Elections in America and Israel: Four scenarios

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/29/11

It is more like a brick wall than a turning; the thump heard when the first primaries are finally held in the next weeks. Here are four scenarios on how history could turn at Iowa, New Hampshire and Israel.

Romney/Perry: There are three conservatives running in Iowa says Rick Santorum; himself, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann. Primary season is about who you like to dance with. Voting at the end, who you will marry. Of these three Perry seems the best fit for Iowa country folk with a farm backbone. While Romney a slam dunk in NH. Rightly so because you know what, Romney camp returns your calls and they always did, even on little items like that Russians-are-coming thing I wrote here a few days ago. Romney/Perry ticket would work because Romney really is a problem solver and would see this ticket as following the post war demographics and dynamics of business, energy and people in our time; with one hand holding on to the East as governor of Massachusetts, but following the demographics west with Perry.

Romney/Paul: But if Paul wins Iowa it would bring a new day to America. There will be a new party. Actually a new movement naturally awakened in the middle of the country with help from Sarah Palin and the roar of the Tea Party crowd, turning now into a real political faction. Solid stock Iowans would be putting their backs behind a new establishment. A new two-party system could emerge: Republicans with Romney at the helm and Libertarians with Ron Paul. But I wish the Libertarians would change their name to the Federalists or something because in the true Jeffersonian mold, that is what they are. Libertarian sounds like a religion hatched in the mountains of New Hampshire in the 1830s.

Romney/Bush: Romney slam duck again. It would be a tragic historic error if Romney, hoping to appease the traditionalist longing, bows to the temptation to bring in Jeb Bush as VP. What is of significant historic action in this race and the next is that America has finally moved past the monarchist temptation to be governed by Massachusetts families, the one which vacations in Kennebunkport or the one which vacations in Nantucket, which has drained American creativity for at least two generation. If politics does not follow the contours of rising history, conflict results.

Israel: There is a race in Israel at the end of January for Chairmanship of the Likud to challenge the party leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu. It comes from Moshe Feiglin and the Jewish Leadership group constantly called "extreme right" in the establishment press. It is not extreme anything but does bring a new political and cultural paradigm to Israel, one similar to that proposed by Thomas Jefferson in America. Recently, Netanyahu called Israel a “liberal Western democracy.” His leadership is actually comes from generational demographics based on American pop culture and political influence. There is no West. It has ended in Europe. None in America either. Feiglin's group has called for a rejection of American aid to Israel (as Paul does). This is seen as extremist by many America Jews and others who see Israel in an American perspective as a half-child of America. And that is the issue. In our time, Israel has prospered. It has also become more Jewish and is ready to drop the American mask. A Feiglin victory in Israel would engage a new generation of governance and bring a new future to Israel.

How to fix a corrupt Congress? A Governor's Council (Ron Paul/Joe Miller '12)

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/28/11

There is easily available testimony from the best among us, warrior scholars such as Jim Webb, Lawrence Wilkerson, Wesley Clark and the gone-but-not-forgotten Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, that the invasion of Iraq was a plot by a very small group of governmental advisors and mainstream journalists who had commandeered the so-very-vulnerable imagination of President George W. Bush. At the time it was apparent to anyone who cared to look. But Congress did not care to look. Today, as Iraq falls apart, we pay the price: The price of George W. Bush and the Congress of Easter Peeps is Ron Paul.

Paul's influence is authentic and real. If he wins Iowa he could then go on to New Hampshire, but Iowa is more important. It represents the heart which in the end drives America and to which America will ultimately answer.

But Paul can only change Congress temporarily. If a new grass-roots wave comes in there will be a lot of shouting for awhile and throwing the bums out, but the problems of centralization are systemic to the system, and that is the source of our problems. When influence coalesces in one place, money will inevitably follow. And as Ross Douthat said this morning in the New York Times, Rick Perry's idea of a part-time Congress will only bring more lobbyists. And again in short order, Congresswomen and men will find the insider track to wealth though their legislative positions.

Few are brave. The problem is not the people in Congress. They are no more vulnerable to temptation that the rest of us. The problem is the system of centralization. It was a perfect system for when America was three cities and a forest in 1776, but in seeing the future, it no longer works.

Nor will the excellent ideas of Paul and Rick Perry, who bring a thoroughly new approach to government and one well suited to the times and to America’s future. But these ideas won’t work because the states, accept maybe Texas, Alaska and Kansas, are fully unprepared to take on greater authority and new responsibilities. Most states, such as Vermont under Governor Peter Shumlin, would be like those unfortunate Soviet sub states suddenly let out into the light in 1991, but they forgot who they were, they forgot their real names.

America is ready to mature in the middle, where farms stretch into the horizon as in a Thomas Hart Benton painting. But it needs a proper form and matrix to do so. It needs regional representation answering to itself: a Governors Council answering to a single elected representative governor, to end the social and ethnic tribalism that has resulted from the Hamilton view, to watch Congress and the President and hold in check their authority, and to nurture the Jeffersonian moral and economic growth and competition of the states and regions. Then they will be ready for Paul and Perry.

Alaska's Joe Miller, combat veteran and warrior-scholar with the highest credentials, would be a great match up with the more theoretical Ron Paul in this direction, either on a third party or at the head of the Republican ticket in 2012.

Russian troops above America’s border: Canada’s ‘Red Dawn’ moment?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 12/26/11

In August 2007, at the end of a series of war games uniting China and Russia, the Russians planted their flag at the North Pole, that singular place on earth where the world’s axis seems to align itself with the North Star. The planting of the flag was a Sputnik moment but underwater. Its purpose was to territorialize our northern regions as surely as a dog of war would pee on the frozen tundra to ward off Canadian coyotes. It should have been, but President George W. Bush, his imagination filled of visions of Armageddon in the Holy Land conjured by Appalachian mountain preachers, missed it. Presidential hopefuls, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry in particular, should not. Until recently, threats to America via the splendid isolation of the Arctic seemed absurd. But now it is reported that Russia intends to send a combat brigade.

The Arctic is transforming before our eyes, Heather A. Conley reports on Christmas in The Washington Post, and not just because the ice is melting. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the Arctic contains 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil resources and 30 percent of its gas resources. And as the ice melts, cargo transport could increase from the 111,000 tons in 2010 to more than 1 million tons in 2012, according to some Russian estimates.

It is increasingly the site of military posturing. “Russia has plans to establish a brigade that is specially equipped and prepared for military warfare in Arctic conditions,” she writes.

Does the presence of a Russian brigade present an existential threat to Canada; a ‘Red Dawn’ moment? Because if it does, it presents the same threat to America.
President Obama did the right thing in sending a few hundred troops to Australia, apparently symbolic action geared to the rise of China’s influence in the region. But questions arise if we would likewise defend our far more intimate Anglosphere kin, Canada.

Canadian foreign policy scholar Irvin Studin at the University of Toronto’s School of Public Policy and Governance has single-handedly and perhaps presciently warned of a “new strategic reality” in which war could come to our continent. Under new circumstances he writes, the U.S. “might very well raise the threshold beyond which it would be willing to directly defend or intervene to defend Canada in the event of an attack. The U.S. of this new century [weakened economically and weary of war abroad] will let many sleeping dogs lie.” The astonishing rise of Ron Paul’s isolationism is testament to Studin’s thesis.

The Star, a Canadian periodical, reports that Russia’s new Arctic security force will include 590 ground and sea-based units and 384 aviation units, raising fears that this is a disguised and destaibilzing military buildup. Russia says it is to guard against terrorists, smugglers, illegal fishers, and other interlopers. But Putin’s fresh show of force includes a multi-billion program to build a new generation of nuclear submarines to patrol the Northern Sea Route, he announced last month.

Any threat on Canada's northern borders is as great a threat to America as it is to Canada. It is said that there is nothing between Minnesota and the Arctic Circle but a bunch of fences. I’ve been there. There are no fences. But now a Russian brigade is on the way.

Free Kansas

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 12/22/11

The “revolution in a corn field” that is happening today in Governor Sam Brownback's Kansas is potentially as important as what happened here in 1776. Because in the last two years the states have learned that they don't have to do what the federal government tells them to do. They can think for themselves and govern themselves, just as Dorothy promised. As the Washington Post reports with an excellent article today titled “In Kansas, Gov. Sam Brownback puts tea party tenets into action with sharp cuts”: “If you want to know what a Tea Party America might look like, there is no place like Kansas. In the past year, three state agencies have been abolished and 2,050 jobs have been cut. Funding for schools, social services and the arts have been slashed. The new Republican governor rejected a $31.5 million federal grant for a new health-insurance exchange because he opposes President Obama’s health-care law. And that’s just the small stuff.”

It is the essence of the Tea Party and it is the essence of Jeffersonian democracy. And in this election it was said here the other day it could go one of two ways: There is loud, boisterous and thoughtless Tea Party support for the ideas of Newt Gingrich that advance big government further and to the direction of totalitarianism. Then there is the original item advanced by Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, the Tenth Amendment Center and Judge Andrew Napolitano; states thinking form themselves and freeing themselves from an archaic historic overlord. But someone needed to take action and Kansas has. This could not have been accomplished by any president even one sympathetic to these initiatives like Texas governor Rick Perry.

