Quigley in Exile

2012-01-29T08:07:00.000-08:00

Erskine Bowles for North Carolina governor

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/30/12

President Obama’s invitation to Bush family members to the White House makes him seem an Everyman; all things to all people, and Caroline Kennedy’s open letter to vote for Obama a second time because her name is Kennedy, both mark the turning of the times, and suggest that Obama, like the Kennedys and the Bushes, is no longer a rising part of the times. We have left the age of two family politics, honoring Northeastern gentry who bask in Kennebunkport or Hyannis, and have entered instead into a full-bore Jacksonian heartland awakening. Tea Party has taken the mantle these past two years. But Jacksonian populism, channeled today by Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Ron and Rand Paul, all started in Virginia with Mudcat Saunders.

This new Jacksonian wave brings a most auspicious beginning. It awakens a new generation of politics; the first new wave in the new century. It could bring Elizabeth Warren, Tom Brady loyalist and Massachusetts’ own Okie grandmother, to the White House in the future, and Erskine Bowles to the governor’s chair in North Carolina in 2012. Public Policy Polling says that Democrats “will have a better chance at winning the North Carolina Governor's race now than they did yesterday no matter whom their candidate is this fall. But one potential candidate really rises to the top: Erskine Bowles.” Bowles, with assist from Dave “Mudcat” Saunders and Steve Jarding, authors of “Foxes in the Henhouse: How the Republicans Stole the South and the Heartland and What the Democrats Must Do to Run ‘em Out” could now find a path.

Jarding and Saunders helped Mark Warner win the governorship in Virginia, sponsoring NASCAR stock cars and bringing in The Stanley Brothers. This was not the anti-South, self-hating liberalism which has sapped the spirit of Virginia. Warner’s liberalism demanded fiscal responsibility and economic health and progress. It was liberal politics which sought the center, not that which rushed to the edges; one that families, hillbillies and hunters could feel comfortable with. Warrior-scholar Jim Webb, supported by General Wesley Clark, followed, to remind Virginians that before Ronald Reagan, they were Democrats. The same spirit shortly rose in North Carolina with Senator Kay Hagan. They go to church, watch the Super Bowl, serve in the armed forces and honor those who do.

Bowles would be a prodigy of Warner’s creative model of governance in this rising era. Simpson-Bowles was a heroic effort and Bowles and Simpson were heroes just for one day. Warner was a strong supporter. Bowles could well run now in opposition to a weakling Congress, a failed “super committee” and an ineffective Presidency.

Bowles and his folksy sidekick, Alan Simpson, former senator from Wyoming, brought an old school voice of country authenticity to a time of discontent and confusion, not unlike the voices of Sam Ervin and Howard Baker during Watergate proceedings. It gave sudden clarity to the issues and gave the possibility of a safe recovery and an auspicious future, if only we had the courage and common sense of these two. He could build bipartisan support on this in North Carolina.

The Raleigh News and Observer reports that Bowles and Simpson want to keep the pressure on Congress as they tour the country giving speeches about their deficit plan.

"I think the future of this country is very, very bright if we face up to our problems," Bowles said at one event.

"If not," Simpson interjected, "we'll be a great country, but we won't be No. 1."

2012-01-27T04:05:00.000-08:00

Note to Gingrich: “The Seventies called . . . “

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/27/12

“The spaceship has landed,” – Steve Jobs, 2011

Note to Gingrich: To paraphrase from the movie “Joe Dirt”: The Seventies called, they want their space program back. Gingrich is the disco paragon; a conservative reaction to the Sixties in double-poly leisure suit, white patent leather belt and shoes and all the baggage trailing from the very end of a century of total war. Like David Bowie’s Major Tom, Newt is stuck in Seventies space/time. His comment RE the moon base egging us on to get there before the Chinese, might be looked at in view of the singular American conservative genius barely mentioned in the Republican debates, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who saw the moon project as a stunt. It wasn't then, but it is now. China flies blindly to the moon with no purpose but competition with America, but it is a competition we do not share in.

We as Anglo-Americans are unable to see and feel the competition with China that we felt with Russia. Asia is foreign and difficult to penetrate. Lao Tzu has no equivalence in Angloamerica. A legitimate swami like the Maharishi Mahesh Yoga is soon scorned back to India by MSM and Gingrich’s Seventies space/time mentality. Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy on the other hand somehow fit, and often guide us to our deepest places and belong to us. With China it is merely economic, with Russia it is existential. With Russia we share our primordial European prehistory and cultural prehistory which swings back a thousand years and beyond. To their credit, the creators of the Project for a New American Century, Kagan and company, understood this.

The are good reasons to go to space but a moon colony is not one. The Kennedy space program had its beginning in the German rocket program in WW II and in post war imagination still fired on military systems and in the economic competition between American Keynesians and Russian Marxists. For more than a hundred years Anglo-American imagination preceded us in space with Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, mavens of the pop culture in the rising populism of mass democracy. The pop culture space imagination ended in the mid 1990s with the rise of a new earth-based myth cycle seen in “Lost” “Survivor” and “Avatar.” The rest of us have returned to earth, but Gingrich, like David Bowie's Major Tom, remains lost in space.

Gingrich thinks the imagination of luminaries such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and J.J. Abrams trickles down from some government official offering direction. In fact, and this can be found in endless interviews with space scientists and engineers later in life, it goes the other way around.

If Gingrich wants to see the future he might open to page 22 of The Atlantic this month. There is a picture of a long procession of bearded patriarchs in a row leaving a snowy Russian Orthodox Church which doubled in the space age as a gulag. There may be relevant symbolism to that. Say whatever else you might about the Russians but they have moved on from the age in which Gingrich is stuck. They have returned to the earth and like Raskolnikov, found their way again to God. And they may have gotten their ahead of us.

2012-01-26T05:34:00.000-08:00

Free New England: Repudiate The National Defense Authorization Act

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 2/26/12

New England was a Jeffersonian region of independent-minded yeoman farmers and free-thinking, independents before the Civil War. We lost that earthy colloquialism to the abstraction of federalism after teaming up for the conquest of the west and the South in 1857 and 1865, and again to globalism after the conquest of Europe and Asia in 1946. But today New England begins to find its yeoman soul again. We have always been Jeffersonian. We just forgot. When it starts to catch on any step outside the prescribed Constitutional reservation by the feds will be considered overreach, domination, totalitarianism. And it is starting to catch on. The National Defense Authorization Act is a giant step in the direction of the benign American police state.

Provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act may allow for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens, but the feds could find they get no cooperation from some state and local officials.

Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall (R-Manassas) introduced HB1660 which would, “Prevent any agency, political subdivision, employee, or member of the military of Virginia from assisting an agency or the armed forces of the United States in the investigation, prosecution, or detainment of a United States citizen in violation of the Constitution of Virginia.”

On Wednesday, a House subcommittee passed the bill 6-3, moving it closer to a full House vote.

And the Tenth Amendment Center reports that as many as ten states will consider legislation or resolutions in response to the detention provisions in section 1021 and 1022 of the NDAA.

We read today that liberal iconoclast Oliver Stone begins to look to Ron Paul. My kids, reared on Kurt Cobain and Flogging Molly, tend to as well and the Pauls have become big hits on college campus. A new generation is rising to the idea of states rights as a defense against the hovering domination of the federal government.

Lawmakers in Rhode Island and Washington will likely introduce resolutions authored by the Rhode Island Liberty Coalition within the next week, writes Mike Maharrey of the Tenth Amendment Center. Additionally, local governments, including Fremont County, Colo. and El Paso County, Colo., have passed resolution condemning the detention provisions.

"Federal politicians never seem to repeal federal law. It's going to take ‘We the People’ in our states to stand up and say, ‘No!’ to this unconstitutional monster," Tenth Amendment Center executive director Michael Boldin said.

The Rhode Island Liberty Coalition, “a grass-roots organization dedicated to the preservation of Civil Liberties, Economic Liberties, and the inherent autonomy of the individual” is especially interesting. I’d like to see it expand to The New England Liberty Coalition.

“We drafted nullification legislation that can double as a draft state-wide Act as well as a local ordinance --in any state, county or municipality in the Country -- that denounces Section 1021 of the NDAA and prevents local officials from cooperating with military investigations and detainments of United States Citizens and legal resident aliens,” their website states. “The Act goes one step further and attempts to outlaw military investigations and detentions of citizens and resident legal aliens within those states, counties or municipalities. Did we mention this legislation can be used as a template in jurisdictions ALL ACROSS THE COUNTRY?”

2012-01-24T16:30:00.000-08:00

What’s next for Rick Perry?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/24/12

“Come and take it” – Texas flag at the Battle of Gonzales, March, 1831

Rick Perry takes it back to Texas. He might run again for governor. He should. As Steve Forbes says, he's a great governor with great ideas. I'd make the case that his poor performance in the presidential race is a credit to him as a Texan and a Texas governor. He feels uncomfortable away from home, away from Texas. It is the Jeffersonian ideal and Perry is paragon of these earth-based, sense-of-place values. More than values. A sense of being; at one with the ancestors, at one with God, at one with one’s own place on earth and free of abstractions.

What Perry wanted to achieve for Texas as a Texan was unachievable as a President and Ron Paul should take note. Because Perry and Paul are both in their way “free state” guys. But the freedom and autonomy they seek cannot be granted top down like a benevolent master freeing his provincial serfs in the far provinces. They need to take it. Like his boots say, "Come and take it." If Texas wants it, she’s got to take it.

And right now Perry has a whole posse with similar ideas; the Pauls, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Gary Johnson, Libertarian candidate from New Mexico, Joe Miller of Alaska, Sarah Palin of Alaska, the Tenth Amendment Center – more daily, and tens of thousands of young students who are beginning to listen to the Paul's.

Perry must have seen the problems rising right away when he entered the presidential race; the problems of globalized abstractions superimposed on real people of the desert and big sky in places likeTexas. Gay marriage? Michelle Bachmann wanted to legislate from Washington, D.C. how people live in Vermont and Massachusetts on issues which the federal government has no jurisdiction. It is Tea Party totalitarianism and the tendency was always there which I warned about when I first encouraged Perry to run for president in 2009. Perry called it correctly a states rights issue in his great book , “Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington”:
“We are a diverse people – incapable of being governed from a faraway capital by people who do not share our values. Recognizing this fact is critical to the preservation of a free state.”
Then he walked it back and fell in line with Bachmann and the others in trying to govern the behavior of Massachusetts and Vermont from D.C.: It is totalitarian when the Chinese tell the Tibetans how to pray, it is totalitarian when Washington tells Vermonters how to make love.

What Perry wants for states, especially Texas, cannot, will not be given by a federal government. It has to be taken by Texas and the few other states which seek free state status and Constitutional government. Rick Perry as Governor of Texas needs a committee of like-minded governors. He should be the leader of this movement. He needs to lead a super committee of governors in sympathetic states.
Texas is ready for self government, so is Alaska, Kentucky, Kansas, Idaho and Utah and few others. That means full Tenth Amendment rights and colloquial consciousness. But this is a job for states and their governors who have the courage to take it, because it will not be given and it is not worth having if it is given by central government. Perry can do this and possibly only he can do it.

2012-01-21T06:19:00.000-08:00

And now for something completely different: Petraeus/Jon Huntsman 2012

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill
on 1/23/12

Newt Gingrich’s samurai moment brought a turning. Bloomberg’s Al Hunt said it came right over the plate and Gingrich hit it out of the park. Matthew Dowd on Betty Liu’s Bloomberg report gave a succinct analysis: If Gingrich, who had the crowds rising to their feet in the week’s earlier debate, could rally and dominate in the first five minutes he would have it and he could turn the entire election. That would be the most important moment – the historic turning event – that would change everything and possibly send Gingrich to the presidency. And it came as easily to Gingrich as Tom Brady’s 45 - 10 victory last week over the Mile High Messiah. They said it couldn’t be done, but even women voted for him. Consider that the Gingrich resurgence in South Carolina is not a bump but a birth pain.

I wish New Hampshire, which claims in song and story to have a mind as clear, hard and strong as granite, still had the spontaneous and instinctive gut South Carolina has, but we don’t. Which is why New England today is barely a shadow or reaction to real, organic events rising in the heartland (Occupy the anti-Tea Party, Elizabeth Warren the anti-Sarah Palin). Our primary is irrelevant now: We are North Massachusetts.

But South Carolina still brings it with a rebel yell; they have not lost themselves to the geist and the degenerate gods and golems of mass communications and that horrible music that poisons the air in every mall and grocery store in the realm these last hundred years (Huxley warned of this). And Gingrich has awakened again that which has been sleeping in the earth for a century.

In contrast, Mitt Romney was eating birthday cake at the children’s table and singing happy birthday to South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. Timing could not have been worse. Hey, I checked her birthday horoscope in Chicago Tribune, significant perhaps on the first day of Aquarius: “Work hard today to bring a wild idea to life.” Eating birthday cake with Mitt Romney? And this: “Do your research, because you'll want this thing to hold up to scrutiny and review.”

Could Gingrich beat Romney? Possibly he already has. And there is no question in my mind now that Gingrich could be named President in 2013. Yes, he could beat Obama and those who say he can’t are like the unfortunate sad eyed John King of CNN, the priests selected by the elders to accompany the conquest, not watching the astonishing thing that is rushing to the front right before our eyes right now, but hoping to preserve the patrons of the past and the old temple.

Gingrich is a revolutionary and there are two authentic revolutionaries in this race, Gingrich and Ron Paul. Gingrich takes the day. He could beat Romney now and Obama. But it is too early for a Gingrich revolution or any other kind, although he has the classic profile of the trickster who starts revolutions. It needs more time to simmer. It will come, but not today and Gingrich will not take the presidency.

But General David Petraeus could in a brokered convention.

The New York Times reports on Saturday that cadets at The Citadel, who generally speak with a united conservative voice, are torn this time between Romney, Gingrich, Santorum and Ron Paul.

The old temple will pitch the usual suspects; Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, all surrogates for Jeb Bush. They are already. But how would the Citadel cadets feel about David Petraeus?

2012-01-20T05:58:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich/Rick Perry 2012

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/20/12

If Newt Gingrich wins the South Carolina primary Saturday:

Gingrich would not be my first choice for president right now, Romney would be, but he does fit the historic contours as I’ve been writing about them here now for several years, making two claims: First, we enter now an age of Jackson, when the heartland rises in opposition to Eastern cities influence as it did shortly after the death of Jefferson and Adams, sending the cold willies up the spine of gentry in Richmond and Boston. Jefferson’s contempt for Jackson was echoed in the establishment of his day and paralleled the “Eek, a mouse!” response of MSM’s to Grizzly Mama, Sarah Palin; daughter of the forest. Second: America has always had two countervailing “creation myths,” the Boston Tea Party in 1773 and The Alamo in 1836. It is not clear yet which will dominant.

Possibly the best and brightest observer of policy today is that Native America fisherman from Alaska Todd Palin, who first threw support to Gingrich at the critical turning. A week later Sarah Palin followed. Rick Perry then, just in the nick of time. These things are related not by design but by intuition. If we enter now a Jacksonian age, Gingrich is the definitive trickster. Here is what a Gingrich administration could look like: Rick Perry, Vice President, John Bolton – he prefers Romney but will take the job as Secretary of State, Sarah Palin, doing something, John Huntsman, doing something else. This would effectively bring a Jacksonian turning as successfully as Jackson himself did. But this time it may turn out differently.

Prediction: In this scenario, Gingrich, bored after two years as president, will either quit or get thrown out and Vice President Perry will take over.

