he wrote in 1959, psychic changes like UFO sightings always appear at the end of one Platonic Month and at the beginning of another. “We are now nearing that expected when the springpoint enters Aquarius.” Most everybody today associates the Sixties with Aquarius and sees maybe John Lennon as the Aquarian. But the new cycle technically started around the year 2001. Maybe George W. Bush is the Aquarian.

Utopianism is a symptom or a by product of this. It is a way of seeing the world not as it is, but as we wish it could be so as to solve a difficult or unsolvable problem which plagues us. It is a willful delusion. At worse, it is a possession, even a collective possession. Here where I live just below the Canadian border in New Hampshire, there are two, common viral forms: Canada-ism and Swiss-ism. If we were only like the Swiss or the Canadians, it goes, everything would be good.

During this long healthcare debate not a week goes by without someone talking about the wisdom of these people – Scandinavians too – and their wonderful social networks. These people are nice. And when they open the books at the Swiss banks I can assure you that all those secret billions did not go up the nose as they did on Wall Street and in Bernie Madoff’s office. Canadians are nice. They are so nice that last year when I went to Quebec City with a bunch of kids for a high school orchestra competition and our credit cards didn’t work at the gas pump, they said don’t worry about it. Just send the $85 when you get it.

But the reality is that we as a people are not that nice, although most people in Vermont are kind of like that. In Montreal there were two murders per 100,000 people in 2008. In Detroit, forty. There are 209 murders so far this year in Los Angeles. There were 304 in 2008. To extrapololate, it might cost a little more in health care to treat 40 gunshot wounds in Detroit or 304 in the LA emergency room than it would 2 in Montreal. I tried to find the current number of murders in Berne, Switzerland, this year but nothing came up. Recently, a popular LA Times columnist sallied abroad to study good health care systems. Where did he go? Switzerland.

Utopianism may be the curse of our age. The least among us Americans desire to “ . . . save the world,” a wish which Jung colleague Barbara Hannah called, “ . . . just childish.” Globalism is one aspect of utopianism. In this state of mind we are not individuals bonded to our own place and culture like the Swiss or the Quebecois. We are a horde seeking a god king. A horde of penguins. Clearly Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sees her husband as a world god king – everything would just be great if Bill were just king of the world again – and Elvis did as well. And for a time they were. But not now. That’s why nobody listens to Hillary anymore.

Obama has better sense and by any standard or observation, he – unlike Bill Clinton and Elvis – is anchored to reality by family, mother, grandparents, a sense of place and his own sense of balance. He, unlike Clinton and Elvis, doesn’t really believe he is a god king although others do. He can make adjustments and I believe he will soon, particularly in that most recent utopian voyage, the millennial “war of Armageddon” in the Middle East.

He better watch out. Ted Danton sees him as king and Sting sees him as world god-king. But I really began to worry when a friend sent a clipping claiming an official announcement by the Obama administration disclosing the reality of extraterrestrial life is imminent. President Obama will figure prominently. The disclosure will follow upon a year of greater government openness on UFOs in accord with a policy secretly developed at the United Nations. If extraterrestrial disclosure does occur at the end of 2009 or early 2010, President Obama will lead an unprecedented effort to promote global governance through the United Nations. What they’re talking about here if I have this right is actually intergalactic government with Obama as king – king of the universe.

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Palin/Perry 2012: The Conservative Party should bring a national challenge in 2012

by Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 11/02/09

Whatever happens tomorrow in the NY 23 race will be anti-climatic. Now that Dierdre Scozzafava, the Republican candidate, has dropped out there has already been a clear and historic victory for the Conservative party. The Republican party is now a third party in NY 23. This is a new beginning and it cannot be denied that Sarah Palin was the first major, national politician to cross the river to NY 23. It is a new and original political format formed out of the Tea Party and Town Hall movements. We can see now the fledgling beginning of a third major party in America, the Conservative party.

South Carolina governor Mark Sanford was the first major figure to speak out when he wrote last November 15 in the Wall Street Journal, “I find myself in a lonely position. While many states and local governments are lining up for a bailout from Congress, I went to Washington recently to oppose such bailouts. I may be the only governor to do so.” Texas governor Rick Perry joined him shortly after. But it cannot be denied that Palin is the dynamic force awakening the heartland to this new perspective. The victory of the Conservative party over the Republican party in NY 23 is the first step out of the abstract and into the concrete.

Maybe Perry should change his brand to Conservative party in his race in Texas and leave Kay Bailey Hutchison to the Republican nostalgicos. Dick Cheney is campaigning for Hutchison and they seem a fairly good match. Palin is stumping for Perry.

In our times there has not been such a critical division in substance and outlook. The critical turning in NY 23 came when Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota who expects to run for president in 2012, followed Palin’s initiative and threw his support to the Conservative party candidate Doug Hoffman. By the time Scozzafava dropped out, Palin, Pawlenty, Perry, former New York governor George Pataki, Minnesota representative Michele Bachmann, former Senator Fred Thompson and other prominent Republicans had lined up with them. Newt Gingrich led the traditionalists in support of Scozzafava. Cheney might be considered in the Gingrich column as well. Haley Barbour, Governor of Mississippi and head of the Republican Governors Association supports Perry in Texas and might be considered among the Conservatives.

With 43% of the voters in a poll not long ago claiming to be independent, it is fully possible today to see a third party challenge in 2012. Palin would be the perfect candidate. Two issues need a fundamental new approach: The war and the bailouts. In my opinion the Republicans are dead wrong on the war and the Democrats are dead wrong on the bailouts. And there are two people on these fronts today who present better ideas: Ron Paul and Marine Capt. Matthew Hoh.

In a recent poll 93% of Texans said they think Ron Paul should run for president in 2012. Paul independents and conservatives could well find a place of convergence in the rising Conservative party. As Daniel McCarthy, senior editor at The American Conservative wrote recently, Republicans have yet to comprehend the magnitude of their loss in recent years among young people. “If Republicans are to have any hope of turning back that tide, they must heed the man who excited more students and young people than any other candidate for the GOP nomination—Ron Paul.”

Political parties are exclusively about packaging. New ideas and ideals need new packages or they will be beaten back by senior generations demanding the old hat, the old calcified forms and the old orthodoxies. This is still fantasy football, but a Palin/Perry ticket on the Conservative Party in 2012 would really wake things up.