Working with Arthur Laffer, former Reagan adviser, Kansas is developing a working strategy for self governance. It will be a model now for other states, states in the middle with similar economies which want to go the way again - the American way - of sound money, hard work and self government.

If Ron Paul wins Iowa - Dorothy Rabinowitz of the WSJ who advanced Gingrich weeks back this morning declares Paul to be “the best-known propagandist for our enemies” (Surrender Dorothy!) - and he is doing well in New Hampshire, we will have a new party system. One a combo of Dems and Republicans (“No Labels”? Whigs?); Republicans such as George W. Bush and Dems like Obama with the same policies with cosmetic differences. The other a Jeffersonian party in the direction of Gary Johnson, Judge Nap and Ron Paul. Economically this might be seen as a shift in contention from the twins that have ravaged the world for 150 years Marx and Keynes to one between Keynes and Hayek. This returns us to our original nature: Hamilton v Jefferson.

Even today, thanks to Brownbach and Laffer it is possible to see a Jeffersonian century ahead.

Frodo lives: “The return of the king”

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 12/21/11

In 1967 I walked the night through around two top secret nuclear weapons buried not so deep in the heartland of Ohio’s vast corn belt. One day I noticed that someone has scrawled on the wall, "Frodo lives." Then it was everywhere. Frodo had become an overnight hero of an underground movement begun inadvertently by a mild mannered Catholic Oxford professor of Middle English who in 1937 published a charming book about hairy dwarves and little people, “The Hobbit.” Frodo became in no time at all the avatar of rising Aquarius. “The Hobbit,” prelude to the journey of Frodo featuring his uncle Bilbo, (like John Lennon and his son Sean, born on the same day) hits the big screen this year on Dec 14, 2012.

Any advocates of Aquarius not yet laughed out of the domain? Surely the date will strike a primal cord: 12/14/12, two days after the storied end of the world just ahead, December 12, 2012.

The century ahead is said to be the rising first of 20 centuries of Aquarius. Will it be different from the last century or last say, the last 500 years? It already is. It will be marked by a returning to earth of English imagination. Consider when my father was a boy what captured his imagination. Frank Reade, Jr. and his airships and steam-powered robots, Buck Rogers, Captain Z-Ro, Flash Gordon on his mythic journey to the planets. Imagination was rising as Walt Whitman had written in 1900, to Sirius, Jupiter and beyond. In the 1950s UFO visions shook the world and if you look closely they resembled the oculus architecture at the pitch of the arc of Byzantium cathedrals; “eyes of God,” very many hovering strangely over the Mormon lands.

But as Steve Jobs has said, virtually his last words, in fact, “The spaceship has landed.”

Today my kids are inspired and awakened since the 1990s by the earth shaman who preceded Newton and even Calvin, Harry Potter, returning America to its oldest English psychic ancestor. And Tolkien goes beyond to the “shadow of the past,” to Tom Bombadil, the earth spirit itself, here before river, trees, acorn and the first raindrop.

And look to the currency on TV today; “The River” coming in February from Steven Spielberg, following the trend of “Lost,” all returning to earth myths but with the inherent mysteries we saws in planetary pop culture of the fifties, found here again on earth. Even the popular “Survivor” series has a “returning” quality, as if in the Eliot poem of returning where we know the place for the first time

Maybe that is our time again. It should be a good time because when the journey to Jupiter and beyond is finished, says Whitman and we come home to ourselves, and “The true son of God shall come singing his songs." And that, with Tolkien, is the promise; the end of golem’s long shadow and “the return of the king.” And that is the promise of rising Aquarius.

Worth noting today on the last solstice before the fiery end. Or not. Maybe an end only to seeing and seeking things in the sky and a beginning again to find ourselves here on earth where we actually live.

Rick Perry rising

Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 12/20/11

7.57 million viewed the ABC debate on December 10. Nallie Andreeva reports on Deadline:Hollywood: “ABC News’ Republican presidential debate drew 7.6 million total viewers on Saturday, 2.1 million of them in the 25-54 demographic. Titled Your Voice, Your Vote – Republican Presidential Debate in Iowa, the special ranks as the most-watched debate of the 2012 presidential campaign to date, eclipsing Fox News’ Sept. 22 telecast, which averaged 6.1 million viewers."

Suggests that “normal people”; people who do not compulsively follow politics, are only recently beginning to get serious about the upcoming primaries in the last week.

The Gallup poll out December 19 indicating Republican preferences for 2012 GOP Presidential nomination and recent trends indicates that since the December 10 debate Gingrich sank 7, bringing him even with Romney. Romney and Paul remain flat. Bachmann up then down. Santorum, Huntsman flat since Dec. 11.

Only Rick Perry graphs steady rising progress since last Tuesday, Dec. 13, when people started to watch in greater numbers.

Did George W. Bush destroy America? Will Gingrich?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 12/19/11

Ruling class suggests Kim Jong-il’s son is in charge, as sclerotic North Korea like Greece pitches its third family member. And Jeb Bush likewise hovers this morning again at the top of the WSJ op ed page as his family seeks, strives and hopes for a brokered convention. Because without Bush (III) there is no America. And given the state of the Republican Party, crippled by money, influence, think tanks, nostalgia, the WSJ op ed page, too many Bushes and dead ideas as it seeks it's worthy, it is not unlikely. Newt Gingrich? That Gingrich this weekend brings in Abraham Lincoln, liberator of the world, avatar of the awakening centuries, to legitimize a miscreant like George W. Bush and advance his own feral visions of dictatorship and authoritarianism borders on the demonic. Iowa voters take note.

Time measures us by the size and status of our enemies: Nelson/Napolean, Grant/Lee, Churchill/Hitler, Roosevelt/ Stalin, George W. Bush/Kim Jong-il. But Gingrich begins the age. His claim that if elected president he would reign in the judiciary is a brilliant and dangerous ploy, peeling back the illusions of the American dilemma and slashing its idols, Lincoln, to expand his ever-growing girth. The Presidency has the right to reign in the Supreme Court, he claims, because it has done so twice before. The president of course has no right to reign in the Supreme Court and a president who does so should be thrown in the D.C. jail with the general population.

Then what was Lincoln’s authority in the invasion of the South and for freeing the slaves? Not the constitution. "Higher law." The law of God. In freeing the slaves Lincoln took the “higher law” path and even Rand Paul, primo libertarian and states’ rights advocate, acknowledges that morally, he did the right thing. Likewise, in the same theme and forum, God apparently gave Bush the right to torture the already pitiful foreign devils under the thumb of Osama bin Laden.

This authority came from God? As did Henry VIII, W. Bush declared himself to be the agent of “higher law” and the emissary of God. And Gingrich intends to do so as well.

In the Washington Post this weekend comes essential reading. The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq this month marks the passing of an era, claims Andrew J. Bacevich, a retired Army colonel and Boston University professor, who would make a very excellent VP candidate for Ron Paul if Wes Clark can’t take the job. President George H.W. Bush heralded the approach of a “new world order” he writes. But lacking poetry, his formulation never caught on. And that which never began ends today with American troops leaving Iraq.

Gingrich is today as always, the Trickster. But as Obi-wan Kenobi advanced it, the Trickster’s power is only advanced by the people’s inclination to deception. He tips the statues of our gigundous idols to find the weasel work underneath. But in this we find Newt, the Tea Party champion to be in fact the antithesis of Tea Party. Tea party speaks for the states as Rick Perry does and Ron Paul does. In that regard, Tea Party speaks to our future. Newt paves the way to Bismarck, Kim and himself and he understands that we are at the moment of essential change today and it can go either way.

Ron Paul and Moshe Feiglin

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 12/13/11

Last year, when the idea of the Tea Party was beginning to catch on, the New York Times ran a story on the rising Tea Party in Israel. On stage was Moshe Feiglin, an Israeli leader and I would say authentic, indegeneous folk hero. Feiglin is the head of the Jewish Leadership Movement which seeks to turn “the state of Jews into a Jewish state.” Feiglin and company were Tea Party before Tea Party was cool and before it became loud. I was writing about the Tea Party at the beginning and for two years at least, every day, Ron Paul and I were on the same page. It was why I first became interested in Feiglin. As Paul rises in Iowa he will carry America, whether he wins or not. He will not go away. The same can be said of Feiglin.

The Tea Party has even become imperial with Glenn Beck’s resent sojourn to Israel to declare Christian solidarity. His call was famously repudiated by Feiglin and several well known Senators who planned to attend suddenly cancelled. But America’s vision has always been imperial regarding Israel. We intend to help, but imperialists always do. Many Americans see Israel as a pseudo-American state in which they somehow have a say. George Schultz, advisor to George W. Bush, once said on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer that as a Christian he “has a say” in Israel. With no mean intention. It is taken for granted by those who love Israel most; Christians in the heartland and American Jews in the northeast.

Israel in recent years has become more Jewish. Jewish Americans have become more American.