2012-01-19T05:23:00.001-08:00

Moshe Feiglin v. Netanyahu: Last Exit to Jerusalem

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/19/12

Why must I, a cold country New Englander and a solitary mountain dweller with a broken foot, be the only American to write about the upcoming election in Israel for leadership in the Likud, as critical to Israel’s destiny and to American interests in Israel as the fateful primary in South Carolina? The Israeli paper Arutz Sheva reports that Moshe Feiglin, who is challenging Binyamin Netanyahu for leadership of Likud in the party's primaries two weeks from now, cited a favorable poll Tuesday morning as evidence that his chances of seriously embarrassing Netanyahu are high, and that a victory by Netanyahu is not a complete certainty: “In a poll conducted by polling company Ma’agar Mochot, about 26 percent of Likud members not affiliated with Feiglin's faction agreed that ‘it is important to vote for Moshe Feiglin in the upcoming primaries, even though it is clear that Binyamin Netanyahu will win, just so that the right wing inside Likud will gain strength.’”

As Feiglin has written not long ago, this year for the first time there are more Jews living inside Israel than outside inside: "The exile is over."

European Jews have been returning to the source in Jerusalem since 1492. It has been a journey homeward, like a parallel event; a shadow journey of European Jewry joining in with the gentile world on the way here to New York City. But the last 500 yards of the journey, up the steps to Temple Mount, where Jews are arrested today and sometimes beaten by police for praying, is proving to be one of the most treacherous links of the journey.

The changes we face today in the United States are generational; Bush, Clinton generations moving out of the scene and carrying with them their generation gods, demons and furniture. Israel faces a similar generational change which portends Netanyahu and the American-dominated Israelis, leaving the scene now or in the near future. That is why this race is critical.

These upcoming races move toward an auspicious future where Israel and the United States, alone or together in a different way than they are now, both enter light and air. Europe faces a different trajectory and different destiny; a journey which recedes from Yalta inauspiciously as capital flees to Asia. Bret Stephens, columnist of the Wall Street Journal, calls Europe’s state a “slow suicide.” But Israel and Europe have different destinies.

Ten years hence Americans will have new friends in Israel and Israel will have new American friends. There is no telling with Europe; moral descent of the world geist since Yalta can be seen not only in the collapsing economy but descending as well from the clarity and density of Hannah Arendt writing to the one-world voices today of Lady Gaga, Bono and Bob Geldorf of the Boomtown Rats. Where can they possibly go from here?

As Stephens suggests in a recent column, the sinking of the cruise ship suggests Europe’s trajectory. Should be noted that the first harbinger of a plague in Europe in the 14th century came when a trade ship entered the port at Constantinople and everyone on board was found to be dead of the plague.

But that is not our fate and it will not be Israel’s. The generations will shift and rise in the upcoming election in Israel and in the races here in the coming year.

2012-01-17T15:45:00.001-08:00

Mitt Romney/Lew Lehrman 2012

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/17/12

Conservative pundit Bill Kristol hates Ron Paul. All through the hour on C Span’s afternoon call in show yesterday he kept coming back to it, proudly pitching the praises of his own kind; the predictable and graceful long-in-the-tooth old school after The Beatles had already landed. And that is the Republicans’ dilemma. Because the rebel yell is heard again in the heartland and the young ‘uns rise again in the night; this time rallying to Ron Paul’s revolutionary cry. It is the greatest measure of Ron Paul’s achievement. Could be the real big story this cycle is Ron Paul.

Paul should do well in South Carolina and his ideas, taken from Jefferson and the Austrian economists, will not fall fallow in South Carolina or throughout the heartland where things of the earth agree. Paul has marked a distinct change in American consciousness and it could well mark the century.

But he cannot bring this thinking much further. Nor can his son, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who is doing a great job just where he is but would do even better as governor of Kentucky. Ron Paul will bring it to the convention but there he will have reached the water’s edge. And anyway, like all tricksters who initiate organic change and even revolution; John Brown or Boston’s James Otis who inspired John Adams, he is cranky and contentious. Lew Lehrman, who authored “The Case for Gold” with Paul in 1982, might take it from there.

If Paul, then Lehrman: You get much of what is needed in Paul without the bloody revolution. And Romney, who knows how to fix things, could find a match in Lehrman to accommodate the vicissitude of Paulian change without chaos or breakage. In this regard, Lehrman is more a man of the times than Romney or any of the non-Pauls that will rise to the stage tomorrow night in South Carolina.

And tomorrow will be telling. Crowds rose to their feet when Gingrich spoke of his personal brand of economic liberation in soaring rhetoric. They cheered as well Ron Paul although MSM edited much of it. Romney has the go-along-get-along vote but spirits are rising. Front runner next week could just as well be Ron Paul or Newt Gingrich (with Sarah Palin, who has endorsed him in SC, tagging along again as VP).

But Romney is likely to win and take it by Florida. He should consider Lew Lehrman as VP. These two together could build a new establishment and one that could creatively surf the contours ahead of economic tide receding in Europe and rising in Asia with us stuck in the middle. The potential for failure is catastrophic. Mastery is needed now, not ideology. And Romney and Lehrman are masters.

Lehrman is smart-as-paint and a stalwart Reagan Republican. He achieved national prominence in a 1982 campaign for governor of New York, in which he ran a close race against Democrat Mario Cuomo.

“Gold puts the money supply back in the hands of the people,” he told Fox’s Neil Cavuto recently, who called his debates with Cuomo “a Lincoln/Douglas moment.” Lehrman is a fearless intellectual and he repeated his case Monday night on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Freedom Watch.

Think of Lehrman as the “thinking man’s” Ron Paul but with foreign policy perspective closer to real time and as better friend to Israel.

Conservatism has not seen a better man since Eisenhower. A match with Romney would not bring a revolution but a sea change.

2012-01-16T06:40:00.000-08:00

A world without books

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/16/12

Christian Davenport reports in the Washington Post on the crowds waiting to take out books at the Fairfax County Public Library. Out or towners should note that Fairfax County is target center for globalists on the make in America with more candle power on hand that Brooklyn managed in the early part of last century. As I recall, several years ago, Fairfax County High School had 41 valedictorians. So what are Tiger cubs and their dominating, upscale mothers reading? E books. But what?

“Want to take out the new John Grisham? Get in line. As of Friday morning, 288 people were ahead of you in the Fairfax County Public Library system, waiting for one of 43 copies. You’d be the 268th person waiting for “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” with 47 copies. And the Steve Jobs biography? Forget it. The publisher, Simon & Schuster, doesn’t make any of its digital titles available to libraries.”

Pop culture. But even Steve Jobs doesn’t make the cut. You would have to buy the book.

A world without books leaves trees without singular purpose because that is the purpose of trees- to make books. Books give voice to trees. That is their end and their best metamorphosis. As we enter the age of light and air, everything goes to the sky – Cloud now is the conduit - and wisdom; finding perspective in long stretches of time, is impossible. Globalism is a place in the sky without past or future. Possibly that is how we should go or must go, hell bent into the future, without reflection, and like the Kamikaze pilots, without landing gear. It is the American way and most attractive and necessary to new people and new generations, leaving history behind; chopping down the tree (killing the tree), like George Washington. And this way we go as that heartland bard Jean Shepherd (“A Christmas Story”) described in his own times: "Mindless we laughed, mindless we loved, and mindless at last we died."

Years ago I worked in a publisher house, a temple really, of small books saved; books saved from annihilation and reprinted such as “The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus, the Christ” published in 1908. There were so many lost and unheard tales and unseen and unwanted manuscripts; the pictures of Hildegard von Bingen, Newton’s million word manuscript on the “vegetation spirit of the earth” which no museum wanted, the Policy Planning Papers of George F. Kennan, which few wanted, the creative shadows of Alexandra David-Neel, first to walk Tibet. Even minor classics today are sure to be lost again like MIT theoretical physicist Kerson Huang’s translation with his wife Rosemary of the ”I Ching”. So many come to mind: Ruth Benedict, Andre Malraux (“The Temptation of the West”) Alfred Kazin (“New York Jew”) that were more of less mainstream thinking to the people who walked the night through The Strand, the famous second hand bookstore in New York City in the 1950s.

If you got on at Flatbush, you could be there in 30 minutes back then. I wonder where you would go today in Fairfax County, or if there is such a place? A place for books to go when they are no longer wanted in the mainstream? Because that is the way of return; of gradually getting back to earth in the generations, without crashing.

2012-01-11T04:04:00.001-08:00

Mitt Romney/Nikki Haley 2012 or Gingrich/Palin 2012?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/11/12

Romney’s victory in New Hampshire can almost deliver the nomination to him and I am convinced, the presidency. There cannot be a more auspicious moment. Having a man from Bain come in and restore your company or country is like having Chef Gordon Ramsey reawaken your restaurant. And Romney brings skills to his task akin to those of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

It is a transitional moment but it might even be considered a transcendent moment. Barack Obama’s job was to complete a work project begun long ago by Jack Kennedy and Eisenhower and even farther back to Lincoln, Emerson and Garrison. This aspect he has graciously mastered and completed.

But we are a different country today than we were in 1831, 1865 or 1956; a rich and full country and one that looks auspiciously out across the Pacific as well as the Atlantic. A place today like Black Elk looked to as “the center of the world”, East, West, South and the Great White North. So 2012 brings a beginning and there is no one better to begin new processes, systems and establishments than Romney. There is no better man for our times.

Providing everything goes well in South Carolina which today is more important than New Hampshire.

2012 could bring Romney/Haley 2012 or Romney/Perry or Romney/Petraeus but this has been the political season of the trickster and the trickster is still at large. So South Carolina could just as easily bring Gingrich/Palin 2012. I think Romney has it. But the departure of Bill Daley from the White House is also ominous. Daley is honest and honorable. He was the first to speak out about the direction of the Obama presidency, claiming that it was leaving the middle behind. It appeared that Daley was brought into the White House to accommodate that middle. Now that he is being sent out it appears that the middle – and Daley’s warning to Obama – is being abandoned and the president will pursue a more radical agenda. This could bring crisis to a divided America like we have not seen in a hundred years.

2012-01-09T07:49:00.000-08:00

Ron Paul on Israel: “Hong Kong of the Middle East”

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/9/12

Israel, in its current incarnation, can be seen in its post-war generations; warriors like Moshe Dayan, old world kibbutzniks like Golda Mier, Carter, Clinton and Bush allies, and these are characterizations shared by American sympathizers and Jewish Israelis alike. But in 2012 it is safe to say that these generations are passing into history and when former New York Mayer Ed Koch slanders Ron Paul in classic Sixties hyperbole it simply registers as rude and confusing. Gary Bauer, a Christian evangelical leader, with support from Weekly Standard founder William Kristol and the Emergency Committee for Israel, also warns that Paul is an enemy of Israel. But with what legitimacy do these speak for Israel today? The idea of Israel as an American pseudo-state becomes preposterous as more immigrants arrive from Russia and elsewhere, and as more children are born in Israel to first and second generation Americans and Europeans who have made aliyah or sacred passage. Moshe Feiglin, who challenges Netanyahu for leadership in the Likud this month, says there are more Jews today in Israel than there are outside: The exile is over. In this new situation, America’s demands and expectations on Israel can seen as ill advised and illegitimate as China’s over Tibet.

Ron Paul has been called an anti-Semite because he opposed George W. Bush’s war on Iraq. I was as well when I appeared on the same pages as Paul in that period. So was General Wesley Clark and Jimmy Carter. The Washington Post’s Election 2012 blog reports on Paul defended his Israeli policy this week in New Hampshire. In response to a question from an undecided voter, he suggested that Israel “should be the Hong Kong of the Middle East.”

Felicia Sonmez reports:

“I would want to maintain very close relations with Israel,” Paul said. “I’d want to be a good friend of Israel. And I also want to respect them in many ways that I do not think the United States should undermine their sovereignty in any way.”

He went on to defend his position that the United States should not provide foreign aid to Israel and should not “tell them what to do.”

“If they want to have a peace treaty with their neighbors and they think they can work it out, they shouldn’t have to ask us for permission,” Paul said. “They shouldn’t have to ask us permission to defend their borders. That should be their business. But also, I do not believe that I should take money from anybody here and send money to Israel.”

“We should be friends,” he said. “We should trade with them. I would encourage them to become the Hong Kong of the Middle East, or something like that. You know, have a really affluent society.”

2012-01-06T05:14:00.000-08:00

The Eastern Establishment Konservatives (EEK!). Wes Clark/Elizabeth Warren 2016

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/6/12

“A working class hero is something to be,” – John Lennon

The only explanation for a mediocrity like Rick Santorum, celebrated in the NY Times and on Charlie Rose today by David Brooks and by Krauthammer in the Washington Post, as a working class hero and darling of the Eastern Establishment Conservatives (EEC), is that they are following TV mass market paradigms and have gone beyond the “American Idol” model to “America’s biggest loser.” Santorum is perfect. He makes all the unpleasantness that happened since 1957 just go away. (He didn’t say “black” people, he said “blah” people. Memorable.)

Undoubtedly, he and his core supporters have vast electric train landscapes in the basements with whistles, turrets, engineer hats and smoke pellets. But it has to have come to a tipping point when a most prominent pollster declares that what Romney needs to rise in the polls is a groping scandal. Is this why they hate Mormons? Because they are not squalid? Because they come with a work ethic? It ruins it for the gropers and for those who sleep late and come to work stoned. Is that their problem with Romney? He is too good? (Too good for America?)

When Kafka looked at America rising he saw its shadow and spelled it with a k: Amerika. Could be what we are seeing here is the new Eastern Establishment Konservatives (EEK!), a dark shadow of its heroic tradition; conservatism’s own Children of the Korn.

I proposed several years ago a way of selecting presidential candidates as you would cheese or maple syrup here in New Hampshire, by grade. Top grade, governor of a major state (CA, NY, TX, MA). Next, in emergency, a great military commander (Eisenhower, Grant, Washington) and to this, to survive, we inevitably return. Perhaps that time is now. Third, governor of a smaller or under populated state (Palin and Jon Huntsman, but Huntsman’s resume is so sterling and his character so honorable he belongs in the first rank.) Last grade: Stand-up comedians, circus performers, professional wrestlers, television pundits, Charlie Sheen, just anybody.

Traditions fail; it is the creative part of nature and nature’s necessity. It happens because generations pass and their idols (Kennedy, Bush, Reagan) pass with them. It is a tragic mistake to reach down the food chain to replace them with market imitations. The Republicans have already done this once with George W. Bush.

If two of the top three candidates – Romney, Perry, Huntsman - are not left standing after South Carolina, we should consider the failure catastrophic and quickly move on to an honorable (not a groper) military commander. David Petraeus seems the obvious candidate for the Republicans.

The Democrats, the party now of the fashionably rich, have already worked their way down to stand up comics, professional wrestlers, celebrities and relatives of past favorites. And just when they are about to turn the corner with the formidable Elizabeth Warren in Boston, in my home town they suddenly find an undiscovered Kennedy. They might start again from scratch with General Wesley Clark.

2012-01-04T13:24:00.001-08:00

Rick Perry does the right thing. It’s all about South Carolina now.

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/4/12

“Not that there aren’t real Republicans here in Iowa,” Rick Perry told ABC. “But the fact is it was a pretty loosey-goosey process, and you had a lot of people who were there that admitted they were Democrats voting in the caucuses last night, so we’re going.”

Perry does the right thing in heading to South Carolina. He’s got friends there and as he says, the process is less “loosey-goosey” than in Iowa. And did somebody say “quirky”?

The process is still winnowing down to a select few and Perry in one of them. I’d contend here that Gingrich, Bachmann and Santorum are not now and never have been real contenders.

Bachmann is about the small mind of America she wants to force the rest of us to be part of so we stop our loathsome and low down city ways. Gingrich is a phony intellectual who so impresses his generational fellows in the House. But unlike most actually academics, he is unable to sustain a coherent theme. His mind is like an old bookstore with everything stuck all over; every book an awakening, every lecture enlightenment. But add them together and they make no sense. One day he wants states sovereignty, next he wants to conquer the world so the new world under his domain will have state sovereignty. He was the anti-Bill and now he is the anti-Hillary; a shadow player who will drift away when they do. He is half nutty and his phony shutting down of the government was irresponsible play acting (which resonates today) by one who so wanted to be called into the action and passion by the gods of war, plume in the wind and saber slashing up the Shenandoah Valley with J.E.B. Stuart – but fickle nature sent him to the times of modest women and men. And he never really fit.

Ron Paul is a man of character and will modify conservatism over the next years, but he will run along the side as Ralph Nader did and contribute that way to both parties and to the rising generation. His role in this race is up.

Rick Perry needs to beat Santorum in South Carolina which should not be so difficult because there is little to Santorum. Little money and organization too. Said here yesterday, Santorum is the Republican’s Joe Biden, waiting for the Fifties to come back. He was last on the Iowa merry go round, in which like suburban soccer, everyone gets a little trophy. He is devoid of substance and a sense of the reality of changing times, which is what politics is all about.

With these others fading, it focuses the mind. Perry now is the only one who can stand and deliver against Mitt Romney. Choices have narrowed. Sarah Palin should ask, who do I support now, going into South Carolina, Mitt Romney or Rick Perry? Donald Trump should ask the same thing and so should Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani and the very influential Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham.

Romney will win sky high in New Hampshire next week but Perry can take South Carolina. And who takes South Carolina could take the nomination.

2012-01-04T04:38:00.001-08:00

Romney and Santorum in Iowa: A good day and a bad omen

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 12/4/12

There is no need to consult the Mexican Grand Warlock to see a Romney in America’s near future. Intrade has him winning the Republican nomination at 81.5%. It was a good day for Mitt Romney yesterday and it will be a better one next week in New Hampshire. Possibly nothing could be better for the Republican party and America at this time of congenital leadership crisis because Romney has killer skills as a problem solver, akin to those of Cardinal Wolsey, Zhou Enlai or Dwight D. Eisenhower. America is broke in so many places and Romney can fix them because that is what he does. But he will need more than eight years to do so, so he must pick his VP wisely. His job is not only to rebuild the Republican Party but to rebuild America to find its way into the new century. John Thune, Senator from South Dakota, who appeared to figure prominently in support during in the Iowa campaign, may be the good helper in this as VP. But it is a problem that Rick Santorum came so close. Rick Santorum is the Republican's answer to Joe Biden, from the land where time stopped some 50 years ago.

The problems of our country run deep. I think the Republican establish so dislikes Romney and waged so much of its credibility against him - even bringing in Barbara Bush and Kissinger to oppose - because they know they are broken and do not want to be fixed. They have been cruising on nostalgia for two decades now and by sending in third tier types like former Senator Bob Dole have afflicted the world with the Clintons. Santorum is in that mold. This week David Brooks of The New York Times presents Santorum as the Republican’s working class hero: “The Republican Party is the party of the white working class. This group — whites with high school degrees and maybe some college — is still the largest block in the electorate. They overwhelmingly favor Republicans,” Yes, from the day of Babs and Riley in “The Life of Riley” or “Ozzie and Harriet” maybe; the land before internet, before grunge, before three-speed bikes, electric trains and color TV.

In fact, Republicans do have the avant garde of the working class, impossible to miss in the presence of Sarah Palin on the back of a Harley on Veteran’s Day, the Tea Party and Ron Paul’s almost dead even finish in Iowa. And it grows in the high schools and colleges. Had the candidates ever gotten to the hills of New Hampshire to town like Warren, Bath and Haverhill, they would see the Ron Paul signs. But it gives them the night terrors. Like Biden, Santorum is the antidote – the perennial Fifties candidate - to keep time from happening. To keep the present from happening.

But Romney is not afraid and it is possible today to see in Romney an American president. And in him, to see an agent sent by Bain, like the two young men who visited Mayor Shirley Franklin and helped restore Atlanta with her. And it could be seen that the Republican Party and possibly all of America still has a strong pulse beneath the ruin and is ripe for renaissance. And there is no better man to do it – born to do it possibly - than Mitt Romney.

2012-01-02T06:20:00.000-08:00

The Tim Tebow phenomenon

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/2/12

Could be that those who hate him to see it clearly: Tim Tebow, bent humbly in prayer, is a threat to the very core of America as we have imagined ourselves to be since 1776. They see a threat right to the core of science mind, head domination over the heart that has brought us to world conquest these last 200 years. They see love rising to extinguish power as invariably in time it tends to.

It could be the "Grand Inquisitor" moment that Dostoyevsky warned us about. Pop culture mavens may recall two knock offs in modern times, one penned if I recall correctly by David Duchovny and Chris Carter in “The X Files” and the other in magnificently portrayed all through a television season in J.J. Abrams “Lost.”
In the “X Files” account, the Christ reappeared on earth in the body this time of an alien. Immediately he is recognized by The Cigarette-Smoking Man as the Christ. He is sent to the dungeons for torture. "Science is their religion," says the ineffable Cigarette Smoking Man, meaning us, and it is his role as subtle agent, like the Grand Inquisitor’s, to protect the official religion. As Dostoyevsky’s Grand inquisitor did, Cigarette Smoking Man wisely saw this alien imposter in our midst as a threat to our very essence. Much as Bill Maher sees Tim Tebow.

But the “Lost” telling was a masterpiece, not only because it slipped beneath the TV censors and advertisers and critics exactly as Dostoyevsky’s great works did, but because of the exquisite telling of the story. In this telling, the execrable Ben Linus (read “Ben” = “Son” – the Christ; Linus, Muse of Apollo) was captured by the “Lost” islanders and thrown into the dungeon for torture. The definitive chest wound and a Dostoyevsky book used as a talisman, given to him by John Locke, a seeker, who wants to know better, identified him as the returned Christ, worn threadbare and gone half mad by his long journey.

In the Dostoevsky story the Christ appears and is thrown into prison by the Grand Inquisitor because what he asks of people is too hard, and what he brings will destroy everything the Inquisitor has built these past thousand years. He, the Christ, is sent to the dungeons for torture.

I don't pray and am kind of the opposite of the Tebow haters. I personally dislike public displays of religiosity unless they come from Jews or Buddhists (Asian ones but not Deepak Chopra). Because otherwise they have, these past decades in America since Jimmy Carter declared himself to be “born again,” seemed simply to be insidious and insincere projections of territoriality; the use of religion for political ends, which should be considered a kind of blasphemy.

But Tim does not seem like that. I like to watch him pray. He seems real and that is the danger. That is what Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor knew, and so do Bill Maher in our time and the Tebow-haters: One real man praying could ruin everything.

2011-12-29T07:12:00.001-08:00

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.

2011-12-28T05:05:00.001-08:00

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.

2011-12-26T07:49:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-22T04:26:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-21T05:06:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-19T13:33:00.001-08:00

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.

2011-12-19T05:03:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-13T11:11:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-13T04:52:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-10T12:10:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-09T05:44:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-08T05:53:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-06T12:49:00.001-08:00

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.

2011-12-06T05:22:00.001-08:00

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.

2011-12-05T01:56:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-04T03:22:00.000-08:00

‘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.

2011-12-02T02:32:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-01T04:01:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-11-30T04:09:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-11-29T03:07:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-11-26T04:46:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-11-25T07:19:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-11-23T05:16:00.000-08:00

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?

2011-11-22T03:44:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-11-20T16:12:00.000-08:00

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 . . .

2011-11-17T13:30:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-11-15T13:33:00.001-08:00

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.

2011-11-15T05:43:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-11-10T13:13:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-11-10T02:34:00.001-08:00

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.

2011-11-09T05:00:00.000-08:00

Rabinowitz: “Why Gingrich could win”

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/9/11

New York money comes out now behind Romney from the old school of power, starched collars, stiff necks and hubris which tried it's best to replace him with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, but the Herman Cain condition brings the moment of turning. He will go now hard and fast or maybe with a whimper but he will go. And either Rick Perry or Newt Gingrich will replace him as the anti-Eastern Establishment candidate. Romney's support is soft. No one is crazy about him outside of New Hampshire and he lives here. The Wall Street Journal's best mind, Dorothy Rabinowitz, says today in her column that in the end Newt Gingrich could take this and she makes a very good case for it.

Gingrich’s attack on Charlie Rose at the Dartmouth debate would be the awakening moment in the shifting geist; the zen moment on which history will turn and the century rise. Rose was the perfect personification of full spectrum East Coast Establishment – the Kennedy/Bush dominatrix - and Gingrich represented the terrifying Rising Other. For what it's worth I was at the Dartmouth debate and my comment here on Gingrich’s assault on Rose was: “I never liked Gingrich before. Now I do.” Others too, as from that debate he jumped into the 10% bracket and became a contender.

Newt Gingrich's rise in the polls—from near zero to the third slot in several polls—should come as no surprise to people who have been watching the Republican debates, writes Rabinowitz. His talk at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition forum last month would ignite a huge response.

“The Gingrich list was interrupted by thunderous applause at every turn. The difference was, as always, in the details—in the informed, scathing descriptions of the Obama policies to be dispatched and replaced, the convincing tone that suggested such a transformation was likely—even imminent.”

Complaint was made at the beginning of the Tea Party movement that Gingrich and friends had commandeered the movement and distracted from key elements like states rights and the Kentucky Resolutions. But on the other hand his first efforts in the Clinton administration did bring a prelude to current events.

Today, writes the Tenth Amendment Center, “on the eve of the 213th anniversary of the passage of Thomas Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, laying the intellectual groundwork of nullification, the people of Ohio exercised their power and nullified the insurance mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”

Rabinowitz says Gingrich began his Iowa speech with the declaration that Americans were confronting the most important election choice since 1860. “America would have the chance in 2012, Mr. Gingrich said, to repudiate decisively decades of leftward drift in our universities and colleges, our newsrooms, our judicial system and bureaucracies.”

Could be that Tea Party action and passion these past two years was all a prelude to Newt.

2011-11-07T17:55:00.001-08:00

Rick Perry: The Republican Party's last best hope . . .

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/8/11

The Republican nomination and the 2012 election all comes down to this: South Carolina. Who wins the South Carolina primary will win the nomination. I think Mitt Romney can beat Barack Obama. I think Rick Perry can. I don’t see anyone else in the wings coming close. Romney is stuck at 24 %. He will do well in New Hampshire. Not so well in South Carolina. The question now comes down to this: Can Rick Perry win South Carolina? Three months ago it seemed like a slam dunk. Then Herman Cain awakened in the polls. So the question advances now: Will Herman Cain win the South Carolina primary?

Herman Cain represents old, reliable, pre-World War II conservative, southern conventions. It was interesting that when he was accused of sexual misconduct he was also asked to sing at an event; odd, even embarrassing, and he sang a verse of Amazing Grace, the one which seeks salvation for the flawed wretch. They in the Deep South get it and Cain knows it. But up here in the north it feels like Adam Clayton Powell double talk.

If you look at Cain’s personal style and his cultivated political persona, it is, like the fedora he proudly sports, pure 1950s. That is the intended subtext of the misguided smoking ad which brought Cain’s smiling (or smirking) approval. And that has appeal to a party which sees value in turning back time (maybe he should have sung that Cher tune). There is a special giddy relish to some to see this coming from a black man. In fact, there are so many ways, subtle and gross, in which Cain appeals to the Republican’s dark side.

Recently, Richard Viguerie wrote an article indicating that many conservatives and Tea Partiers are unlikely to vote for Romney, the “establishment” candidate, even in a general election against President Obama.

“Conservatives and Tea Partiers have brought the Republican Party back to the point where the promised land of an historic wave election is in sight,” he wrote, “but that opportunity may be lost if the GOP hews to the old establishment ways and old establishment leaders.”

But Cain personifies that old generation of flawed leaders even more than Romney; he is almost a caricature of the flawed establishment. The only candidate on stage who can consolidate the tradition with the Tea Party is Rick Perry.

More may be at stake here. When the South moved en masse to the Republican party in the Reagan period it was a historic moment. The 2012 election will tell if it was an action of growth, maturation and even cultural salvation as Viguerie suggests or one of violent and apocalyptic self destruction. South Carolina will tell.

2011-11-07T05:33:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Warren will start her own “club”

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/7/11

Some women just bug men, Bloomberg columnist Margaret Carlson says in a useful article titled “Do men have a problem with Elizabeth Warren?” She cites Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton as problematic. Now, she writes, “Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has joined the club.” But this is misguided. Like those psychological tests they give which ask what do apples, pears and bananas have in common (. . . all fruit, don’t you know) they tell you little about Elizabeth Warren, and to compare her to Pelosi or Clinton is to fully misunderstand Elizabeth Warren.

Elizabeth Warren does not join a club. She starts her own club. If I had to compare her with any Democrats in Congress today they would be Jim Webb and Mark Warner, Senators from Virginia and North Carolina’s Senator Kay Hagan. These three plus Warren might belong to a similar club but leadership has not yet emerged for that club because it has been overwhelmed by the lagging generations of nostalgicos in both parties (the Republicans are starting to wear Stetson hats again and drink in the morning) and particularly the leadership of Clinton and Pelosi, which has driven almost half of traditionally Democratic Boston to be Independents.

Warren “proved so annoying to powerful men in Washington that she didn’t get the job of running” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, says Carlson. And powerful Dems, including Chris Dodd, didn’t help.

But “the club” idea brings problems to both Democrats and Republicans. It relates to marketing issues. The same “ekk, a mouse” response the Senate committee had to Warren came to Sarah Palin who brought apoplexy to both parties as well. Palin brought forth an entirely new political paradigm; a Jacksonian paradigm in a world in which Dems and Repubs had been governing as Hamiltonian since 1865. I guess it is just a simple twist of fate that their sudden presence is accompanied by natural disasters – earthquakes in Warren’s Oklahoma and hurricanes at the Republican convention when Palin appeared.

In marketing terms, politics is the same as anything else. The “eek!” factor accompanied Bob Dylan as well and his agents and publishers had their own “club” so he had to surreptitiously bring his music to New York clubs and the people direct. Warren will have a similar battle if people expect to compare her to Pelosi and Clinton and to be a footnote to Ted Kennedy.

The analogy does not hold up with Warren any more than comparing Dylan with Perry Como and Andy Williams who owned his day. Warren will awaken a world which has been trying to be born here for at least ten years but is still unable to bust out.

Carlson’s club analogy brought to mind the awkward moment when Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neil, who owned the House when Boston owned politics, welcomed President Ronald Reagan to speak to Congress with the phrase, “Welcome to the club.” It was entirely inappropriate. The country had moved on to new paradigms and keepers of the own temple like O’Neill were first to go.

The “club” error is compounded when Carlson says Warren “ . . . headed back to Massachusetts to try to reclaim Ted Kennedy’s seat for the Democrats.”

Scott Brown’s finest moment was when he famously responded in an interview, “It’s not Ted Kennedy’s seat. It’s the people’s seat.”

For people like myself who were born in Massachusetts and educated in public university there and whose family has been involved in politics there for 150 years, it was a refreshing moment. It was time to move on. The old club of Tip O'Neill and the Kennedys had become a burden. It was holding us back. But I think Brown brought little to his task beyond a barn coat and a truck. Now Elizabeth Warren has the opportunity to bring us forward.

2011-11-03T15:02:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Warren changes the entire post-war liberal ethos

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/4/11

The greatly influential part of the post-war liberal ethos came from a hand full of very intelligent and committed New Yorkers – Brooklyn, primarily – which split into two teams; the Norman Mailers and the Norman Podhoretzes. They had an astonishing influence on modern times. I had the occasion to correspond with Mailer over 20-some years and it was much fun; much talk about drinking and play. Felt it wasn’t so much their ideas as their energy, intelligence and willfulness which carried that day. When the conservative Jews in this group moved to Washington, it perhaps more than anything formed modern conservatism. Liberalism at its worst perhaps from that period can be seen in Mailer’s novels in the 70s like An American Dream (1965) at it best in his journals like The Armies of the Night (1968) and elsewhere in a kind of intellectual majesty which Alfred Kazin brought to every task including his autobiography, New York Jew.