My interest in Israel is correctly described by former Mayor Ed Koch of NY: After 9/11 “an attack on Israel is an attack on America.” In a conversation recently, Feiglin framed it more elegantly: An attack on Israel, he said, “is an attack on freedom.”

Feiglin brings a challenge to Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership on January 31. Events there could very well parallel events here in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Rafi Farber, a young Israel supporter, sees a parallel between Paul and Feiglin. “Ron Paul is to Government Spending as Moshe Feiglin is to the Oslo Peace Process,” he writes.

“America made a decision in 1913 on big government,” he blogs from Samaria. “To change that direction requires not simply a change in style. It requires a 180 degree paradigm shift in the way America thinks about itself as a country,” and as Paul brings that paradigm change to America, so does Feiglin to Israel. And that includes aid to Israel: “Both Ron Paul and Moshe Feiglin are trying to do the impossible and change the way their countries think about themselves. And both Ron Paul and Moshe Feiglin want America to stop giving foreign aid to Israel.”

Indeed, as Feiglin wrote years back in his book, The War of Dreams:

. . . the State of Israel, with the GNP of a modern country, can easily do without aid that amounts to just one and one half percent of its budget – aid for which Israel essentially surrenders its independence. Why do Israelis insist on developing a sense of imaginary dependence on the U.S. and Europe, specifically at the point that Israel is both economically and militarily vigorous? The answer to that question is not at all connected to Israel's military or economic capabilities. It is on a totally different plane.

The Hill

Newt Gingrich: The world begins with Trickster

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 12/13/11

The conventional wisdom is that Newt can’t get elected so Romney should be pushed. Same was said of Barack Obama. Certainly Newt can get elected and a Gingrich/Rick Perry ticket or Gingrich/Jon Huntsman ticket or a Gingrich/Nikki Haley ticket would bring a new political agenda. Possibly only Gingrich can bring it to Washington. The Trickster starts the world again and Newt is the Trickster.

What he says shocks because it is true. And we know it is true. We just haven’t been saying that since at least 1992 and the Oslo Accords or even before. I felt we turned the corner to cloud cuckoo land when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and George H.W. Bush began taking foreign policy advice from Bob Geldorf. (Geldorf, who can fairly be called squalid, was a singer in the Boom Town Rats, an Irish punk band. He was the Monkey Trickster who legitimized Bono and Lady Gaga as foreign policy luminaries.) Since then we say these things are true because we have accepted them to be, like taking Pinocchio to be the real boy, we know they are not true but they feel nice and if so many of us say the same thing we believe them to be. And we don’t want any trouble. The wooden boy is good enough. But they were never true and only the Trickster – he comes with the sword and cuts through the false consciousness of the establishment press like butter – can lift the curtain.

A Gingrich/Perry or Gingrich/Huntsman or Gingrich/Bobby Jindal operation in the White House in 2012 is a very real possibility, even at the moment, a probability. Gingrich understands the new day. He is not beholden to old family sentiment and the ancient regime. The new starts with the Trickster. And he is essential for the new to begin, like John Brown or Bob Dylan. There would have been no Lincoln without Brown – Thoreau and Emerson would not have brought in the New England preachers. And without Dylan the Beatles would still be in the floppy wigs, playing Bar Mitzvahs and weddings. They have said as much. The Trickster awakens the world.

Then he goes away. A classic Trickster run today would be a Gingrich/Perry or Huntsman ticket. Changing everything. New foreign policy, balanced budget, the whole nine yards. Then two years in the horde that brought him there tires of him and decides to throw him out. And as quickly as he slips in, coyote Trickster slips back into the forest. Then the great man takes over, whoever that would be. Probably who Newt brings in now as his VP: Huntsman, Perry, Haley, someone else yet unsuspected as Gingrich always does the unexpected. It is the way of the Trickster.

A Christmas wish: England and the Anglosphere

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 12/12/11

A clever young Israeli writes that Bathsheba should be looked at as the cosmic feminine principle of the Jewish people; the equal and opposite counterforce to the cosmic male principal, David. The history of the Jews and Israel’s four external children in the outside world - Orthodox, Muslim, Catholic, Protestant - all evolved from one moment between these two. I think the term for that moment is coniunctio; the sacred marriage, the marriage of the divine spirit. It was the moment that produced Solomon, his temple and his kingdom. The moment time rose from an empty desert to become the world.

I hope those toothless labor leaders who brag of their shiny new Jaguars and who so want to yield England’s birth right and sovereignty to Germany catch the magnificent Canadian-produced series The Tudors to see that we in England and North America were born as well in coniunctio, like Solomon, in lust and panic, and our own tribal mother this side of Israel is Anne Boleyn, mother of Elizabeth I. It was Elizabeth who gave the England its kingdom and Elizabeth who created the modern world. Her psychic ancestor, the White Goddess of Birth, Love, and Death, was worshiped under countless titles for a thousand years preceding her in pre-history, celebrated at the winter solstice. A testament to England’s old soul; a virtual “old testament” of England, is well documented in a classic text by Robert Graves, “The White Goddess.”

Maybe It is just too late for us. Maybe England, like America, has already been killed by populism and sociology and journalism and political science; the nerd prom, Bono and the smart phone, and has to start again at zero, like in the first day of the Christ, year zero. Today, the shadow of Benny Hill quite literally stalks the Republican primary. Possibly we have wandered just too far away from mother.

Germany gains strength. Sarko was always Angela’s bitch and as is clear today, France's fate was fixed in Vichy France. She, France, will be German in time but England should stay with us.

The American Revolution drove us apart but WW II brought us back together. We belong together. We, the U.S. and England should begin now to formalize our primal root, our history and own relationship; we plus Canada, Australia, New Zealand and any other of the English-speaking people brought together again in WW II. For Germany has outgrown the Anglo-American conquest and soon will outgrow Angela. (Did we think they would forget? Did they forget Napoleon?)

With the successful rise of the economic East, America for the first time finds a margin on the left where our free range comes to a stop. With the rise of Germany and its EU, England finds the same margin to its right, the same one that has always been there.

Ottawa, jewel of the Great White North at the top of the world, should be looked at today as the beginning spot of something that resembles the EU but instead as the most obvious union of English-speaking nations which still hang together in spirit. Hatched all in time from the same lusty and panicky coitus of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.

The UN, NATO, EU, etc. are really packages resulting from the WW II conquest, but the victory now is past and Poland today begs for Germany to save it. Anglosphere is a better fit for times ahead for England and North America.

Free New England. Free California. Martha Coakley to the rescue.

. . . states rights’, states’ rights, states’ rights . . . Texas Governor Rick Perry, April 15, 1009

When I proposed up here at the buildup to the war on Iraq that if the United States no longer wanted to be part of the UN then New England should send its own represented, it brought a kindly note from John Kenneth Galbraith who thought it “ . . . wonderfully to the good.” America’s greatest ambassador since Franklin, George Kennan, like Galbraith, almost into his hundreds, proposed New England secession. “We are a monster country . . .” he wrote, and proposed decentralizing the U.S. into a dozen constituent republics. Harvard’s pastor, Rev. Peter Gomes, proposed a new Hartford Convention like the one during the War of 1812.

Possibly Emerson’s anthem and manifesto of New England self reliance is beginning to sink in. Martha Coakley, Massachusetts Attorney Generally, following Emerson’s order to “go alone,” takes initiative on her state’s behalf. From the Massachusetts Real Estate Law Blog: “Breaking away from the proposed 50 state attorney general settlement talks, Mass. Attorney General Martha Coakley has filed a monumental consumer protection lawsuit over wrongful foreclosures against the top 5 U.S. lenders, Bank of America Corp., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Ally Financial.”

The Democrats hate Wall Street and the Republicans hate Washington, D.C. As George Will wrote this week, Texas Governor Rick Perry doesn’t like either very much. Which in my opinion makes him the man for our times. New England is a place. Texas is a place. Let them think for themselves. Take the training wheels off.

The timing of Coakley’s action seems a manifestation of Occupy; moving from the amorphous to the actual. That is, moving from rest to an awakening. I propose Coakley take it further and run for governor on this; Governor of New England.

And California Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes, a Democrat from Sylmar, CA, for governor of California. He is gathering signatures for a ballot initiative for what he calls the California Opportunity and Prosperity Act, in which hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants living in California could work without the threat of deportation. But this could be a job for Arnold Schwarzenegger, no? He seems at loose ends. (“I’ll be back!”)

California is falling apart because it is a free state which, like Tibet, must answer to power thousands of miles away. Companies and capital are fleeing to the hinterland. A major India journal recently suggested that if the U.S. wanted to jumpstart the economy it should bring in several million East Asians, Chinese, South Koreans and others thereabouts to start a new economic cycle. As New England brought in Irish workers in the 1830s and later. It gave New England a hundred years. California should be able to make its own judgments on this.

Arizona’s immigration issues last year brought a legal prelude. Not a lawyer, but as I understood it, Arizona was not within its Constitutional rights to make decisions on immigration. Nor is California. Fuentes knows that. So it is a Constitutional issue: Does California have the right to override federal legislation by state referendum? No, the real question is, should it?