They were great days but they were post-European days; days lived in America but borrowed intellectually from Europe; Trotskyite Marxist and anti-capitalist in a romantic way on the left. The non-intellectual folk were Europeanized as well as if they were only half Americans speaking of themselves as “Irish-American” or like Geraldine Ferraro, the Vice Presidential candidate in 1984 as “Italian-American.”

Elizabeth Warren brings an end to all that. She brings to liberalism an indigenous or native ethos, which like her dress and presentation suggests a carefully and exquisitely stylized and symbolized American gothic, much as Lincoln’s big hat and beard was intended to bring country to mind. And she spent most of her life as a Republican, so she brings structure to her thinking. This is of enormous consequence. But it might not be fully realizable unless you grew up in ethnic Boston or New York during the Kennedy/Bush/Lodge era, well charicatured in the movie Miller’s Crossing.

But with Warren we are all Americans now, even here in Boston.

Since Dwight D. Eisenhower tentatively handed the keys over to Jack Kennedy, the American condition has been about ethnicity and kind; Can an Irish-Catholic be President? A Jew? A black woman? A lesbian? Was as if we at large were all sub set of proletariat and George H.W. Bush the only American. And we all wanted to go to Harvard too. But this inclusiveness had issues; excellence would be bypassed and in time, things would fall apart. And each group had its vengeance demons.

Eventually “the Krebs factor” (Bob Dylan’s phrase) would take hold. In time (at the end of time) the beatnik sidekick, Maynard G. Krebs, would take dominance over the mainstream event, Dobie Gillis.

Thankfully, from Krebs to Charlie Sheen and Ashton Kutcher there was enough money to go around. Now there is not. Now again we need competence, and here enters Elizabeth Warren.

She has style, grace, courage and as can be seen in any one of her YouTube clips, ability.

Said here before, when the age’s avatar dies, be it Victoria, Jefferson or Ted Kennedy, the age ends as well. It is an archetypal rule of history. Shortly thereafter, the world will begin again and that is now and that is where Elizabeth Warren comes in.

2011-11-02T04:00:00.001-07:00

The George W. Bush presidency, through a glass darkly

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/2/11

Ten years on into the new century it is possible to see what is rising and what form it will take. It is possible also to see that this century rises like a phoenix from a singular psychotic historic episode which was the George W. Bush presidency. Compliant in this was a Congress of Easter Peeps let by Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, a Supreme Court which had lost its way and a MSM in the pocket of power. Ironically, it is the Republicans who gain from this and bring the century forward. Libertarians, constitutional conservatives, gold standard advocates, Austrian economists, Ron Paul, Judge Andrew Napolitano, the Tenth Amendment Center; all have opened a door which will not be closed. But the Democrats begin to rise out of 20th century torpor well now with Elizabeth Warren.

George W. Bush cannot take all the credit. Bill Clinton, blinded by narcissism, hiring Republican advisors who gave him a budget surplus so that their shadow administration in waiting could spend freely on war and mayhem next, didn’t see what was up. Certainly vice president Dick Cheney who took as his guiding mantra the thought that "deficits don't matter" deserves much of the credit. But it was Bush's job and responsibility, even If it was Cheney doing the dirty work.

And the Obama administration made things endlessly worse, bringing the whole realm to a pre-revolutionary state. It is now possible that world economy will not survive. But it is possible now for better ideas like a flat tax and a balanced budget, return to gold standard, term limits for the Supreme Court and states’ rights to ascend. And it is now possible for people of stronger stuff – Congressman Paul Ryan, Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee - to emerge, opening to a promising future.

But tribute to this is the rise of Ron Paul, libertarian, anti-war, advocate of Austrian economics. He opened the portal. The world today is kaleoscopic, moment to moment – Herman Cain for a week or two and already the MSM pitches Gingrich as his replacement; world economy hinges on 11million Greeks who in the end will refuse to become Germans; protestors wear the mask of the father of modern terrorism, Guy Fawkes, but through a glass darkly the century emerges.

2011-11-01T04:56:00.000-07:00

America at the beginning

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/1/11

A commentator on Bloomberg’s excellent Pimm Fox show made the observation that in economic terms there are actually 33 Chinas and marketers should understand the difference. As there are varied markets here, said Fox. It seems a thought usually ignored. As we see ourselves as an outward sailing species. But we are no longer the generic nationalized economy to come out of WW II. We are instead multifaceted internally and therein lies our growth potential. North Dakota is booming and should be a magnet for the industrious young willing to live in a van for a few years to stake their claim in the future. As the west is booming for farmers, and as you drive north from Louisville in any direction for thousands of miles, America is a farm. And Chicago is its center. But on the edges are they bookish, petulant and broke.

In our time we have found the edges that will contain and constrain our external drive and China will make that explicitly clear in the G 20 gathering this week. China is no longer ours for the taking, nor is Japan, Brazil, India, etc. They have all now turned the black ships back. And the current discussion of inequality of wages is a passing fad of nerd nihilism wearing the mask of Guy Fawkes; irrelevant so long as everyone has enough. What does rise in relevance and potentially to crisis is economic inequality of regions. Some states and regions are booming, like North Dakota. Others, like New Jersey, are gasping.

I grew up in a broke place; Fall River, Massachusetts. After the angel of economy had passed and the Irish and Quebecois had got a purchase here, he best moved on as they will today; moved south then and west to find again prosperity. The least among us remained behind to die. All the money in the world could not have saved New England’s manufacturing. Capital moved south, to Mexico, to China.
No longer. There are no more places to go. We have found our edges. We can no longer think of ourselves s a unique (“exceptional”?) human species destined to control the world as Hamilton wanted, or to fly across the universe as in Captain Kirk' s beguiling (childish?)narrative (which Paul Krugman wrote an economic thesis on). Even Lt. Ripley came home.

It is a good thing. It is the beginning. We, as Americans, will be required now to find ourselves as we are. We will be required to find who we are without looking somewhere else. We can no longer save the world. (The world has survived our attempts.) We must now save ourselves. This will change us economically, politically, culturally, but it is a beginning of a new direction in this century and will take us the next hundred years.

2011-10-29T12:43:00.001-07:00

How Rick Perry will win . . .

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 1/11/11

The lesson for the press in the last election should be drawn from Marshall McLuhan’s famous vision that the media are themselves the vehicle and the message. TV’s popular celebrity commentators were gatekeepers to a geist of their own time and generation (their own “kind”); sentries at the portal to tell Sarah Palin that she could not go in. She gave her children funny names. She used a Garfield desk calendar. She shot a moose and ate it. She dressed like a “slutty flight attendant.” She did not belong with them. Rick Perry, naturally leery in this otherworld of imagery and style, will not be likewise taken down. By solstice it will be clear to all that he is an instinctively agreeable and genuine person with a common grace that McLuhan’s winged monkeys cannot exile.

I had an excellent brief conversation with Rick Perry at the Barley House after the NH signing Friday about the astonishing World Series game the night before. It meant something to Texas. Viewership of the World Series jumps way up when the games are between the Yankees and the Red Sox as if some ancient memory drives us. But the great series this year advances my theory that America is finding its “center” now in the middle of the country (St. Louis, say) and leaving the New England families – Kennedy, Bush - behind. It increases the bitterness of us in the northeast; engenders the subtle feeling that we are no longer important. That we are being left behind.

This how I see Rick winning: He needs endorsements of Trump, Palin, Giuliani and South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. Cain, who is really on a self-promotion tour, will fall apart – he has no money and has begun the spiral to cloud cuckoo land. What I have been calling the “establishment” Republicans – Bush/Rove/neocons - will fall apart as well; they crave ideas whose time has long passed and can’t let go – they have become nostalgicos, relying on the reassuring clichés of their Jesuit priest and the quiet confidence that in the end they can still rig something in Florida – they’ll always have Florida. Bush senior, Bob Dole, the WW II wounded. War is over. We won. But the Republican Party today resembles those lost but loyal Japanese officers still hiding in the jungles of Indonesia decades after the armistice.

Since they can’t get Chris Christie in now (and Jeb Bush as VP of course) they will now pour their cash into Romney. But Romney is a shade, a deception, and they will self destruct just as the Eleanor Roosevelt liberals did in the face of Jack Kennedy rising in early 1960s.

The 11% creep factor will ruin Romney & the establishment Republicans. George Will accurately projects this: “Romney, supposedly the Republican most electable next November, is a recidivist reviser of his principles who is not only becoming less electable; he might damage GOP chances of capturing the Senate.” He seems falling apart by the day now; he seems possessed by New Hampshire’s mountain witches. That leaves only Perry standing, steady and sure. With Nikki Haley as VP he beats Obama and empowers the new generation and the rising heartland movement. Long term I look forward to 12 years; Nikki Haley taking on the challenge of Elizabeth Warren in 2020 (Jim Webb as Warren’s VP) with Jon Huntsman as Haley’s own VP.

Going with the contours or time and economy, America is a peaceable kingdom. Otherwise there is breakage.

2011-10-27T08:10:00.000-07:00

Take America back: Boycott the debates

Jon Huntsman boycotted the Nevada debate to protest Nevada’s decision to move up its caucuses to January. (They changed their minds.) Said here that Newt Gingrich’s rant at Charlie Rose at the Dartmouth debate, which boosted Gingrich into the mainstream, would have given him a Marlon Brando moment had he boycotted the Bloomberg/Washington Post fashion show altogether. Now Rick Perry says he may boycott the upcoming events. He should. Gingrich as well. Debates don’t indicate who will be a good President. They tell who will do well on the lucrative lecture and fundraising circuit after their Presidency. Ask Bill Clinton, he of the 50 gold watches.

"All they're interested in is stirring up between the candidates instead of really talking about the issues that are important to the American people," Perry said of Fox.

The GOP debate drama rewards style over substance, said the Washington Post’s conservative columnist Kathleen Parker. The operative maxim in cable television can be summed up as follows: Is it good TV?

“Brilliant is good but not enough,” she said. “Attractive is imperative but not enough. Also needed are tension, conflict and passion. Television is visual storytelling, and it doesn't succeed without all elements working in sync with the additional demands of the human eye.”

“Now we judge a candidate's worthiness for public office as much according to his stage performance as by his plan to balance the budget. Scorecards include hair, makeup, wardrobe and body language. In other words, the leader of the free world has to be someone we want to watch. Is he or she good TV?”

Anyone who has ever lived in Silver Spring, Alexandria or any of the other regions of Washington might recall regular visits from the FBI to run clearance checks on neighbors seeking work for the government. Undoubtedly they will look at college transcripts as well. And arrest records. And all sorts of things. But for the most sensitive and fateful positions, presidents and vice presidents, we have debates.

It is political theater. And it has brought some who appeared dangerously unstable to the Presidency, some compulsive and twisted and it has made us Americans apologists for all of these things.

The entire primary thing should be reviewed. Jimmy Carter and James Baker came up with a much better program a few years ago but it was ignored.

America is not a game show. Those who comply with the host, Romney and Bachmann in particular, show a fawning conformity; a desire to meet those standards set by pundits, ad men and advertisers. It drags America down to the lowest possible standard.

2011-10-27T05:29:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Warren, the anti-Palin, Pt. 2

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 10/27/11

Elizabeth Warren went up against the winged monkeys a week ago when she referred to herself as a hick, commenting on her Harvard association and how that may alienate the Fenway public. She called herself an “elite hick” and the cries of pain went up from the hick anti-defamation league. The Wonderful Whites of West Virginia were particularly offended.

But that is precisely how she got here. Warren in the anti-Palin conjured here in New England to defend against the rising life-force of the heartland these past two years; since February, 2009, precisely, when New Hampshire state rep. Dan Itse first challenged Obamacare on a Jeffersonian (Kentucky Resolutions) defense and 29 states followed suit. All red states, all hicks.

The rise of Grizzly Mama brought them together and brought shock and awe to the unbearably light sensibilities of the Nantucket eloi.

Like Palin, Warren seems to be made of stronger stuff.

Raised in hard scrabble Oklahoma, she brought heartland to Harvard Yard. A waitress during college, she worked her way through like the best of us. Like Sarah Palin.

Warren shouldn’t back away from claims that she framed the Occupy movement. As Cavuto said to Rick Perry on Tuesday, “You sound like the Occupy crowd.” As Perry was the first governor, back in December, 2008 – the Bush period – to publicly oppose and opposition then when in Virginia calls against came in 10 to one as those of Occupy now.

But before we had Palin we had Jim Webb of Virginia who, when Mark Warner was governor of Virginia, first brought anti- Wall Street rural rustification to contemporary politics.

A tobacco-chewing, gun toting, proud-to-be-Scotch-Irish warrior novelist from the way far hills and hollows of westernmost Virginia.

But the country wasn’t ready to start again and the best of the new Democrats like Wesley Clark and the old like Russ Feingold were passed over as the Democrats wasted away again in Hillaryland.

They/we may be ready now; ready to begin again with Elizabeth Warren.

This is the second time rustification has happened in America. The first after the Colonial period when the east rusticated to defend against Andrew Jackson. Prediction for this time: If Herman Cain is elected President in 2012, Elizabeth Warren will be elected in 2016.

2011-10-26T15:34:00.001-07:00

There’s still time for Sarah Palin

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 10/26/11

Mitt Romney takes support of New Hampshire’s former Governor John Sununu this week while Jeb Bush and Karl Rove publicly attack Rick Perry. Chris Christie is out. Romney is now certified as the Eastern Establishment candidate. But although things can and likely will change, Rick Perry has yet to consolidate the non-establishment (anti-establishment?) or Tea Party sentiment going now to Cain, Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich.

The Fox poll out Wednesday night has Herman Cain in the lead with 24%. The CBS/NYT poll out Monday has Herman Cain at 25%, Mitt Romney at 21%, Newt Gingrich at 10%, Ron Paul at 8% and Rick Perry at 6%. Herman Cain persists and advances.

Romney’s “establishment” support seems frozen at around 18%. With Perry’s 7%, the combined total for the non-Establishment, independent conservatives is 65%. But no one in this race has been able to consolidate this scattered Tea Party, “constitutional conservative” (how about counter-culture conservative?) libertarian conservative and independent conservative vote.

Note to Sarah Palin camp: Friday, October 28 is the last day to register for New Hampshire. There is still time.

2011-10-26T03:41:00.000-07:00

The Hill

Is the Herman Cain campaign all a prank?

by Bernie Quigley

For on 10/26/11

Is the Herman Cain campaign a publicity stunt that got out of hand? Cain is up to 31 percent in the new CBS/NYT poll. Could this suggest to Cain and company that he could actually be president in 2012 and that was never the actual intention of his campaign? The strange new video of his agent appears to be a parody of campaign videos or of presidential campaigns in general, and this suggestion is advanced at the end when the agent inexplicably lights up a cigarette. And Cain enters with a mischievous smile.

The video suggests not so much that Cain shouldn't be taken seriously as a candidate for president but that he never intended to be taken seriously as a candidate and never hoped or wanted to be president. It was all a motivational speakers self promotion gag that got out of hand. A prank perhaps to comment on the tawdry and devolved “American idol” quality of a serious presidential campaign handed over to media promoters, ad men and pop culture mavens.

2011-10-25T04:24:00.000-07:00

Visualize Rick Perry, Pt. 2
by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 10/25/11

With a solid endorsement from Steve Forbes and an idea whose time has come - the flat, fair and free Cut, Cap and Grow plan, Rick Perry's team rolls out. And if I have it right the Texas Rangers are on the verge of winning the World Series tonight. For the first time.

The show of tight jaws unsettled the pundits last week at the debate, but it worked. And Perry wandered the wildernesss of Iowa in tree bark since, gun in hand. What gave Rick, the hunter, that aspect of authenticity was the contrast with Romney's bookishness. And Perry’s jaws were still tight. He was shooting birds with tight jaws. Shooting birds in anger. The pictures were great.