A question for Judge Andrew Napolitano.

Rick Perry and Mike Huckabee should join in the Trump debate

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 12/8/12

Mike Huckabee should join the Donald Trump debate on Dec. 27 pitched by Dick Morris as “the most important Presidential debate in American history.” Potentially, yes. At least since 1860. And Rick Perry must be there as well. This is the big fight and The Donald is Don King.

Because there is panic in the primaries as the Establishment attempts to gather itself. This morning there are two pictures of New Jersey governor Chris Christie on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, suggesting – “just talk and just speculation . . . hypothetical” - a write-in campaign and a brokered convention. They would feature those who are not Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney like Mitch Daniels, who used to work for the Bush family, and Christie, who hopes to in the future. And did I mention Jeb Bush? His name tags on at the end there. How about Chris Christie? How about Jeb Bush? How about Jeb Bush in a Chris Christie mask?

Jennifer Rubin’s column in the Washington Post features a Goofus and Gallant contrast:

Gingrich, for example, in his over-the-top style called this election the most important since 1860. Christie at lunch had mocked the elf-importance [sic] of those who say such things. Gingrich at one point declared that he’d need not just eight years but solid majorities in the Congress. Christie had chided pols who are obsessed with the time in office rather than the progress they make on big issues. Gingrich explained how he couldn’t get anything done without big GOP majorities. Christie had spoken about how a leader can pull in Democratic support. . . The speech certainly revealed Gingrich’s exaggerated regard for his own intellect, his tone deafness, his penchant for self-delusion and his serious handicap in reaching voters beyond the GOP base.

All the result of the venerable WSJ Dorothy Rabinowitz’s column a few weeks back dragging Newt out of rural obscurity to the top of the polls. Lonely are the brave.

Possibly the panic is greater in Iowa and more significant. I may have this wrong but as I understand it there is no ballot in Iowa so anyone can enter at any time. So Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who won there last time, could still enter Iowa. And he seems as a good a fit for Iowa as Christie does for Wall Street.

I don't see Iowans voting for Newt, who not long ago converted to Catholicism. His conversion seems the Dutch Schultz model popular with politicians today: Schultz lived a life of ruin and mayhem and converted on his death bed. It appeared suspicious to us in the Catholic school. Iowans might prefer John Bunyan’s Christian on the road to the Celestial City. Someone more like Ron Paul in principal. But not in real life. I don’t see them voting for him either; too much like John Bunyan’s Christian. Paul is a revolutionary and Iowa is not yet in revolutionary times. Nor do I see them voting for Mitt Romney. The mischievous video “Romney: Stuff the Ice Chest” (“I would force spiders and badgers on the enemy!”) hits a spooky cord. Earthy Iowans intuit Romney’s 7% creep factor.

That leaves Texas governor Rick Perry hovering around at 11% in fourth place behind Gingrich, Paul and Romney. Iowa is still unsettled and Perry is a good fit. As good and natural a fit as Huckabee was last time around when he came from behind to win.

Draft Mike Huckabee

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/7/11

In the new Gallup poll virtually all of the support for Herman Cain has translated into support for Newt Gingrich. He stands at 37% now and Romney is at 22%, where he has been all year. Everyone else is in single digits. Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney? Really? How about Mike Huckabee? I can’t think of anyone better prepared to be President. I can’t think of a better man. It is not too late.

Huck gave it long consideration early on. He might have seen Texas Governor Rick Perry riding over the horizon pretty tall in the saddle. As Gingrich said, if Perry could adapt to the national scene there would be no stopping him. Then something happened with Perry and I still can’t figure out exactly what. For whatever reason, he decided in that environment to stay out. It might be wise in this environment to get back in. Gingrich and Romney are not satisfying options.

He won Iowa last time around. He would likely win this year again if he was in. And against Gingrich and Romney in South Carolina he would likely do well. Florida too. There is a pall over this race now. GOP leadership is not pleased with the contest between the current front runners. No one is except Team Obama.

And Huck has very good Tea Party kung fu. Not the shouting and hollering kind like Gingrich, Dick Armey and Glenn Beck bring forth. Huck is no iconoclast or renegade. The mature format of his forum over the weekend brought high marks from the Tenth Amendment Center, on the front lines of Tea Party relevance.

“The emphasis you saw placed on limiting the powers of the federal government during the forum reflects an awakening we’re seeing across America,” Tenth Amendment Center communications director Mike Maharrey said. “People are concerned about the growing power and intrusiveness of the federal government – from the whole health care issue to concerns that the government is disregarding our civil liberties in the name of security. People are recognizing we need to return to the proper balance of power between the state and federal government intended by the founders.”

“Huck’s forum brought us back to the philosophical underpinnings of conservatism,” said Janis Cherry, Director of Policy during his presidential run. “Too much of this campaign so far has been about nonsense like the HPV vaccine causing retardation or children working as janitors or ‘corporations are people’ that has made the GOP look stupid and silly. Huck showcased the candidates in a setting that was serious and substantive, something Bill Buckley would have approved.”

Exactly. Probably why his popularity today seems broader and deeper than it was four years ago. A Catholic journal likewise gave his forum highest kudos.

Huck should rethink. In hindsight, he was a man ahead of his time and ours and maybe his time is now.

Perry should attend the Donald Trump event

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 12/7/11

They come in twos, it is advised in Star Wars, but which is the emperor and which is the sith? And there are still today two New Yorks, the high brow brahmins and the broad shoulders of the working class. Everything else is precariously perched in the in between. Jimmy Breslin and Norman Mailer. The gut brain and the ethereal. But New York today as always gets its power from the broad shoulders. And say what else you like about Donald trump, he's down with the people. And he represents New York, still the center of the world, in its gut. All candidates should attend his debate.

The Bloomberg/Washington Post debate was supposed to be the high brow event in this race, featuring Charlie Rose as moderator, bow tie wearers and Al Hunt. Good for the people who read the New Yorker and dine at The Leopard at des Artistes. But are you likely to run across Rose at the Frazier/Foreman fight? You might have run across Norman Mailer there with his bud Donald Trump.

Particularly among conservatives, that which we used to proudly call working class, as working class hero John Lennon did, has been commandeered today by ideologists, religious fanatics and the dangerously disturbed like Glenn Beck. Trump today is quintessentially New York, although Tom Wolfe snarks at his tacky architecture. That is part of it. This is New York, not Versailles. Let Trump ask the questions.

All who attended the Dartmouth debate should go to this one as well as more than any of the others in our times it is likely to be the people's forum. Especially those who took the free meal; Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann and didn't slip out the back door. It's the Donald buck. He should not let that one back in.

Time for a third party with Gary Johnson

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 12/6/11

I said “hey” to Gary Johnson as he was standing mournfully outside the state house in Concord, NH, when he signed on to the primary. The former governor of New Mexico seemed the most normal or human of the candidates; does not “prepare a face to meet the faces that he meets” or see himself as an object that is Gary Johnson, candidate, as most of the others see themselves. We talked of Tuckerman Ravine and New Hampshire. He said recently on the John Stossel show that he could possibly run as a third-party candidate. I hope he does.

Others threaten to do so, like Trump and Bloomberg, but they would run as third or fourth gargantuan party just like the other two but with themselves as the new Godzilla.

But Gary Johnson, with Ron Paul, has added enormously to this campaign. As he told Stossel, the rising energies in conservatism today are in Libertarianism and Johnson is a libertarian. Most of the gargantuans, or globalists or neo-totalitarians - Clinton, Bono, Trump, Bloomberg - act out of a basic anthropology which would claim that if you can conquer New York City then you have conquered the citadel and you have conquered the world. The presumption is that people are sheep, but our two existing globalist parties helped make them sheep. There is little inner satisfaction in conquering sheep. A libertarian third party approach would liberate individuals, freeing them from the neurosis to “save the world” and guide the child instead to Krishnamurti’s direction, allowing them to free and conquer themselves as individuals and as communities. This cannot be done with a top down, one-size-fits-all federal government.

I was drafted into libertarianism in 2003 when I wrote an article titled “A states’ rights defense against Dick Cheney.” It took a long time to figure out what it was, but Johnson, Ron and Rand Paul and Judge Andrew Napolitano have clarified things. I claimed then not knowing it was libertarian that New Hampshire and Vermont need not participate in the war on Iraq citing Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions.

In those days it seemed only a few hundred were listening, but today millions nightly follow Judge Andrew Napolitano on states’ rights, constitutional government, Austrian economics and personal freedom. I have never voted for a third party but would not this round consider voting for either Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich. It would be a nice option.

Besides the books of Judge Napolitano, there are two recent free state and libertarian books that some western governors are already using as texts: Rick Perry’s “Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington” and “Nullification” by Thomas Woods. I have spoken at a series of conferences which featured both Johnson and Woods and the energy and ideas presented brought a vitality that I’ve not seen elsewhere in my lifetime. It brings new karma arising. Much is to be done in this regard because most states are in truth not ready for self government and rely on federal government as the inmates of the cuckoo's nest rely on Big Nurse. The northeastern states; the oldest states and Vermont in particular, are most dependent. These are ideas for new people and new regions like Texas, California and Johnson’s New Mexico: The west is the best.