As The New York Times’ Ross Douthat said when Perry first entered the race, quoting a Texas competitor, “Running against Rick Perry is like running against God.” Very few politicians smile naturally . . . Jack Kennedy and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Perry does too. But his anger is authentic and palatable as well. High contrast with New Englanders here of the old line where anger and joy are both eclipsed by form. To the degree where the reader would be chilled to the bone by the pure democratic fairness and Buddhist detachment of three men in a small skiff off Nantucket in the whaling days, drawing straws to determine which would kill and which would be eaten. Seafaring people with names like Coffin. So many cousins, all named Coffin. Such are the dark spirits which still haunt the swamp Yankees. We bury our feelings. We hide our past. We move.

The witch spirit haunts the hills of New Hampshire as well said Nathanial Hawthorne - they come and go; Mitt Romney take note - and sometimes Fenway Park. Still it was with disbelief that we watched the gifted Dominicans, brought in to lift the Curse, praying to Big Papi’s mother in heaven after each home run, win the Pennant from New York. Under a full eclipse off the moon. Really.

Some say they had conjured the dead. Old school in bondo patched trucks listening on radio didn't even watch the World Series or listen because all that mattered to New England was New York v. Boston and the Pennant flag. That was the world, our world, New York and Boston, nothing else in 150 years.

Now this. Texas maybe to win the World Series tonight. And Rick Perry.

2011-10-24T07:08:00.000-07:00

What’s next for Sarah Palin? How about a “super committee” of governors?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 10/24/11

What's next for Sarah Palin? She seems at the moment to be finding a role as a general commentator, remarking on Ron Paul's foreign policy and what not. That is, she seems to be at loose ends. There is much more she could do as an Alaskan in terms of advancing regionalism and states as laboratories as Rick Perry talks about it.

Palin’s role these past two years has been much as the La Passionara of the Tea Party movement. Seeing her at the Nashville Tea Party Congress at the beginning showed a connection to this rustic grass roots movement which brought it to large recognition.

But something happened in the interim. Old school professionals like Dick Armey commandeered the rising spirit and it became an unfocused conservative howl, and old fashioned country rant against those effete Washington people.

The Tea Party has lost its original intent. State sovereignty issues as they are maturely discussed by Andrew Napolitano on Freedom Watch and Thomas Woods and Rick Perry and governors like Butch Otter of Idaho and candidates like Alaska’s Joe Miller and advanced by legislators like Delegate Jim LeMunyon of Virginia need some time to percolate. And there couldn’t be a better Petrie dish than Alaska.

A sympathetic president like Perry cannot dictate these changes top down. They have to rise up from the states and governors must take the initiative. And the status of governors must be enhanced. Palin is in the perfect position to bring leadership to this new direction.

Richard Nixon brought forth a model of regionalization of needs and resources that could enable this vision but it was ill conceived culturally and the time was not right. The entire idea in the Jeffersonian view is to advance cohesive American cultures holistically as they mature. George Kennan recognized the need of shifting from global to regional in his last book, “Round the Cragged Hill”:

“I have often diverted myself, and puzzled my friends, by wondering how it would be if our country, while retaining certain of the rudiments of a federal government, were to be decentralized into something like a dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment. I could conceive of something like nine of these republics—let us say, New England; the Middle Atlantic states; the Middle West; the Northwest (from Wisconsin to the Northwest, and down the Pacific coast to central California); the Southwest (including southern California and Hawaii); Texas (by itself); the Old South; Florida (perhaps including Puerto Rico); and Alaska; plus three great self-governing urban regions, those of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—a total of twelve constituent entities. To these entities I would accord a larger part of the present federal powers than one might suspect—large enough, in fact, to make most people gasp.”

It has been suggested here that a “super committee” of governors and former governors be formed to consider these issues and build a working framework for discussion and action. I can't think of anyone better than Sarah Palin to form and chair such a group.

2011-10-21T04:57:00.000-07:00

Jon Huntsman’s brilliant tactic

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 10/21/11

“What happens in Las Vegas stays in Vegas. And I say that what happens in New Hampshire impacts the world.” So said Jon Huntsman in Hopkinton, NH. Huntsman will boycott Nevada and spend his efforts in New Hampshire. It is a brilliant move and one that can put him in contention.

As the Wall Street Journal reports: “The candidates were all smiles this week at the Las Vegas debate, but behind the scenes, many were wrangling over what to do about the state's January caucus. Since Nevada moved its date up to January 14 (just three days before New Hampshire's primary), the outrage has been palpable. Yesterday, New Hampshire encouraged candidates to suspend all campaign activities in Nevada, and some are already planning to skip the state entirely.”

Huntsman senses that Romney may be vulnerable. I believe he is. And this rhetoric about New Hampshire “impacts the world” is music to our ears. It was even true 50 years ago. But we above the commercial districts of Manchester have little to bind us now to the outside; the nation’s first primary and a mountain in the shape of a man’s head. Then a few years ago the man’s head fell off. So being first is even more important to us.

From the WSJ coverage: “For some, an earlier set of dates would help by denying their rivals time to organize. Mitt Romney and Rick Perry have declined to engage in the Nevada boycott threats. But other campaigns have rallied to Mr. Huntsman's way of thinking. Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, and Newt Gingrich have all threatened to skip the caucuses.”

New Hampshire makes little difference to Rick Perry. Romney has been expected to take it, then Perry would potentially rise in South Carolina. But Romney has put lot of stock in New Hampshire over the years, including a second house on Lake Winnipesaukee, and understands New Hampshire’s importance in any future election. After this long cultivation will Mitt now deny New Hampshire its first in the nation status? It would be considered here to be an act of betrayal.

But that could be very good for Jon Huntsman.

Indeed, the Trickster may be at hand and whole season could shift on this as it did in the third game of the Stanley Cup for the Boston Bruins.

2011-10-20T08:03:00.000-07:00

“Primal scream”: The continuing crisis of authority

Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 10/20/11

We should be in a season of celebration. Three of the Republican candidates for president, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman, are of the highest caliber, on a level we have barely seen in the post-war period. But interest is lukewarm. And the mainstream yearns for the family member of a former president, one not particularly distinguished; a monarchist yearning. Or Herman Cain. It has been like this for awhile: Obama, Hillary, Mike Huckabee, W. Bush, Al Gore and others should be seen as history's passing fancy, yet in our time they rise to the top. This is a crisis of leadership and authority coming to its most critical moment. If we fail again this time, this time the country will fall apart.

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank notes that in the recent debate in Nevada, Jon Huntsman, “governor, ambassador, the man who in a normal political environment would be the most qualified and formidable candidate in the race, wasn’t even on the stage.”

And he is right when he says: “A system that rejects a Jon Huntsman in favor of a Herman Cain isn’t a primary process. It is a primal scream.”

What went wrong? Everything. There is something wrong with everything: The government, the press, and the people.

I’ve been following this descent since Bill Clinton’s Elvis caricature followed in his inauguration parade. It was all good fun, no? A President with the moral overview of the Hunka hunka burnin’ love himself. Maybe not. At the beginning of the Clinton presidency I felt we had turned the corner and entered the vestry of the place of no return. I wasn’t alone. It was then that alternative government, secession and regional thinking began. It began with the League of the South and in New England, the New England Confederation. The idea cross cultured and took steam in the Bush administration and took off in Obama’s moment. There are now dozens of states’ rights and sovereignty movements across the continent. And the so-called ‘occupy’ movement resembles the Pirandello play in which the actors are in search of an author.

They could very well find them in authors like Thomas Woods, or at Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Freedom Watch or at the Tenth Amendment Center, a Petri dish for brilliant new Constitutional thinking. And if the grownups don’t get it right this time, they may find no other options.

2011-10-17T02:47:00.001-07:00

CNN Western GOP debate: Rick Perry, Jon Huntsman and Kurt Cobain - draft

Bernie Quigley, for The Hill 10/18/11

Jon Huntsman made a comment regarding Kurt Cobain there a few weeks back after comments here that some of these musician/politicians who were in the Presidential race seem like leftovers from the Sixties. Was said that only Wolf Blitzer got Huntsman’s reference. But Kurt, the maistro of his generation who sought God in his own way carried a warning: "I'd rather be dead than cool." Good to know that Jon is up on the pop culture. Did I mention that he looks incredibly like Carlisle Cullen, the benevolent patriarch vampire in the Twilight saga which comes to fruition on 11/11? And did I mention that theory passing on the Internet that the vampires in Twilight are not bad boys like in the old school but really-high minded angels or gods come to help us out and it was widely suggested they are Mormons?

Whatever, never mind. More to the relevance of this race is a contrast between what might be called new world and old world. Not U.S. and Europe, but the old world receding east of the Mississippi and the new world rising west of the Mississippi. Mitt Romney straddles both, straddles all and none, but Rick Perry and Huntsman personify the New West rising in energy, resources, commerce and karma. It is a booming new land where new immigrants are scorned as they were here in New England in the 1830s. Here then the century could be seen beginning to rise to a boom in both new classes and masses with Irish workers and European Jews just over. Today there is virtually a mirror image in the southwest and northward with new immigrants from South America and Asia which will build a booming America again to the New South of Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal and the New West of Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman if it is allowed to awaken. Immigrants are a sign of prosperity: They bring joy. They bring families. They bring desire and work ethic.

But the old people back east don't get it. Maybe that’s why the Dartmouth debate was so boring and predictable. Take the journey west with Frasier. Give up the Boston Irish bar patrons of Cheers for the Hindu waitress in the Seattle coffee shop. Because Kurt would never have found his path to certitude and conviction back east. Or Joseph Smith or Stephen Austin or Sarah Palin for that matter. It is a west thing and Rick and Jon could awaken it. Like everything that will happen next in this country, if it doesn't awaken in the west, it won't awaken.

2011-10-15T04:40:00.001-07:00

Bring the Churchill bust back
by Bernie Quigley

For The HIll on 10/15/11

Question to Republican hopefuls: Would you bring the Churchill bust back to the White House?

What was the real purpose of division between the U.S. and England during the American Revolution? Trade? Taxes? Or something more? At its mythical core we might look to Sir James George Frasier who wrote that one of the central-most myths of a rising people is the cutting down of father's tree so as to make one's own generation rise in the world. And this mythical significance is found in Washington, who could not tell a lie but had no problem with random vandalism; he chopped down the tree on behalf of his revolutionary generation.

Taxes and trade seem to be taking care of themselves. But if the only purpose of the American Revolution was to be separate culturally from England so as to grow our own tree, maybe we should think that through again. Because we fully bonded once again with the mother country when Winston Churchill brought us kicking and screaming to defend against German fascism.

Today, the spirit of Anglosphere flows uninhibited across the Atlantic and as far west as Australia. It is revealed in the final episodes that Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, drew her sword of discrimination from a stone put there in Arthur’s time by the Earth Mother herself. Dr. Who freely traverses time and the cosmos to the Andromeda soul of the universe and Chef Ramsay beats us out of lethargy. Neil Gaiman, possibly the greatest living writer, who has my kids lining up to see him, comes again from England. No surprise as Tolkien turned the mythic corner post-war and the rising generation’s creation myth is from that medievalist trickster/shaman Harry Potter. So Catherine and William are for us as well. This culture flows smoothly. It is not globalism. It is not Europe, Christendom, “the West” or the “global village” or HIllaryland or Bill’s pathologically named “global initiative.” It is not an abstraction or a political construct. It is who we are. It is tribal and it is the tribe from which we emerged.

Two telling details: As a New York disk jockey observed at the time, there was question how The Beatles would be taken in America because the French sensation Johnny Holliday "couldn't get arrested " in America. Jim Rogers, the legendary investor said at the global crash in 2008 that "London and New York" were finished. He didn't say Boston and New York because Boston and New York have never been connected. The true psychological state of old soul/new soul has always been London and New York.

This is the natural history of the English-speaking people. It should be symbolized by the bust of Winston Churchill which was sent to the White House after 9/11. Sent back later by Barack Obama.

2011-10-14T05:17:00.000-07:00

In Charlie Rose’s Mandarin Court Mitt Romney wins the Rose Kennedy award

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill

on 10/14/11

A purely zen way of looking at the Dartmouth debate might be to look at not what was said but why it was said in the first place. And why it was said at Dartmouth with New York commentators in the bucolic New England autumn in black suit and brown shoes and 400 dollar shirts and Charlie Rose. This would be a test on political instinct and action and commitment to principle or a moral ethos, in a countervailing war within the self with the politician’s desire to be included, to be famous, to be, like Terry Malloy, somebody.

Hold into perspective Rose Kennedy’s question when the Kennedys and the Boston Irish had already taken power in Boston and she asked, “When are the nice people going to invite us over?”

The analogous question today: When will Charlie Rose invite us to his circular table?

In context, Rose’s question was asked when Joe Kennedy in particular but any Irish at all were not allowed to buy a house in Cohasset and so built their compound in Hyannis Port. By the “nice people” she meant the Yankee Protestants. The men, meaning Joe and Jack, understood from the first that the answer was “never.” And they did the right thing. They built their own world, they built their own network, they built their own America and it is today’s America and it does not belong thankful, to the “nice people.”

Gingrich and Rick Perry, like Joe and Jack, correctly understood the discussion on Wednesday night.

Gingrich understands this instinctively. Newt was right when he said 20 years ago that the northeast, like the China Mandarins, still see themselves as running the century when they are irrelevant. All things will pass, even the Lodges and the Kennedys.

But the nice people are back and Charlie Rose holds the Mandarin court. And the desire to be part of the court virtually gushed from Michele Backmann.
Marlon Brando, repudiated the banality of the times when he refused to accept an academy award. Newt could have made a better mark on this debate by his conspicuous absence. As it was, he did well and he did good by lashing out at Rose’s pusillanimous attempt to weaken his command that the money launderers in the Obama administration be thrown in jail. His ratings went up to the double digits. I’ve never liked Gingrich until that moment. Now I like him.

Rick Perry did well in this regard as well. He could easily have brought out an economic package on Wednesday night with some of the otherrs, but bringing it out this afternoon showed a refusal to be marketed, dominated, territorialized, packaged, chewed up and spit out by the Washington Post, by Bloomberg and by Charlie Rose, late of PBS.

But Mitt Romney wins the Rose Kennedy award. Thrilled to be invited in by “the right people” he even made a joke about Rose’s obsequious, milquetoast life as a PBS commentator.

Romney has modeled himself recently as a Tea Party guy, earlier as a Massachusetts liberal and now as Admiral Perry incarnate threatening to whack the Chinese this time with his black ships. And it all seems so staged; every day in every way a life staged from birth to one day be president.

2011-10-13T06:53:00.000-07:00

2011-10-13T05:37:00.001-07:00

Herman Cain has peaked

The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows Herman Cain to be leading the Republican field Cain 27, Romney 23, Perry 16. But Cain's rise is about to end. His campaign has peaked.

He has enough momentum to go along till February maybe, but possibly not enough money. And attitudes of the other Republican candidates toward Cain suggest he will not be gaining more money ahead.

Cain is primarily a motivational speaker of the kind that appears throughout the heartland advertised in local newspapers, featuring clear-thinking egotism and a positively-charged guy like Cain along with a sunny preacher, a retired football player and a simple message. As Jon Huntsman said, 9-9-9 sounded like the price of pizza. When I first heard it the Subway 5-5-5 inches long jingle came to mind.

But what indicates that his ride will now peak and slow is that none of the other candidates see him as serious as they see themselves. Bachmann, Gingrich and Santorum rank in self-importance and Cain is delightfully free of it. But Cain's 9-9-9 mantra became the friendly joke theme of the recent debate night with even the formidable Julianna Goldman of Bloomberg joining in about the price of beer (to go with pizza). He is Ringo Starr and the room defaults to him for relief when tension rises between the battling principles, primarily Perry and Romney.

The 9-9-9 marketing strategy has backfired on Cain. He has leveraged his whole campaign on it and it is not enough. And there is something about Cain that doesn't so much want to win, but to be included. And he is. But this is as far as he will go.

2011-10-12T04:51:00.000-07:00

The debates minus Sarah Palin

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 10/7/11

“We are Dartmouth. We speak for the trees!”

“Michele Bachmann get out of my womb and that goes for the rest of you too!”

So rose the chants politely corralled on Dartmouth’s common off to the edge of the large Bloomberg stage. Newt Gingrich paid homage to Sarah Palin in vindicating language about “death panels.” But this was a neutral forum which included everyone. Except Rick Perry.

In a discussion at Dartmouth’s Beta House later the other Rick Perry was revealed. Thoughtful, dynamic, engaged, with better ideas. In my opinion a candidate remarkably like Wesley Clark. And like General Clark, his premise that energy independence will being peace and prosperity is a little misguided. All history’s dynamics today linked to external oil; Islamic forces at a receding realm, Israel in a the rising realm - and cannot be made separate. But Perry smart and uncomplicated on the Canada pipeline. “Build it now.” Otherwise the agreement will go to China. But it will be the same with external oil.

The blurb cited by the MSM at the Beta event was that Rick Perry mixed up the date of the American Revolution. Gotcha! Does anyone really think that Perry doesn’t know that 1776 was in the 18th century?

This was the most polite debate. Designed perhaps for The New Yorker crowd but with a feel like that of the T.S. Eliot poem, the one where the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table.

“I’m bored,” Tom Keene repeated in his afternoon broadcasts for Bloomberg.

Note to Sarah Palin: October 28 is the last day to register in New Hampshire. There is still time.

The presidential race is okay, but the most fascinating politicians in our time are Sarah Palin and Elizabeth Warren. They are doubles, one produced by the presence of the other. I’d like to see Palin and Warren run for president in 2016, Palin for the Alaskan Independence Party, Warren for the New England Party. Throw in Ron Paul who won the Values Voter Summit straw poll this weekend for the Texas Independence Party. (Howard Dean for the Vermont Party?) Start again from scratch.

Sooner if Mike Bloomberg is stupid enough to start (buy) a third party run. Bloomberg believes he can buy America like he bought New York. But New York is not America. He vastly misunderstands America. The Democrats and Republicans, those Ford guys and Chevy guys of the establishment, in their drive to mediocrity will continue to send in their own; Hillary Clinton maybe or someone related to her and Mitch McConnell, Kay Bailey Hutchison or a Bush relative. But if the times are to ascend; we need to think regionally.

That was the idea of the Tea Party before it was commandeered by Glenn Beck in his quest for world conquest. But the Tea Party today is nothing but a provincial rant.

It might be recalled that it did not start on the right, it started on the left. It did not start in the Obama administration; it started in the George W. Bush administration. It started under the influence of two places: New England and Alaska. Two major influences were Emerson’s essays, particularly, “Self Reliance” here and the venerable AIP there. There was a silent partner in the New England initiative, Thomas Jefferson.

These ideas leave the discussion now that Palin has been sent into exile and Ron Paul has been accepted at the table with the tall men.

2011-10-08T07:20:00.001-07:00

Dartmouth debate question: Did you serve?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 10/10/11

(Photo: Virginia Senator Jim Webb, Vietnam)

Not that I've ever been so inclined, but if I'd ever had the dark inclination to run for office, especially president, I would want to do two things: Go to college and do military service. The first is least important although a Jeffersonian with a natural pride of place might do undergraduate work at her or his state school; U. Tennessee like my surgeon friend in Tennessee (and his father and grandfather before him), U Mass., Texas A & M, etc. Military service more important as it has a ritual quality: You go before your rational function is fully developed so you enter the moral ambiguity of war on a leap of faith; faith in the collective you will enter as a full adult. Common honor which common people once strived for. Today only Prince Harry, doing combat training in California, sees it as a duty.

I am sure they will not ask the contestants (the word contestants suggests game show, no?) on Tuesday night in the Dartmouth debate this question: Did you serve? Please answer yes or no. So here are the military records of those in the Republican lineup for American President in 2012. No substitutes (Outward Bound, Peace Corp, college, Boy Scouts, civilian working for military, worked on kibbutz).

Mitt Romney: Did not serve. He talked tough at the Citadel this week but like many of those who did not serve - most dramatically in the W. Bush administration - he was doing something else when people of his age were being called up; Romney on a mission of religious intent in Lyons, France. There is a neurosis to those called chicken hawks in the Bush administration like Cheney who took five deferments and did not serve. They spend the rest of their life compensating for the mythic passage they did not make when they were young. Tends to create needless war and mayhem.

Newt Gingrich: Did not serve. Warmonger as well. (He worries that weakling countries like France will be dominated by Islam and sharia law. So what?) Possibly felt he could serve his country better by going to college. Newt, who wants to be vice president, is all about serving his country.
Michele Bachmann: Did not serve.

Herman Cain: Did not serve.

Jon Huntsman: Did not serve.

Rick Santorum: Did not serve.

Ron Paul: Served as a flight surgeon in the United States Air Force from 1963 to 1965 and then in the United States Air National Guard from 1965 to 1968.
Rick Perry: Commissioned in the Air Force, completed pilot training, and flew C-130 tactical airlift in the United States, the Middle East, and Europe from 1972 to 1977. Ranked captain.

2011-10-07T11:47:00.000-07:00

New directions for Sarah Palin, Elizabeth Warren and Ron Paul

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 10/7/11

The presidential race is okay, but the most fascinating politicians in our time are Sarah Palin and Elizabeth Warren. They are doubles, one produced by the presence of the other. I’d like to see Palin and Warren run for president in 2016, Palin for the Alaskan Independence Party, Warren for the New England Party. Throw in Ron Paul for the Texas Independence Party. Start again from scratch.

Sooner if Mike Bloomberg is stupid enough to start (buy) a third party run. Bloomberg believes he can buy America like he bought New York. But New York is not America. He vastly misunderstands America. The Democrats and Republicans, those Ford guys and Chevy guys of the establishment, in their drive to mediocrity will continue to send in their own; Hillary Clinton maybe or someone related to her and Mitch McConnell, Kay Bailey Hutchison or a Bush relative. But if the times are to ascend; we need to think regionally.

That was the idea of the Tea Party before it was commandeered by Glenn Beck in his magical mystery quest for world conquest. But the Tea Party today is nothing but a provincial rant.

It might be recalled that it did not start on the right, it started on the left. It did not start in the Obama administration; it started in the George W. Bush administration. It started under the influence of two places: New England and Alaska. Two major influences were Emerson’s essays, particularly, “Self Reliance” here and the venerable AIP there. There was a silent partner in the New England initiative, Thomas Jefferson.

Citing Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions, it was suggested up here in 2003 that the northern-most New England states need not participate in the invasion of Iraq because it was unconstitutional. George Kennan liked the idea and agreed with it. John Kenneth Galbraith thought our (I helped) idea of sending our own New England representative to the UN “wonderfully to the good.”

And Kennan recognized the need of shifting from global to regional in his last book, “Round the Cragged Hill”:

“I have often diverted myself, and puzzled my friends, by wondering how it would be if our country, while retaining certain of the rudiments of a federal government, were to be decentralized into something like a dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment. I could conceive of something like nine of these republics—let us say, New England; the Middle Atlantic states; the Middle West; the Northwest (from Wisconsin to the Northwest, and down the Pacific coast to central California); the Southwest (including southern California and Hawaii); Texas (by itself); the Old South; Florida (perhaps including Puerto Rico); and Alaska; plus three great self-governing urban regions, those of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—a total of twelve constituent entities. To these entities I would accord a larger part of the present federal powers than one might suspect—large enough, in fact, to make most people gasp.”

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 before Bloomberg buys it. Hayek works in this model. Health care works. Everything works. Not how it worked in 1930, but how it will work successfully in 2030.

2011-10-06T07:18:00.000-07:00

Apple in mourning

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 10/6/11

Illistration by Leif Parsons for Bloomberg

For The Hill on 10/6/1

When I heard of Steve Jobs’ death last night the thought came to my mind of John Lennon’s death; the circumstances were different but the times – Lennon died Dec. 8, 1980 – remarkably the same. And both found symbolism in the apple. Drudge had a picture of Steve Jobs from the beginning, dressed in a business suit, holding an apple. Actually, offering us an apple. The apple appeared as well in Virginia Postrel’s remembrance of Jobs in Bloomberg, illustrated by Leif Parson’s rendition of the iconic Magritte painting of the Englishman in bowler hat with an apple before his face. But the apple is sky blue like the company’s logo and the sky grey, in mourning.

Steve Jobs of course brought the apple to the day but most in the day assumed he got it from The Beatles as the apple was the symbol first with them: Apple Records.

Homage to the times in which Jobs, like Lennon, broke bread with the Hari Khrishnas. But to go back, the Magritte image of apple man tells us something. It was painted in 1964 and overtly suggested a shaman rising was at hand. The painting was called “Son of Man” the phrase taken from the Book of Daniel, widely seen among the faithful as a harbinger of the awakening. From the Catholic Encyclopedia:

“In the great vision of Daniel after the appearance of the four beasts, we read:

‘I beheld therefore in the vision of the night, and lo, one like a son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and he came even to the Ancient of days: and they presented him before him. And he gave him power, and glory, and a kingdom: and all peoples, tribes, and tongues shall serve him: his power is an everlasting power that shall not be taken away: and his kingdom shall not be destroyed.’

Like so many things in art of numinous circumstances this picture comes with a double; Magritte did another painting just the same but with the image of a white dove before the face of the Englishman instead of the apple.

No question, something rose with the times in about 1964 and ascended in the bard of Apple’s phrase to visit a million suns, calling him on and on across the universe. It carried through every day and to the end of Steve Jobs’ life.

I remember where I was – in my kitchen in west Philadelphia feeding my cat - when the call came from a New York friend to say that John Lennon was dead. And although I was never the greatest of fans of tech per se and still read by oil lamp, I think that last night when Lou Dobbs, almost in tears, broke off his interview with a Massachusetts sheriff to announce that Steve Jobs had died, will stick as well.

That which arose in spirit in1964 feels like it has come to a final end here this week. But if it die it brings forth great fruit. I’m sure the shaman of Cupertino saw it coming; no doubt, and he gave a suggestion with his last public words to describe the new Apple campus with its extraordinary circular building which looks like a grounded UFO.

“The spaceship has landed,” he said.

But maybe he was talking about himself. Or something else.

2011-10-05T05:41:00.000-07:00

The Dartmouth Presidential Debate begins the season

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 10/5/11

In all likelihood, the President of the United States in 2013 will be Barack Obama, Rick Perry or Mitt Romney. This is a historic moment and it begins at Dartmouth College next Tuesday in their Presidential Debate. That is where the Republican contest begins. Potentially, that is where the century will begin.

It is still too early to say with conviction that Sarah Palin will not enter. My guess is that she is holding out with an eye on Herman Cain, who has caught up with Mitt Romney in a recent poll. Like Ron Paul, Cain represents a part of the Tea Party. But although Paul’s analysis and perspective is mature and reliable, his numbers have gone down and very likely so will Cain’s by the first primaries. But Palin brings a spirit to the conversation which no one else has until now and without her rising cry Tea Party – including Paul, Bachmann, Cain and possibly Perry - would have remained in the margins. But at the moment, I do not see Palin finding the need to enter. If she does enter without the need; if Perry and now Romney can metabolize and mature Tea Party karma between them, she will not rise. But the pattern of her professional life suggests she will not make that error.

What is historically significant about this race is that the eastern establishment and the Bush/Cheney/Rove faction does not have a horse in this race. If President Obama wins a second term they will be back in 2012 unless something happens in the interim; third party and there is a strong likelihood now that the Massachusetts liberals (Kennedy) and Massachusetts conservatives (Bush) form by 2012 or 2016 to a third party in opposition to the converging Perry/Romney/Tea Party force and the heartland rising ascending now to the mainstream.

But this new lineup is a strong force. In effect, Romney has been pushed out of the establishment by the Christie effort and camps now with Perry and the Tea Party. Good to have. Herm Cain will have a good week as he will spend a lot of time on Cavuto and elsewhere. But summer is over. The field is likely set. And the first real contest is next Tuesday at Dartmouth.

Proposed here in October, 2008, that we face a Jacksonian age ahead; an indigenous rise of political influence in the heartland and the west following post-war demographics. That, I think, is panning out. It was Gingrich who said at least a decade ago that the commentators and politicos in the northeast were like the Chinese Mandarins, still thinking they held sway long after they had become irrelevant.

They will not go quiet into the night. But he was right.

2011-10-01T18:06:00.000-07:00

The Republican establishment: No Mormons or Texans, please

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 10/2/11

In November, 1963, the conservative political establishment including Dwight Eisenhower, General Lucius D. Clay, Bill Robinson of the Herald Tribune, Augusta’s Cliff Roberts, and Slats Slater met at New York's Waldorf-Astoria concerned about the bandwagon developing for Barry Goldwater. They were anxious to discuss “moderate alternatives” including Pennsylvania's Governor William Scranton, Henry Cabot Lodge and Michigan governor George Romney. This last week a new political establishment made up of hedge fund managers, Republican donors, industrialists, a personal investment guru and other billionaires, mostly based in New York and Bush former employees and family members including Barbara Bush, gathered or spoke together to find an alternative to former Massachusetts’s governor Mitt Romney.

Barbara Bush?

And they came up with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

Who could possibly be more of an establishment politician than straight-as-a-gate Mitt Romney? What did Romney do to turn the eastern establishment against him? Support Cut Cap and Balance? But some in this group including the Bush family’s loyal maestro, Karl Rove, had also looked to Paul Ryan as the Romney substitute.

Is it possible that Romney’s only offense to this establishment is that he is a Mormon? Does this attitude pervade the entire Republican Party? Friday night on Cavuto, Neil asked Southern Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee if he would vote for Mitt Romney.

“Of course,” he said.

Why did Eisenhower and company not care that George Romney, Mitt Romney’s father, was a Mormon? In the Eisenhower administration Mormons were appointed to cabinet positions, the federal judiciary, ambassadorial posts and positions at all levels of government. Those who had served as missionaries in foreign countries were heavily recruited because of their linguistic skills,

Possibly it is as the Chinese proverb says, “prosperity cannot last three generations” and conservatism today is a bankrupt establishment that has been spiraling in a moral free fall for two decades.

Will Chris Christie save them? Will Obama save the Kennedys? Because as Obama is to the House of Kennedy – the last man standing – so Christie is to the House of Bush and both these royal Massachusetts families are going the way of the Nepal monarchists and the Romanoffs.

We are on the verge of a new conservative political age. States rights? Yes. Troops to Mexico? Yes. A rising patriotic age? Yes! Yes! Yes! Mormons, Baptists, Jeffersonians, red necks, Tea Partiers, Goldwaterites. Libertarians, gold bugs, Tenthers, hobbits, hockey moms, Texans, Alaskans, Constitutional conservatives and all will bring a new political awakening. We are turning a corner. Huck should enter now, and Trump, Giuliani, Sarah Palin, Joe Miller, Jim DeMint and anyone else with something to say should have their say right now. As fate has brought us the unfortunate American Idol model we should bring it right now and bust out this fall to a foot-stomping tent revival or a hell raisin’, head banging hillbilly happening and keep it going all the way to the convention.

And in the end, which will come quickly as the irresponsible shifting of primaries will have us voting before the leaves fall here in New Hampshire, there will be a brand new party.

And there will still be two standing: Rick Perry and Mitt Romney. How will these two, the Texan and the Mormon - among the very best governors and managers of the post-war period - feel about the old eastern establishment trying to purge them?

How would you feel?

2011-09-29T06:53:00.001-07:00

The rise and fall of the West: The eastern conservative establishment will divide America and possibly destroy America.

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/29/11

Our first post-war journey was west, busting through the Smokies with Davy Crockett on his way to the Alamo to help out Jim Bowie. Politics and demographics brought us there as well as Americans crossed the plains and Appalachian hills to Texas and the west. Our best and most important presidents since post-war were westerners: Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II but now we face a collapse of the western awakening as the northeastern establishment conspires to take it back. Rick Perry is a real full blood prince of the desert and that is perhaps what is freaking them out.