That is where the future of the free state lies. Those who have made the journey across the desert sense it, feel it, and Washington, D.C. is just too far away to tell them what to do.

Would a third party skew results. This time, in a race between Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama it makes little difference.

The late distinguished historian David Smiley used to say that when the United States moved to centralized government in the 1850s all of the major governments in the world followed suit. It may prove to have been the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. Johnson, the Pauls, Napolitiano and company offer us an auspicious new beginning.

‘Twilight’ of the Republicans; Jon Huntsman, Rick Perry to rise

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 12/5/11

“In what all say is an ‘historic’ election, the GOP is fielding its B team while the A team sits in the locker room. Since when does that win the big games?” The Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger asked last week.

Because, like Bella Swan, they are lost in a dark trance and can’t wake up. Because they have with astonishing hubris considered the 2012 election to be a slam dunk, visualizing President Obama to be the second Jimmy Carter, who they followed sensationally with Ronald Reagan in 1981. And so they have been inclined to advance their weakest agents; Gingrich, Cain, Bachmann, just anybody, and appeal to angry birds, to the dissolute base and to those dumpster babies of archaic conservatism, red neck radio commentators.

Possibly the Republicans have spent one too many mornings at the bar in the smoky Legion hall. They bring forth first their most honorable, the war wounded. But they don’t seem to have noticed that the war is over some 70 years now and the Poles today beg Germany to save them. War is over. We won. Time to come home.

Technically, the Republicans are stuck in time, much as the South was until W.J. Cash published The Mind of the South in 1941 and changed self awareness.

But an 8.6 unemployment rate should change things.

“Is this [the 8.6 unemployment rate, down from 9] good enough to get Obama reelected?” Stuart Varney of Varney & Co. asks colleague Charles Payne.

“Moving in the right direction. Every Republican should be worried,” says Payne.

This is good for Republicans. They should have been worried six months ago.

This should be a wakeup call. The Republicans should begin to get serious now and send forth their best people. Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman should rise. Perry did very well in Huckabee’s forum this weekend and gave a great speech to the New Hampshire legislature last week. The Huntsman girls’ YouTube bits give a human touch and apparently Perry and Huntsman are the only candidates with a sense of humor. The others appear to have taken laugh lessons for public speaking. The Huntsman/Gingrich “Lincoln-Douglas” style debate matchup is one of the best ideas to come this campaign to date.

But it’s too late for Mitt, on the settee this week with H.W. Bush and his little Bichon Frise and Barbara, sheepishly seeking their endorsement in Texas. What kind of man would do that after the entire Bush Establishment (including Karl Rove, Kissinger, Barbara and the neocon apparatus) orchestrated the “anybody but Romney” campaign featuring Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, John Thune and anybody but Romney?

Outlook: George Will’s Saturday column in the Washington Post, “Stop the coronation”: “Both Gingrich and Romney are too risky to anoint today” pretty much comes down to an endorsement of Jon Huntsman ( “. . . Republican for people who rather dislike Republicans, but his program is the most conservative.”). Gingrich, the "angry badger," will destroy Romney and then destroy himself as he always does.

Are Republicans “normal”?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 12/2/11

My daughter, who is not old enough to go to college, says that although she doesn’t really understand all of the issues, she likes President Obama because he seems “normal.” She says most of the Republican candidates “don’t seem normal.” It’s been my observation. I met Obama with my kids up here when he was running and instinctively liked him for that reason. It is why as things go today, Obama will likely win in a landslide. Jon Huntsman seems normal too and Republicans have no use for him whatsoever. Rick Perry, normal. Same.

Another thing, they like to fail. The Republican apparatus today is enormously proud of its failures (Gingrich). The Democrats, especially in Massachusetts, were like that for a long time after JFK. Took pride in impossible losers like George McGovern and The Duke. Considered losing with McGovern a victory. With Howard Dean as well. Likewise, they did not seem exactly “normal.” They seemed ideological, driven by ideas, even vengeance, abstracted and ungrounded. Like Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, Herman Cain and Rick Santorum today. Maybe it is a Reagan afterglow; there will never be another; we will wait devotedly for the return of the avatar.

Another Kennedy announces he may run in Massachusetts this week. Perhaps this one will be the returning master up here. Still they wait.

The Republicans also have ghost issues; things they support vehemently but don’t really want to happen. That gives them that out-of-body quality. Like balanced budget. They love to talk about that but they don’t want it to happen. It is something to wish for like next year in Jerusalem. They had a conniption fit last summer about wanting it and not wanting it.

And the small government thing. They don’t believe in small government. They believe in thin government. They want to remove organs of the federal government placed in there in our times because they didn’t put them there. But there has not been a moment’s discussion until the Tea Party about actual small governments which we call states. Now the Tea Party has forgotten it. And how would states work with a devolved federal government? Rule of thumb: Power will not devolve to new agencies like states and regional circles until those regions are fully formed and ready to receive it. Was that way when Germany and England removed from Rome and when the colonies removed from England. And you never really remove; you mainly shift certain responsibilities to more appropriate realms as the greater convention matures.

So all small government talk amounts to antithetical posturing. You will get a lot of that in the Gingrich administration’s “idea factory.” He’s a regular bee hive of ideas.

Texas is probably the only state ready for the shifting of authority from central government to regional. So when Governor Rick Perry says he is an outsider, he really is. Pundits who say he has spent a long time in government because he was governor of Texas miss the central idea: He has spent a long time in SMALL GOVERNMENT. And that is why he brings a successful model of regional development and governance for the 21st century.

We could have, should have, had that back here in New England a hundred and fifty years ago but defaulted to governance by New York and Washington. Elizabeth Warren, Okie grandmother, briefly brought us an auspicious new beginning. But again we default back to a Kennedy family member. ‘Twas ever thus.

The end of the Smoke-Filled Rooms?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 12/1/11

“In what all say is an ‘historic’ election, the GOP is fielding its B team while the A team sits in the locker room. Since when does that win the big games?” writes The Wall Street Journal’s talented Daniel Henninger. And he overheard mumbling of late: "Maybe it's time to bring back the smoke-filled rooms."

This was the nearly mythical system of selection in which party leaders and party bosses gathered over cigars, bourbon and branch to pick a candidate "who could win," he tells. “The most famous smoke-filled room pick was William McKinley, anointed for the 1896 election by Ohio kingmaker Mark Hanna (though in fact Hanna got McKinley nominated over the opposition of GOP party bosses).”

No, it persisted longer. When Jack Kennedy first decided to run for office in Massachusetts he presented himself to three prominent Boston Irishmen who pretty much ran Boston. One I knew well; old school . . . a drink in the right hand at any time of day, a cigar in the other, high starched collar and a diamond pin in his tie, a new grey Cadillac every two years. When Kennedy told them he intended to run for office and he needed 16,000 signatures to enter, one of the burghers said they would have them on his desk in the morning. Kennedy said, no you actually have to go out and get people to sign. Which they did. First time in Boston. But there was never any question that Jack would get the job. It was more of an appointment, with a little public performance thrown in of people on the street signing papers. But it was long decided elsewhere that Jack would be their man.

This was the politics of smoke-filled rooms; situations decided by the traditional association of money and men. But the worst-case was the most recent, the election of our very worst president, George W. Bush. This was decided before he was even born.

And that is where all the trouble comes this time around. Both parties have lost the atavistic connection to their Boston families, the Kennedys and the Lodges, playing out today in its end game now with Obama, keeper of the Kennedy dog, and the heartfelt yearning for Jeb Bush. These are birth pains. America is being born.

The level of corruption in the Kennedy mystique, personal and professional, was high and unprecedented in America. The level of professional corruption in the George W. Bush administration was astonishing and immoral. And as per the B team Henninger mentions; Cain, Gingrich come to mind, we have become acclimated to it.

Family politics devolves a republic or even a democracy to an empire by lowering the political dialog to pabulum. Did Sarah Palin mistakenly attribute a quote? Did Rick Perry get the voting age wrong in New Hampshire? The people default to trusting a political family – Hapsburg, Papandreou, Kennedy, Clinton, Bush - because they do not trust themselves or maybe because they no longer care and they find it easy. Then those who desire the rigors of a republican government should separate from them.

If regions want a significant family to identify culturally and spiritually with as England does and Israel will do again in my children’s lifetime, they should appoint a queen and leave governance to an elected prime minister. It works in Canada.

Sarah Palin still untried . . .

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/30/11


Hot Air comments yesterday: “. . . the polls in every one of the early states have been pretty much of a roller coaster ride since summer. There’s probably time for at least one more rise and fall before the state’s [South Carolina] residents actually go to the polls.”

The Republican campaign degenerates now to a state like that in the mid-‘70s when political contrast was phrased “hippies v. hard hats.” The hard hats, red necks today, were characteristically pictured sitting by a construction site on lunch break with American flag decals on their safety helmets and on their metal lunch pails poignant political slogans like “I’m not FONDA commies.” Yelling to passing hippies or just anyone, “Get a job! Take a bath!” (And to hippie girls or just any women, “I like it in the morning!”)