Maybe it is already too late. If you look at that row of western presidents, it makes progress from Eisenhower (born in Denison, Texas and raised in Kansas) to Reagan. But it climbs the mountain and then turns around. History is in the details and the telling detail in this passage was when George H.W. Bush tried to convince the world that he was really a Texan. Most felt he was a Connecticut Yankee absurdly decked out in cowboy boots. Worse with W., torn between East and West, and as much as he loathed the eastern prep school and longed for the prairie in office, the western clarity of purpose found in Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan was fully absent in his office. And with the current yearning for Jeb, who has entirely moved back east to that sub-tropical suburb of New Jersey, Florida, the arc has fully returned to the Eastern seaboard.

Chris Christie is the eastern seaboard’s great hope to return governance to New York and New Jersey. Today’s New York Post reports that he now has support of Nancy Reagan, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and George W. Bush.

“Wealthy, Influential, Leaning Republican and Pushing a Christie Bid for President” reads the headline on Sept. 26 at The New York Times. “Christie understands what it is like to be a Republican in the Northeast,” said Lynn Krogh, a Republican campaign consultant in New York, adding: “He’s practical. He’s not just a barnburner.”

In my opinion this is a symptom of failure and represents collapse of the western movement that has brought us economic success in the last 60 years. It will drive America to regional division, because the time of continental dominance by the east is well past and has been since the end of World War II. The west will no longer be dominated by New York and New Jersey. We need instead to represent the western paradigm, as represented most holistically by Dwight Eisenhower. Today only Mitt Romney and Rick Perry fill the bill.

But if this western passage is fully subverted by New York “crony capitalists” it will bring trouble not seen in this country in more than a century.

2011-09-27T12:43:00.000-07:00

Rick Perry, W. and The Duke

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill
on 9/28/11

Donnie Osborn v. John Wayne was The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto's comment on Thursday’s debate. A good one. As The Duke in the original “True Grit” showed himself to be uneasy among strangers and outsiders and preferred the company of his cat and a Chinese merchant. The intuitive Duke was especially out of sorts in the original scenes when the men in black in the courtroom had him pinned like a bug and still squirming. Rooster Cogburn was a man of place, the open range and big sky. He didn't like to be fenced in and sent to court where you had to watch what you said, all dressed up in a monkey suit. And you could sense Perry missed Texas. Like George W. Bush in this regard. W., like Sarah Palin and Perry has a sense of place; a Jeffersonian sense of belonging to one place and it doesn't work everywhere. Elsewhere you feel funny. It doesn't work when you are talking to people you don't know in your heart. And they won't like you. Ask Sarah Palin. Ask W. Both pinned as well.

His recent debate performances, in which he has at times struggled to answer questions or speak clearly in full sentences, have energized his rivals, according to the Washington Post. And Perry has all but conceded that he has not been effective on stage with his rivals, saying at recent campaign stops that the party should pick the best candidate, not the “smoothest debater.”

“Yep, there may be slicker candidates and there may be smoother debaters, but I know what I believe in,” he said Saturday on Mackinac Island, Mich. “And I’m gonna stand on that belief every day. I will guide this country with a deep, deep rudder.”

The Duke couldn’t have said it better. Or Andrew Jackson, for that matter and current criticism brings a startling suggestion of exactly that which Jackson received in 1827.

But Palin with killer warrior skills mastered the outside and the otherworld of politics and made it her own, carving out a center for herself which was stronger than the edges and will likely outweigh them in 2012. Both Perry and Palin belong to the center and so did W. for that matter. And in the much discussed division between the eastern establishment and the west, W. really belongs to the west. The east/west division in his soul makes him uncomfortable. It made him swagger more in the presence of outsiders as President.

One Texas historian says they swagger in Texas because they are insecure. I don't think so. I think it is because they are born free in the desert and don't understand those left behind back east. Time only moves in one direction: west. That's where W.’s problems came in. It tore him in opposition to his eastern family. Like Jeb, who has already moved back east. W. was only half way to Texas; loved Texas and repudiated the east but wasn't full blood like Perry, like The Duke in movie land, like Rooster Coburn. That will take another generation. Those who have never experienced the big sky wouldn't understand.

But pinning them like bugs everybody loses, especially the bug.

2011-09-26T04:53:00.000-07:00

Palin/Haley in 2012 Chris Christie/Jeb Bush?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/27/11

Like a real assassin, a political assassin like Joe McGinniss understands the subtle and unspoken lore of his craft: He is doing the secret work of his community in his dark corner. He knows and they know. In McGinniss’s case they actually pay him to do it. Like a suicide bomber in Ramallah or Madrid (or shots fired in Memphis or the grassy knoll in Houston) he is hero just for one day to his silent company. But with Sarah Palin it is quite literally true that whatever doesn’t kill her makes her stronger. And makes us stronger. Same with Nikki Haley of South Carolina who underwent the same torrid and savage assassination attempts while the women on the left in the publishing houses and newspapers in New York and Washington remained silent, otherwise occupied. Maybe Sarah and Nikki should go it alone, together.

Reported here on March 9, 2011, of a trend developing between the East Coast conservative establishment and the rising “Guts and Gonads” conservatives which would play out in 2012 as Christie v. Palin: “This follows the trend of party division which rose to anxiety in the Texas governor’s primary last spring. The traditionalists, including George H.W. Bush, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Karen Hughes –as proxy for W. – lined up against Rick Perry. Sarah Palin lined up for Perry all by herself and he won in a landslide. Since, [as did Nikki Haley when she received Palin’s support] even Barbara Bush, dowager of the Bush souls, has joined the faint-of-heart chorus which cries out for the sending of Palin back to Alaska. But wishing doesn’t make her go. Chris Christie is the East Coast establishment’s new single combat warrior against Palin.”

By November we could be in the single combat contest between “that jolly Kris Kringle of conservatism” Christie v. Palin.

When I told my dentist that I met Rudy Giuliani at a talk at Dartmouth he said he thought he’d make a great Attorney General. Consider the possibilities of a Sarah Palin presidency. South Carolina governor Nikki Haley says she doesn’t want to be vice president but I can’t think of a more enchanted team than Palin/Haley to make Obama/Biden look like something left over from the 1930s. Which is what it is.

And how about Donald Trump as Secretary of State? I think he’d like that. Lew Lehrman as Treasury Secretary. Without question Rick Perry as Chief of Staff. That’s the guy who runs things, right? Add to his responsibilities “liaison to governors.” His primary responsibilities there would be to raise the status of governors and build a “supercommittee” of Governors and former governors like they have now in the Senate – six distinguished types would do or maybe 12 (former Virginia governor Mark Warner comes to mind, New Hampshire’s John Lynch, Indiana’s Mitch Daniels and Butch Otter of Idaho); a Council of Elders like George Kennan suggested at the end of his life.

That would solve the rising states rights issues without contention. Richard Nixon already created the matrix in his regional model; an idea before its time but his regions were in no way culturally coherent. Alaskans and Texans know the meaning of place. They would know how to do it.

And who could possibly be better for Commerce that Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal?

Not to get all outside the box, but wouldn’t Judge Andrew Napolitano be the right choice for the next seat in the Supreme Court? Or Chief Justice maybe?

And by the way that’s three New York: Trump, Giuliani, Lehrman, and one New Jersey: Napolitano. A whole new Eastern Establishment.

2011-09-25T05:10:00.001-07:00

Time to bring in Sarah Palin

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/25/11

Michele Bachmann was a letdown from the first. She appeared as a Palin knock off but proved herself to be merely provincial. Palin is not, nor is Rick Perry. Last year Palin, who defines herself as a “constitutional conservative” said she would enter the race if no one else who expressed the rising geist of Tea Party values did. Perry does and from the beginning it was Perry and Palin vs. the Establishment. But he needs to watch his back. And she needs to think about getting back in this as the Tea Party vote scurrys around the margins without the unifying spirit she brought to it from the beginning; Herman Cain today, Michelle Bachmann yesterday, Ron Paul the day before. Gary Johnson tomorrow.

For the new conservative values to stabilize and advance, Palin might be a necessity. She is an archetypal figure, like John Lennon or Reagan; one that hits a primal cord in the psyche that brings awakening to some and horror to others. My guess right now is that 2012 will bring Perry/Romney, or Perry/someone else, but necessity could just as well make it Palin/Perry or Palin/someone else. And they need other helpers now; Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani. Time to commit.

A McClatchy-Marist poll last week found that Obama looks increasingly vulnerable in next year's election, with a majority of voters believing he'll lose to any Republican. The biggest gain came for Palin, the former Alaska governor who hasn't yet announced whether she'll jump into this fast-changing race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

The Grizzly Mama has the animal spirits and as she has said, a “servant’s heart.” She will do the right thing. But without Perry or Palin in the White House in 2012, that which came in with the dust of the Tea Party in 2009 will be gone with the wind by 2012.

2011-09-24T04:43:00.000-07:00

draft - Texas blues. It comes from being somplace else. they don' swagger at home. They talk quiet
Don’t rule out Sarah Palin

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/21/11

If the establishment nostalgicos can’t let go of the good old days of sustainable mediocrity and overwhelm the process by continuing to pitch the likes of Bob Dole or down market Bush employees like Mitch Daniels . . . and did I mention Jeb Bush? . . . it could hurt Texas Governor Rick Perry’s chances. Never was a group so terrified of new ideas. But that could put Sarah Palin back in the race.
Nostalgicos, the name for a specific group of cultural conservatives who fought to preserve the past and deny the future, led the way to the destruction of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. We see the same tendency rising here today.
The current excitement started with Sarah Palin the moment she took the mike from John McCain and accepted the VP offer. Things have not been the same since.
A new McClatchy-Marist poll finds that Obama looks increasingly vulnerable in next year's election, with a majority of voters believing he'll lose to any Republican. The biggest gain came for Palin, the former Alaska governor who hasn't yet announced whether she'll jump into the fast-changing race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.
Michele Bachmann was a letdown from the first. She appeared as a Palin knock off but proved herself to be merely provincial. Palin is not, nor is Perry. Last year Palin, who defines herself as a “constitutional conservative” said she would enter if no one else who expressed the rising geist of Tea Party values did. Perry does and from the beginning it was Perry and Palin vs. the Establishment. But he needs to watch his back.

For these values to advance, Palin might be a necessity. She is an archetypal figure, like John Lennon or Reagan; one that hits a primal cord in the psyche that brings awakening to some and horror to others. My guess right now is that 2012 will bring Perry/Romney, but necessity could conceivable make it Palin/Perry.

The Grizzly Mama has the animal spirits and as she has said, a “servant’s heart.” She will do the right thing. But without Perry or Palin in the White House in 2012, that which came in with the dust with the Tea Party will be gone with the wind.

2011-09-23T05:23:00.000-07:00

Einstein revisited

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill

on 9/23/11

Will Einstein join Marx and Freud now as a god that failed? One of the “three visitors” who came to us at the turning, that is, at the end of the world and the beginning?

Einstein was Monkey God as the century opened to the new creation. His picture today hangs on the classroom walls everywhere where Jesus, Washington or Ganesh once did.

Even Franklin D. Roosevelt borrowed from his cosmic observations and make with them an atom bomb.

“My biggest mistake,” Einstein said later.

Pretty big mistake. Still the picture hangs in the classrooms. But this is characteristic of Monkey Gods – worlds fall before them and new ones awaken. They change the Creation, but have no control over the changes which will occur because of their speculation. Surely Einstein is our own Karma Dorjee, Rimpoche and itinerant ascetic enthroned in mid-air, under whose resting gaze mountains pitched and tossed, buildings shook and cracked, the sun fell like a thunderbolt and another sprang up in its place. Einstein considered himself to be such a disciple, like those from the heights of The Land of Snows.

Or not. Rumor from his niece, had it that he got it all from Madame Blavatsky and her book “The Secret Doctrine” published in 1888, incomprehensible to all but the best mathematicians. “There is no religion higher than truth,” the Russian savant wrote in her introduction.

Which would be an excellent slogan for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland.

But maybe we were too young for these truths. I interviewed a well known Indian theoretical physicist years back who compared himself to his American counterparts. In India we didn’t come out of the trees until we were 12, he said. And what made India’s physicists different from ours: “We started from God and went to math. You start with math.”

That could be the flaw in the whole century that the CERN found. But something else: This imagination seems kind of dated today. The research is government financed, project oriented, morally compromised at so many levels and third, fourth and fifth generations beyond its creative origins. The imaginative young today look elsewhere for excitement.

I felt I saw the century rising this time in a little discussion overheard on TV of a young scholar talking to Simcha Jacobovici, known to the world as the “Naked Archaeologist.”

With great enthusiasm the young man explained that Bathsheba should be reevaluated. She entered in with David to the “coniunctio,” the cosmic marriage that gave birth to time. Time rose and returns again from her womb via her son, Solomon, moving outward to create the world, and returning again to his temple.

It is not a moral tale; it is the narrative of a time machine which created the human race. Niels Bohr could not have put it so simply when he drew the “tai chi” on the blackboard to explain what he meant about particles and waves.

2011-09-22T07:42:00.000-07:00

What the Suffolk poll means for Romney, Perry and Jon Huntsman

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/23/11

It means that Jon Huntsman has a chance for vice president.

As expected, Mitt Romney received 41% in the recent poll of Suffolk University/7NEWS (WHDH TV) of likely voters in New Hampshire’s GOP presidential primary. As expected, Ron Paul came in second with 14%. It is good news for Jon Huntsman that he gained 6 points and came in third with 10%. He can hold on now at least till the end of February, by which time he will be a household name. He has always has been an attractive and competent figure.

There was no question that Mitt Romney would win this. He lives here. Also, the composition of New Hampshire has changed. We are no longer the mythic mountain individuals of yore, with “the granite of New Hampshire made part of them till death” as the Dartmouth Alma Mater has it. More like a suburb of Boston with lower taxes. For both Democrats and Republicans, the NH primary tells how the candidate will fare in Massachusetts. Wes Clark was well ahead in the last, but Kerry won. Romney will win this time.

One of the luminous mysteries both here and in Massachusetts is that we like Mormons. My father, who was born in 1899 and by 1968 had likely never spoken to a person who was not either Irish or French Quebecois and would certainly never think of voting for any not sanctioned by the Catholic/Democratic establishment, really liked George Romney. Unlike Christians elsewhere with complicated ontological reservations, I think he and his class and generation of Irish Catholics who would not even think of marrying outside the parish, made no distinction between Mormons and any other group. They were all going to hell anyway. In a more secular time, smart people impress in New England and we see Mormons as way smart. So Huntsman should be expected to continue to rise in New Hampshire.

Huntsman has been surfing Mitt Romney’s (Mormon) wave from the beginning. If it works for Romney it will work for Huntsman. Huntsman is a great looking guy. He is young and smart as paint. Romney has a dark, vindictive edge (“No Apology”) and Huntsman has natural buoyancy. (Although Romney’s dark side would be a good match up with the good-natured Perry: Eisenhower/Nixon.) Huntsman’s got a great family and looks half-Buddhist in those photos with the tilaka on his forehead (symbolizing the “third eye” of intuition in Hindu) and we have a tendency toward that with the Emerson/Thoreau/Alcott tradition in New England.

That is what we will see, but a Texan with long lineage like Perry will see something different. Texas and Utah have historic kinship and they also have kinship with California. From our view in the northeast, California is an annex of New York where we make movies. Like Obama, we are children exclusively of the geist. But it is not. Perry spends much time in California pulling business away into Texas. Huntsman and Perry understand the west from a pioneer’s perspective and Huntsman brings natural conduit to India and Asia across the Pacific to our western shore. You don’t get that part with Mitt Romney.

Huntsman had an 80% approval rating as governor of Utah. Perry could do no better for his VP and in second position, the Mormon issues will diminish.