Today, Lou Dobbs lines up the fat white men nightly on Fox Business, the hard hats apparently all radio commentators now, with their hearty guffaws to declare the Occupy people “smelly,” “need a bath” “germy.” It is not just stupid and provincial, it is second generation stupid. Any reference to the Sixties brings uproarious laughter. Time came to an abrupt halt for this group around 1962 when the first Volkswagen bugs entered the American mainstream.

Those were the days when Merle Haggard would sing his anthem, “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee . . .” Sadly, now The Hag likes to brag that he rolled a jumbo with Hillary.

But those happy days are here again for Republicans. They have finally found their perfect provincial hard hat candidate: Newt Gingrich.

Sarah Palin actually has good skill in political name calling; those who misspeak publically like Palin and Perry are creative right brain thinkers. She, from the heartland, absorbed the Sixties, the Seventies and the Eighties and Nineties. Her comments like the “nerd prom” are skillful, not geared at the working people or the “hippies” but the Washington reporters who have been absorbed by the political establishment and become its agents and hacks.

Sarah Palin, still a paid commentator I believe for Fox, should go direct on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show – he the honest, courageous dean of free comment today – and say this: “I am thinking of entering the Republican primary campaign.”

See what happens.

Because right now the hard hat Republican base has commandeered the party. It retreats to a degenerative state and doesn’t have a chance against President Obama. The varying support and lack of coalition around a candidate is nature’s way of saying something’s wrong. (Gingrich, Dobbs and the hard hat right will recognize the phrase from that degenerate hippie group from the Sixties, Spirit.)

Forget Iowa and New Hampshire. Focus on South Carolina. Rick Perry, the only outside-the-beltway candidate besides Ron Paul is at 4% in South Carolina. Newt Gingrich has a commanding lead according to the Augusta Chronicle, at 38% followed by Romney at 15%.

If Gingrich wins South Carolina he will win the nomination and loose to Obama. The Republicans will feel good about themselves because they like to lose and the really want Jeb Bush with some cover agent – Chris Christie, the first choice –in 2016. They can wait. They like to wait.

But if Sarah Palin can win South Carolina she will win the nomination and save the party from itself and beat Obama.

Why Ron Paul, in brief

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/29/11

The Euro debt crisis began to spiral out of control when Prime Minister George Papandreou – called a “prince” by Reuters - failed to meet expectations. Papandreou was the third generation of his family to serve in that office. This is connected to the temperament of Greece. The desire to want the same family to run for office again and again is in Jungian terms a "feeling" one. This is good for the Greeks in my opinion provided that they stay out of the EU which is in the same Jung vein is a "thinking" operation; a "greater Germany" if you will as Germany is in these terms a thinking, objectivist place and center of the economic matrix. And so is the US but the sensibility here to default to governance by family members – princes; Bushes, Kennedys and Clintons in particular - in high office shows decline in our case as it presents a shift in sensibilities from the thinking function on which we were founded to a degenerative emotional realm, one not native to American karma. One bad for a new people; one suited to the ancient regime. It is in a word a decline to monarchist instincts, or better, a desire given the size of our country, for an emperor to relieve ourselves of the anguish and transcendence of self governance.

Nowhere has the destruction of this declining function been expressed more than in the illegal and immoral Bush/Cheney period including the arbitrary invasion of Iraq which poisoned the moral pinnings of the American armed forces, the embedded press, the Supreme Court and the accommodating and appeasing Congress. Those who stood against were few: Wes Clark, Russ Feingold, Jim Webb, Colin Powell’s former chief Lawrence Wilkerson, the venerable Senator Robert C. Byrd and Ron Paul. America cannot go forward until it returns and comes to terms with that broken historic moment.

The Ron Paul movement builds on the values awakened on that moment and the first value was this: Courage. Paul was brave when it was time to be brave. So it is a good beginning. Anyone who watched Tim Tebow in the last five minutes of the football game on Sunday will understand that America is still dynamic and beginning and will not default to the ethos and parameters of decline. But both parties today are burdened by the tendency to default to relatives - Clintons, both of whom supported the Bush/Cheney invasion, for Democrats and Bushes for Republicans - and this is symptomatic of parties here, as it is in Greece, unable to adapt to new demographic conditions and circumstances and new generations. But in America, the heartland has risen in population and economy while the same demographics in the northeast decline: America is moving west.

The states have filled out and developed their own characteristics and circumstances. They will not long accept top down one-size-fits-all governance from far away designed for the early days when America was largely a forest. Ron Paul, with sophisticated new and comprehensive thinking on states’ rights, Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek and innovative perspective on foreign policy offers an adaptive political perspective fit to the times today and the times ahead. Surveys show that enlisted Army personal, the touchstone of American will and sympathy, support Ron Paul ahead of all the other Republican candidates.

Ron Paul and the new age of political culture

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/28/11

Ron Paul brings to government culture today a vision as complete and comprehensive as that which Martin Luther brought to religious culture. He is close to Luther in this regard as well: Ron Paul, like Martin Luther, dispels the worship of idols. Europe could not conceive of life without Roman dominance in the 1500s even as it descended into massive corruption. Until Luther, when half of the European establishment flipped. Paul and his libertarian cadre disdainfully view the political establishment of Washington, D.C. and it may be about to flip.

Even Wesley Clark, who should have been the Democratic nominee for president in 2004 has had good words according to published reports: “Ron Paul — he has his own idea on foreign policy, you should listen to it. Maybe there’s something in there that’s worth studying,” he is said to have commented after the foreign policy debate.

I wrote passionately about both Clark and Paul in 2004 and saw no conflict and much common ground. But the culture was not ready for Clark or Paul and yielded to the immature, irresponsible, escapist siren call of “rock stars” and favorite sons and daughters. The corrupt Bush/Cheney establishment depended on this institutional denial particularly in the Democratic senate. It was a form of appeasement.

Paul, like Luther, brings an organic, heroic response “by the people” to corruption that has carried over generations. Rule of thumb: If the sprawling, brooding, dominating temple and soaring edifice representing the emperor, pope or former president is taller and larger than the individual it is intended to represent, the idolatry surrounding the august personage is directly proportionate to the overblown size of the idol. This idolatry has made us a democracy rather than a republic or confederation of republics as Jefferson intended. Today it is unlikely that students are taught the difference.

It has lessened us as individuals. We idolize the big screen as well and democracy instead of republican government has made us a horde, our totem animal the penguin, helpless in the face of skilled predators. Aldous Huxley wrote of this early on and it is reflected in his book Brave New World; we would become government’s customers instead of citizens, narcotized by the “feelies” and scurrying on cue to “Cyber Monday.”

Ron Paul worships none of our idols. Those who have seen the masterful Showtime presentation, The Tudors, will recall the danger of new ideas repeated today with Paul and son Rand as their fearless tellers, offering a new way to live; a better way, a truer way – the way proposed by Jefferson. It will suddenly cross culture like a firestorm from one place to another as Luther's vision did in the court of Henry VIII.

Outlook: If Newt takes the Republican nomination Paul should run as third party with Dennis Kucinich as VP. Obama may drop Biden. Rumor has started at the Wall Street Journal that he will replace Biden with Hillary. That suggestion from two Democratic commentators from Fox Business with right sympathies. Obama should replace Biden but with either Jim Webb (fire) or Wes Clark (maturity and strength) to rebuild the party from scratch with new people for a new generation. It is the only way to clear out the moral ambiguity of Democratic Senators who unconscionably supported the illegality and immorality of Bush/Cheney in Iraq, namely Hillary and Biden. Will need Dave “Mudcat” Saunders and Steve Jarding however to take the heartland, as he must. Southerner soldiers Wes Clark and Jim Webb would help.

Greece, Italy, Portugal should leave ‘greater Germany’ while they can still get out.

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/25/11

AFP reports: The European Union demanded Wednesday sweeping powers to override national budgets and proposed issuing joint eurozone bonds to help resolve and prevent a repeat of the debt crisis.

"Without stronger governance, it will be difficult if not impossible to sustain the common currency," EU Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said of his latest legislative proposals.

The head of the executive EU arm, Barroso presented radical plans that would allow him and Economy Commissioner Olli Rehn to decide to intervene in national policymaking, the article reports.

It is time for Greece, Italy and Portugal to think twice about the EU. It was all the fever ten, twenty years ago when the economic cycle was rising to its peak and Bill Clinton – he of the 50 gold watches - was just rising to status of world shaman. It was a giddy time; the Dalai Lama charmed the world and Bono was writing op-eds for the New York Times. Every individual, all people in the global village would be as George Soros saw in the rising karma, a kind of American; an American by degree.

But this was all the work of lurid, globalized pop culture and easy money. In fact, all of the great Mediterranean states will be a “kind of Germany.” As comes clear now as if through a glass darkly, what they offered up to the lure of globalized capital was their soul. Ten years hence, reports Niall Ferguson, Harvard economist, Greeks and Italians will be working as gardeners and carrying boxes for Germans. So how’s that going to work out?

The U.S. came to be as an economic and political union in 1776 in opposition to English dominance and no one expected trouble down the line. No one except Jefferson, who realized as early as 1797 that the rising industrial states in the cold climate would dominate the agrarian regions and warm places and they would never be allowed out, even though he had written an escape clause in Virginia’s contract (New York and Rhode Island had them as well). The cost of the felicitous union of 1776 would be signed in blood with more than 618,000 dead and the passage to conquest would begin when Jefferson was barely cold in the grave.

A new generation needs to take hold of this here, there and everywhere, before their future is gobbled up. The laws of nature are hard and fast: When times get tough, the strong economically will dominate the weak and in the EU, that means Germany. Greece,Italy and Portugal should head for the doors and strive to find their souls again. Form a like-minded Mediterranean alliance perhaps. But leave while it is still possible.

The gift of Ron Paul, America’s Gray Champion

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/23/11

Generally when countries surge to become rich and powerful, as America did after victory in Europe and Asia, after Germany did during the Bismarck period, it recedes or retires naturally to new generations and new cultural forms. If left alone they are usually more creative, more peaceful times. But more often countries rage against the return to balance, yield to fascism, as Germany did at the end of the Bismarck period, and die in a primal scream. We are much in the same position today as was Bismarck’s Germany at the end, with stronger competitors, notably China, on the horizon, and the childish and hubristic claims of “exceptionalism” are chronic symptoms. But it will not happen here in America because of one person, Ron Paul. And he is what I am thankful for this Thanksgiving.

Ron Paul is the Gray Champion, the aging veteran who stands in the middle of the road at the end and the beginning and says, NO MORE. He alone makes the future possible. Historians Neil Howe and William Strauss describe the Gray Champion as the singular figure who cuts through the lies, illusions and deceits, but more important, gives the people the courage and awakens them from their moral slumber for it is that which enables the beast. From their text, “The Fourth Turning”:

"Who was this Gray Champion?" Nathaniel Hawthorne asked near the end of this story in his Twice-Told Tales. No one knew, except that he had been among the fire-hearted young Puritans who had first settled New England more than a half century earlier... Would the Gray Champion ever return? "I have heard," added Hawthorne, "that whenever the descendants of the Puritans are to show the spirit of their sires, the old man appears again." Posterity had to wait a while before seeing him again - the length of an entire human life, in fact. "When eighty years has passed," wrote Hawthorne, the Gray Champion reappeared.

As Strauss and Howe’s excellent text indicates, we now especially, rising into 2012, are at the classic end of a post-war cycle and the beginning of a historic transition. Ron Paul alone offers direction in seeing America as Jefferson did of healthy, heartland states, and seeing a world ahead breaking the globalist, world-destroying competition of Marx v. Keynes, both philosophies of conquest, to one of Hayek and the Austrian economists.

Questions can be raised now as never before and thanks to Paul and are raised nightly on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. Questions like, what again is the purpose of federal government? Why does a fully developed and mature country need one at all?

The Rick Perry Uprising

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/22/11

“ . . . states' rights, states’ rights, states' rights!!!” – Rick Perry at The Alamo, June 15, 2009

Until you get higher in the hills, Laconia might be considered the vortex of New Hampshire red neck politics, heavy into the Tea Party. The Lakes Region Tea Party is small but might be indicative of how things will go. A straw poll on November 16 gave Newt Gingrich 49 % while Cain tied with Ron Paul at 15%. Romney 12% and Rick Perry 0. Similar results in a straw poll at a Republican club in Alabama on Saturday: Newt 45%, Cain 13%, Paul and Romney both 11% and Perry 3%. Interesting because Perry first gave national credence to the Tea Party when he chanted for states’ rights at the Alamo. But with the sudden rise of Newt, the consummate Washington insider, Tea Party is no longer really about states’ rights and specific issues. It’s about passion.

I'm all about the Rick Perry uprising as he described it Friday night on Neil Cavuto's show. He is serious about a part-time legislature, term limits for judges, a balanced budget and state sovereignty issues.

His thinking and direction could save America. But it may take longer. For five years before the Texas governor cut loose at the original Tea Party rally at the Alamo 2009 event with Ted Nugent and Judge Andrew Napolitano present I had been writing about states’ rights in northern New England. We were well informed by the best lawyers and scholars in North America on these issues. Legal counsel advised that systemic change as great as this takes time and a lot of conversation.

Perry needs more time for this to sink in and he needs a posse; he needs allies. Not senators, not representatives, but like-minded governors and passionate advocates like Sarah Palin. His brilliant and brave manifesto, “Fed Up!” describes a path to "save America from Washington.” But it is clearly a world which devolves power to states, regions and their governors. And most governors today are not prepared to receive it.

For Governor Perry's form to advance, governors’ power must be enhanced, their confidence and the people’s confidence in them must rise and the political status of states must rise. It is not a project for an aging and predictable “super committee” but for rising young stars like Alaska’s Joe Miller and Tennessee’s Rand Paul and Utah’s Mike Lee and independent heartland governors like Idaho’s “Butch” Otter. Since 1913 and the (unconstitutional) 17th amendment, states and their governors have lost status to Washington, D.C. This first must change and possibly only a Constitutional Convention can change it.

I'd suggest a long-term plan and a council of governors or a “super committee of governors”; a council of elders if you will, made up of former or current governors to consider devolution of power to states and regions. How would the country work then? Who would do what?

Thomas Jefferson’s premise is that the only defense against a bloated or malevolent federal government is the states organically related in their regions. In this model Texans are Texans, Alaskans Alaskan and New England may find its Emersonian soul again. Perry was first to go there again. But it can’t happen overnight.

Maybe the change Perry calls for is impossible. Things don’t change. They break. Then they start over again as something else. The colossal and predictable failure of the “super committee” is symptomatic of breakage ahead. But when it starts again this time it may start with Perry.

Jim Webb: OWS needs a warrior and so does America

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/20/11

MSM, seeking to frame OWS in context, brings some unfortunate editing. The hardships these kids suffered – one lost his computer cable – and comparisons to the Civil Rights movement exhibit inexperienced and youthful prose selections which poorly represent a rising generation. But there is here the feeling of a movement striving for a voice. A feeling that something is wrong; a dread, but it is not clear what the source is. It seems has been wrong for a long time – most of these young people’s lives - and wrong at the center. In the last debate for example, at least three Republicans announced that they willfully support the use of torture. It is not that they shouldn’t be elected. They should be sent into exile.

But Jim Webb, senator from Virginia, had been speaking out against the sources of this creepy and insidious anguish from the beginning of the war on Iraq. Sadly, this great and creative man who has served America in heroic capacity and in so many ways, will not be running for reelection. I hope he runs for governor of Virginia. Actually I’d like to see him run for President right now on an emergency ticket maybe with Elizabeth Warren. Outside the box, but that has never stopped Jim before.

The uncertainty surrounding OWS suggests the leader has not been found to vocalize their distress and desire. I wish they were around when Webb gave the Democrats’ response to President George W. Bush’s state of the Union in 2007. It was shocking and strange to the penguin-like conformist of the time. The reference to “Wall Street robber barons” sent a chill up Wall Street’s spine. It seems a perfect match today for a rising generation still at a loss for words and still seeking an adult worthy of its trust. It can be heard on Youtube under the title “Senator Jim Webb Responds to the President.” Here are some excerpts:

“The stock market is at an all time high and so are corporate profits but these benefits are not being fairly shared. When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did. Today, it is more than 400 times. In other words it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one day . . .

“In the early days of our Republic, President Andrew Jackson established an important principle of American style democracy; that we should measure the health of our society not at its apex but at its base not with the numbers that come out of Wall Street but in the living conditions on Main Street . . .

“With respect to foreign policy this country has patiently endured a mismanaged war for nearly four years. Many, including myself, warned even before the war began that it was unnecessary and that it would take our energy away from the larger war against terrorism . . .

“Regarding the economic imbalance in our country I’m reminded of the situation president Theodore Roosevelt faced in the early days of the 20th century. America was then, as now, drifting apart along class lines. The so-called robber barons were unapologetically raking in huge percentage of the national wealth. The dispossessed workers at the bottom were threatening revolt . . .

How OWS could advance Gingrich to the Presidency

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/18/11

Politics is antidotal. That is, what comes next is the antidote or the equal and opposite counterforce to the disturbance of the force that just happened. It is nature finding its way back to balance. Had there been no Summer of Love, no hippies, diggers and all the adventurers of Summer of ’67 there would have been no Ronald Reagan coming out of the wings. Reagan was California calling itself back to center; a stronger countervailing force than normal to balance the astonishing and rapid rise of the California counterculture.

And that is where Newt Gingrich comes in. As Reagan was antidote to the hippie movement, Gingrich is the equal and opposite counterforce to the Occupy Wall Street movement. His sudden recent support can be seen rising as a graph exactly analogous to the rise in intensity of Occupy Wall Street.

Today’s astonishing Drudge headline: “Shock Poll Iowa: Gingrich 32% Romney 19 Cain 13%” citing the current Rasmussen report. Gingrich is a great debater and an intellectual gadfly, but had their been no Occupy movement he might have spend out his life in a dog and pony show travelling a debate circuit of small colleges to debate policy with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as hippie high priest Timothy Leary and Watergate plumber G. Gordon Liddy did; the last exit at political Palookaville. Now he could well go all the way to the Presidency.

If I recall correctly, Gingrich’s first comments on the OWS were that it would take down the Obama presidency. He recognized that whatever was said by the spinners and sycophants, Obama was a lifelong dissident and Gingrich correctly intuited that Obama would be connected with the squalid aspects of OWS through association. This is especially true now that Obama’s best bud, Bill Ayers (and ghost writer?) was videotaped recently giving advice to Occupy Chicago protesters according to a report from NBC Chicago.

Gingrich may have recognized as well when he saw that OWS would take down the Presidency, that these events would send him there instead.

Newt the Munificent and his feisty gunslinger sidekick, Rick the Impetuous

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/16/11

Something funny happened at the last debate. I started to like them. With some thanks to CBS moderator Scott Pelley and National Journal’s Major Garrett, they developed tempo, drama, intrigue. I’m looking forward to the others now as I’d look forward to a hockey game or a favorite TV show. First time for that. This will now be a season of debates and debates this time will determine the next President.

When Rick Perry said he didn’t think the American people would choose “the best debater” for President he was making a conceptual error. Better to look to the record and experience of the contender. When the pundits said that this year there were “too many debates” they spoke too soon. Too much nonsense had come in and secondary players were taking the initiative. It presented an “American Idol” pop culture. But now it’s starting to get good.

I can’t wait to see what Newt comes up with next time. He is by far the best debater here and in the past two weeks he has made the debates interesting, dramatic, exciting.

All along it had been Newt Gingrich’s secret weapon. Now he has found momentum. Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal gave him a sterling endorsement recently and the mainstream MSM gave him a second look. Newt is outside the box and is now bringing it to the people with him. It may be the “Rabinowitz effect” but he is now right up there with Mitt Romney in the ratings.

Romney better watch out. Newt’s debating kung fu is stronger and Newt’s skill in this is more valuable this year than Romney’s money. Romney seems studied and defaults to Heritage Foundation power points which kills the mojo on TV, while Newt, the creative introvert, suddenly swings his arms and comes up with some startling, radically new thinking for the audience. How about cyber warfare and targeting enemy scientists who work on nuclear weapons? Like poison them. All under the cloak of deniability. What do you think about that? How’s that for outside the box? And pretty good TV.

And Rick Perry is getting the swing of it. His Opps! gaff gave him a pretty good week in hindsight. The country learned that he is a pretty likeable guy. He’s got more money than the others except Romney so he can hang in there a long time. And Gingrich likes him. They are developing new sympathies and fresh personae via the TV debates: Newt the Munificent and his feisty gunslinger sidekick, Rick the Impetuous. This moves along from TV experience as well, from the relationships that evolve from the weekly drama.

But these two have long been two peas in a pod. Gingrich wrote the foreword to Perry’s recent book, “Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington.” “Rick Perry, Texas governor, for the past decade, is uniquely qualified to offer a firsthand perspective on why the United States – the most successful civilization in human history – is being threatened with economic collapse,” he writes.

A group may be forming here; Gingrich’s and Perry’s wives are hanging together with Jon Huntsman’s. Could bring a whole new agenda, a whole new American beginning.

The “Occupy” movement: Rufus T. Firefly’s spiritual legacy

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill

on 11/15/11

That Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan emailed Harvard’s Laurence Tribe to say, “I hear they have the votes, Larry!! Simply Amazing” on the day the House passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, will come as no surprise. They are all friends. Like Charlie Sheen, like Lady Gaga, like Hillary and Barack, Larry and Elena are symptoms of an endgame. The right thing to do; the noble and moral thing, is to ignore them entirely.

The “occupy” activists are best ignored as well. They might be considered the spiritual children of Professor Rufus T. Firefly who in that Sixties cult classic, Duck Soup, declared: “Whatever it is, I’m against it!” Marxist? No. Groucho Marxist, maybe.

“Most of the tents were expected to be gone from City Hall Park by late yesterday after ’Occupy Burlington’ protesters have had a chance to pick up their belongings,” my local paper reports, “but some of the tents will be left for the city to clean up as part of the protest, police say.”

Part of the protest? Who do they think will clean their crap up, when they are taking the Amtrak back to Yale and Brooklyn Heights? The nameless proles who wash the clothes of these dilettante children and cook their food and clean their toilets. The huddled masses. Like the bent and elderly Indian woman just arrived, still with a bindi on her forehead, who cheerfully changed my hotel sheets yesterday.

The persona of Occupy today is the mask of Guy Fawkes, who might be considered the father of modern terrorism. But that was never really forgotten by the protesters because it was never learned. It was seen in the movie , V for Vendetta, produced by the Wachowski brothers, a shadow event which followed their masterpiece, The Matrix, featuring Keanu Reeves, as Neo, who might be considered the ‘savior’; the agent of Aquarius rising. As if when the spirit of the night’s unconscious – known as The Self in the Upanishads, Morpheus to Neo - asked the key question to the apprentice holy man; to take the leap of intuition and choose a pill - the red one or the blue one. The one would lead to Awakening and the other to the shadow path. Occupy took the other pill and became an advertising supplement for a movement or something but they can't remember what.

Iran: A conversation with Moshe Feiglin

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/11/11

I’ve had little interest in Israel in my life. It seemed a lost cause. Jerusalem is the timeless and endless center of the inner life of the West; her rabbis the exclusive guardians to her mysteries. That Bill Clinton could lay claim to it was an abomination.

I perked up when Moshe Feiglin found support. He recognized and representing Israel at its essence; a sacred place which should only be understood in sacred terms and in thousand year historic cycles. Soldier, sabra, leader of Manhigut Yehudit, which seeks to turn the “State of Jews into the Jewish State.” For several years now I as a non-Jew have appreciated his weekly commentary on Torah. This week I had the opportunity to speak to him.

I mentioned the Clinton moment and the Oslo Agreements as a psychological turning away from values and he said, “What about Obama? If Clinton brought a lack of values, Obama brings anti-values. Values become a bad thing.”

Regarding Iran’s nuclear capacity, he writes this week that we approach the moment of truth: “Ahmadinijad, like Saddam, is preparing to destroy Israel. Netanyahu, like Shamir, is hoping that the world will, for its own reasons, do the dirty work for us and fight our existential war.

“The question is, is it better if Israel attacks Iran or if the West does so? From Shamir's mistake [Shamir stayed out of the Kuwait war] we can conclude that greater Tel Aviv will be on the receiving end of the entire payload that Iran can muster. The second lesson we learn from Shamir is that the Western coalition will not be overly concerned with the threat hanging over Israel's head. As we all remember, not one Scud missile was destroyed before it was launched.

“If Israel does not attack Iran and leaves the work for others, our position will be further compromised. First, because a passive Israel will have no power of deterrence against Iran. Second, because it is technically more difficult to defend oneself from a passive stance.”

But conversation quickly turns to Abraham who endangered himself and his entire family in a World War to save Lot from captivity after he made his bad decision to move to Sodom:

“After Abraham successfully traverses this trial and wins the war against the kings of the north, God makes a covenant (the Covenant of Pieces) with him and promises him the Land of Israel. Sounds strange? God "sides with" the winner? Not at all. God chooses the man who is willing to fight for his destiny, and not just for his existence.”

That in essence is Israel’s and its leaders’ responsibility, he says, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not yet learned Abraham’s lesson.

My impression of Moshe Feiglin after a half hour interview: It took a long time for England and America to turn to Churchill because we were afraid not so much of the consequences of action but of the responsibilities which would be demanded of us. When Israel is no longer afraid of its responsibilities ahead – its destiny - it will turn to Feiglin.

Sarah Palin and "the vacuum on the right"

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/10/11

The Washington Post's Dan Balz has been seen a good deal recently here in New Hampshire and has provided a comprehensive overview of the race. His analysis of last night's debate reveals a definitive moment which might be suggested in the phrase Mitt Romney and "the vacuum on the right." Ron Paul, who took 40% at conservative forums last year, was barely mentioned. He was not mentioned at all in write ups by other commentators. Cain fades like the Cheshire Cat one caricaturist has presented him as. And Rick Perry, by his own account, stepped in it.
“A vacuum on the right has become one of the distinguishing features of the campaign for the GOP nomination. One by one, candidates have come calling for support. One by one, they have stumbled or have been found wanting by rank-and-file Republicans,” he writes.

Newt Gingrich rises, in opposition to MSM. He appears the best option to now to face Romney. But is his appeal broad enough and can the professor appeal to plain folk? That is the question and that is the question that Sarah Palin should be asking this morning.

Possibly she created "the vacuum on the right" when she got off the bus and took it back to Alaska. As per last night it is safe to say there is still time to get in simply because nothing else is working. And the failure of the other contenders works positively in her favor.