2011-09-21T15:06:00.000-07:00

Mark Warner/John Lynch 2012

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/22/11

Virginia Senator Mark Warner should challenge Barack Obama in 2012. He should chose John Lynch, the popular and successful Democratic governor of New Hampshire who has recently announce that he will not run for another term, for his vice president. Warner was voted among the country’s best governors in Virginia. He marked a sea change for the Democrats. He was a successful businessman and brought business abilities and strategies to governance. A Connecticut Yankee and Harvard-trained lawyer settled in Virginia, he made himself a Virginian and was the first among the northerners to pass the NASCAR test. He sponsored a stock car and had the Stanley Brothers of Clinch Mountain play at his events. He marked a new direction and got the support of Marcos Moulitsas and the Daily Kos crowd, storied today as the so-called Millennial generation.

But Marcos asked one day in the Washington Post, “Will these Clinton-era people ever go away?” Unfortunately the answer was no. Moulitsas, as representative of the rising generation, also supported Wesley Clark and later Jim Webb and a good number of Iraq war veterans when Webb ran for senate. These, Warner, Webb, Clark, New Hampshire’s John Lynch, and a few others, brought a new sensibility to a rising generation. Warner considered running for President briefly, spoke up here in New Hampshire and had a big cover story in The New York Times Magazine. But those hopes were dashed by the Clintons.

At Daily Kos, Hillary’s support hovered around zero. When she entered the presidential contest, the party tacked to find a counterforce. Barack Obama fit the bill. He was smart and attractive and as Jules Feiffer suggested, his great feature was that he was not Hillary Clinton.

Obama got to here via a kind of neurosis. He didn’t seem to actually desire it but successfully surfed the contours of populism to the presidency and in my opinion, did the right thing. I voted for him because: He fulfilled the historic destiny begun by Lincoln/Grant and advanced by Eisenhower/Kennedy. This was absolutely necessary to fulfill those historic needs. He was not Hillary Clinton. And the candidate running against him, John McCain, had romanticized and dangerous foreign policy sensibilities.

But it can be no surprise that he did not know what to do as president. He had little work experience. He has made little progress as manager. He fulfilled his historic destiny and completed the Lincoln/Kennedy initiatives. He should not run again.

2011-09-20T06:51:00.000-07:00

After Europe, the Anglosphere

by Bernie Quigley

For The HIll on 9/20/11

Several recent books see the end coming. John Birmingham’s “After America”: Fighter bombers rushing at us on the cover. You get the picture. Paul Starobin’s “After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age”: Planet of the apes with nerds instead of apes. Be afraid. But not that afraid. Mark Steyn’s “After America: Get Ready for Armageddon”: Self explanatory. Andrew Breitbart said, “May puke I’m so happy.” Meaning he liked it.

These books see America as an idea rather than a place because the authors don’t understand place and have probably never been to an American place they were inclined to stay in. They would get a rash in real places like Tobaccoville, NC, Haverhill, NH or Luckenbach, Texas, where Waylon, Willy and the boys hang.

But The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens this morning makes a masterful case for the decline of Europe in his essay “What Comes after ‘Europe’?” Possibly nothing. Possibly nothing – Sartre’s La Nausée comes to mind – has long settled there.

Stephens well makes the case that there is no Europe; that is, there has been no such thing in post-war world. It was a figment of the “western” imagination. (But there is no “west” either.) Quoting Bismarck he says, “Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong. Europe is a geographical expression.”

Folkloric history like the great movie “Phantom of the Opera” (the Joel Schumacher version) makes the case that Europe, as it was known in Christendom, died in 1914-1917 thereabouts. Its fate was sealed not by war but by electricity. I don’t see that it has ever recovered except as a pale rider in the shadow of America.

“What comes next is the explosion of the European project,” writes Stephens, and it's not an altogether bad thing. “But it will come at a massive cost. The riots of Athens will become those of Milan, Madrid and Marseilles. Parties of the fringe will gain greater sway. Border checkpoints will return. Currencies will be resurrected, then devalued. Countries will choose decay over reform. [Now that is a great sentence.] It's a long, likely parade of horribles.”

America will survive because America is a state, he says. Exactly! It is a place! It is a lot of places! This is the essence of Jefferson’s heroic vision, yet untried.

And America will be better off without the burden of European history on it back. But how will the UN fare in this climate? NATO, SEATO and all of the other post-war abstractions? Not good. Irrelevant.

The big question is what will England do? The EU has always been her problem. Because England is not a European country. The subtle since 1914 and before asked, where do we belong, with Europe or with America? The answer came on June 6, 1944 when America and England together invaded Nazi occupied Europe. Gene Kelly may have done the victory dance in Paris and Earnest Hemingway may have liberated the Ritz, but this joint venture reawakened the Anglosphere.

It changed everything. England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, America and England became a unified culture, one that spoke the same language and hailed from the same traditions. Anglosphere became the package of like places. If my kids today visit Australia or London they feel kinship and common ground. When they travel to China or the Ukraine they feel they are going “someplace else.”

It will always be like that and it is how we Americans should begin to think of ourselves, as the utopian, totalitarian delusions of post-war globalism crash to the ground now like dead satellites.

2011-09-15T08:31:00.001-07:00

Pataki: Cavuto's great white hope against Texas

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/15/11

Recently, Neil Cavuto of Fox Business has been all up in the grills about the wonders of George Pataki, former governor of NY. Imus was less impressed, like he couldn't remember who he was and when it did come to mind the first impression was political corruption. Imus is a NY touchstone of common folk; much as the Daily News was say 80 years ago. First impressions are most important. When Pataki appeared last night on Cavuto he ran through his plan to save the economy. Old news now after a few debates because nothing is in it that is not well aired and better prepared by so many. The purpose of the visit seemed to be Neil's exit comment: “Why don't you run for President?”

With some fanfare Pataki almost did announce earlier in the month, but cancelled his big Iowa speech when Texas governor Rick Perry took all the air out of the room. Cavuto sees Pataki perhaps as the last man standing in the anti-Perry genre. Fear stalks the heart of upper New Jersey where Soprano shrink Dr. Jennifer Melfi lives; Upper Montclair, I think it is, when they see cowboy boots. Those brought up when only two teams mattered in baseball, the Yankees and the Red Sox and only two families in politics, those who vacation in Nantucket and those who vacation in Kennebunkport. Sooner or later they will have to face, in Pauli Walnuts phrase, “Jesusland” or the space between the Garden State Parkway and Tahoe.

But Chris Christie is too fat and Romney is a Mormon. And Jeb Bush really, as he said with sincerity on Cavuto earlier, does not want to be president. But still, Rove & his surreptitious littles persists in finding the viable anti-Perry. And Cavuto seems to be helping. It is not Pataki.

If you wanted a composite Reagan/Ron Paul candidate to go against Perry, Lew Lehman would be an authentic attempt and authenticity works best. And Lehman is as authentic as Perry and so is Romney. But the Jews in Brooklyn this week did not ditch the Weiner/Clinton proxy for George Pataki. They might have seen Rick Perry rising on the horizon.

Perry should head to Brooklyn, pronto; Juniors, Flatbush, Bensonhurst. Talk to the old Jews direct in the old neighborhoods who this week ditched their century-long, Europe-brought political sensibility. South Philly, Fishtown too because as goes Bensonhurst, so goes South Philly. Stay with the working class; stay in Pauli Walnuts territory. Authenticity rises from there. See how the old school likes him. Passion is rising now and Perry brings it.

2011-09-14T06:11:00.000-07:00

Jimmy Carter’s twisted global caliphate

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/14/11

Will Jimmy Carter (and Hillary and Obama) conquer Jerusalem before Hamas? They are today teamed together with Hamas in their desire for a Palestinian state inside Israel. It is one of the most astonishing abuses of American power in the post-war world, possibly in the history of the world. The sons of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael, team up against their cosmic father to conquer Jerusalem for themselves. In time, Muslims have attempted to conquer Jerusalem. Christians have as well. Never since the Second Temple have they united to do so together, until today.

I am not a Christian but support Jerusalem exactly as former New York Mayor Ed Koch stated recently in an Op Ed: An attack on Israel is an attack on America. That, simply and logically, because of 9/11. As with Pearl Harbor, we did not choose our enemy, our enemy chose us. And without question, the enemy of Israel today has chosen us to be his enemy as well.

And since it is not mine I make no claim to Jerusalem as both Christians like Carter, (and presumably) Hillary and Obama do and Hamas terrorists do. In fact, they have now become allies, both with eyes on Jerusalem.

Since we have heard much from the “born again” perspective, here's a thought from a Buddhist perspective; from my perspective. In archetypal terms, the relationship between Jews and Christians and Muslims is based on the story of Abraham, Father of the Hebrew passage and widely in the current MSM perspective called the “father” of all three of these religions. I see that as a false and malevolent expedient of the recently politicized American Christians and their current power grab attempts on Jerusalem. Abraham is not the father of Christians. Not the father of Muslims. He is the father of Jews. That all are one and equal – Jew, Christian, and Muslim - is a Jeffersonianized (or Oprahized) edition of late, deist Protestantism; new world thinking in which all are equal and all have a say in each others lives. But in archetypal terms, which many Buddhists use, the Father is a mythic and timeless figure never to be equal to the children. The children live in time. The children live in the orchard as did Adam and Eve. The Jews live in timelessness. They are guardians and keepers of the Tree itself.

So it may be as Sir James George Frazer says, that it is the desire of every generation to cut down the sacred Tree, as George Washington did, so as to take the realm from the Father and claim it for themselves. This can only be what Carter and his Hamas friends are up to in their preoccupation with the Holy Land and their pending conquest of Jerusalem.

Israel’s troubles started with Jimmy Carter. They amplify today with Obama. But their claims on Jerusalem are as irrelevant as Glenn Beck’s and as malevolent as those of Hamas. That an American president who calls himself a Christian would use his power to dominate the cosmic realm which rises in time and recedes from time at Temple Mount would be the greatest blasphemy in history. If it wasn’t such a joke.

2011-09-13T09:57:00.000-07:00

Wesley Clark for Obama VP in 2012

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/13/11

The last time a Republican was elected to the seat, which covers parts of Brooklyn and Queens, was nearly a century ago, says Allysia Finley of the WSJ. That would be Anthony Weiner’s NY 9th U.S. District. Brooklyn was long considered the dead center of Democratic politics in America. Indeed, the century of populist liberal thinking was born in Brooklyn. That a Republican would take it today would send the Democrats through a sea change. It already has.

It makes no difference who wins today in Brooklyn. Change is here, but not the kind that Obama called for. If Obama wants to survive in 2012 he needs to make an immediate radical shift. Obama’s lost promise was identified immediately after his nomination. The choice of Joe Biden for VP established the paradigm. This would not be new as Reagan, Kennedy and Roosevelt brought in the new; new demands new people. This would be a party of old hacks and returned political favors. Hillary made it worse. And the foul-mouthed Thugee Society from Chicago gave the appearance of a vengeance agenda.

First off, get Joe Biden off the ticket. On July 8, 2011, Paul Bedard of “Washington Whispers” a blog at U.S. News said it was lamented that President Obama did not pick Wesley Clark, the former NATO Supreme Commander, as a running mate in 2008 or find the retired four-star general a choice cabinet spot: “That has allies suggesting he's angling to be among those Obama might consider if he dumps Vice President Joe Biden or to fill Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's post—or even defense secretary or United Nations ambassador—in a second Obama term. ‘It's a waste of brilliant talent,’ a Clark associate tells our Suzi Parker.”

It is indeed, in a cabinet badly in need of talent. With the romanticized “Arab Spring” now in the grip of soccer thugs Obama foreign policy is surpassing their storied failures on economy here at home. Clark was right about Libya. He was right about Iraq and he opposed invasion of both.

If NY’s 9th district race turns out to be a continuation of conservative trends which rose in the NY 23 race two years ago, the Dems face a landslide in 2012; not only a loss of the Presidency but of the Senate as well. And as one commentator said, Texas’s Governor Rick Perry stock has gone up in the past month like an internet stock in the 1990s. If Perry takes South Carolina, and there is every indication that he will, he will take everything.

It might not hurt the Democrats to have a Southern General on the ticket. One who knows what he is doing.

2011-09-10T12:47:00.000-07:00

Who lost Egypt? The Secretary of State must go.

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/12/11

Who lost Egypt? This week soccer goons tore down walls surrounding the Israeli Embassy in Egypt, but Hillary opened the gate. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul calls for a no confidence vote against Tim Geithner. Forget Geithner. History will deal with him. The House and Senate should call for a no-confidence resolution against Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the entire ludicrous and incompetent foreign policy establishment.

“Egypt is not going toward democracy but toward Islamicization,” Eli Shaked, a former Israeli ambassador to Cairo told The New York Times. “It is the same in Turkey and in Gaza. It is just like what happened in Iran in 1979.”

Alec Ross, Hillary Clinton's senior adviser for innovation at the US state department, has lauded the way the internet has become "the Che Guevara of the 21st century" in the Arab Spring uprisings. Meaning that’s a good thing. The Che reference more than anything reveals the undergraduate coffee shop geist of these foreign policy innocents. The U.S. has pledged to back the “pro-democracy movement” that swept the Middle East and north Africa since January, Ross said, as disaffected citizens organize influential protest movements on Facebook and Twitter, Guardian, UK, reported on June 22, 2011.

Strange but true, we heard very similar rhapsodies about the new microcassette technology pioneered in the 1970s as a miraculous revolutionary talisman from liberal supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini. It made his anti-American and anti-Israeli rants mobile. But now soccer goons have joined the melee.

The Arab Spring was to be a nerd paradise, a Silicon Valley for Arab yuppies. At a recent debate at the National Press Club, Peter Bergen, CNN’s Hillaryland correspondent, said: When you look at the Arab spring, “ . . . not a single picture of Osama bin Laden, not a single American flag burning, not a single Israeli flag burning . . .”

Not exactly true responded Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, author of the recently released “Bin Laden’s Legacy: Why We’re Still Losing the War on Terror.”

“Historically, when you have sky high expectations that go unfulfilled as you may have with the Arab Spring, extreme ideologies can step in and fill in the void,” he responded. “We may well see that.”

Astonishingly prescient, as this debate took place on September 1. Nine days later, The New York Times reports that soccer fans, thugs known in Egypt as “ultras,” are tearing down the Israeli Embassy in Cairo and dumping documents out of the windows. The Israeli ambassador, Yitzhak Levanon, his family and most of the staff and their dependents — some 80 people — were evacuated out of the country by military aircraft overnight, the Egypt Daily News reports.

“Long known for their obscene chants and reckless brawls, the ultras have become increasingly engaged in politics since the revolution,” the Times reports.

In fact, Egypt's soccer goons have been an essential part of the uprising from the beginning with thousands shouting and chanting things like "F*** the mother of Hosni Mubarak!" and "Go f*** your Minister, Habib al Adly!" It was sympathetic MSM which conspired to create the obsequious "Arab spring" when the situation on the ground often suggested Brown Shirts and "Springtime for Hitler.”

2011-09-08T08:06:00.001-07:00

Perry/Romney 2012

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/8/11

For the first time in 18 years I can say like Lincoln Steffens, that I have seen the future and it works. How things begin is important and the world began again last night with Mitt Romney to one side of Nancy Reagan and Rick Perry to the other. They seem to get along together potentially as a stellar team, like Lennon and McCartney, Fred and Ginger, Eisenhower and Nixon. The first few minutes were a hoot. The back and forth about jobs was clever and good humored. When Perry made the seemingly generous case that Romney had indeed created lots of jobs . . . “everywhere” Romney picked up instantaneously that the complement was not a complement and Perry was cleverly suggesting that Romney had sent jobs overseas. But it had a Rowan & Martin quality to it and Brian Williams and the audience got a huge kick out of it. An auspicious beginning. We thank the others for their support and interest. But from here on out, this is about Perry and Romney. It will be hard now to see them apart.

Debates are the least important part of a presidential race. This race will be won on the merits and character of the individuals. As President Elect Perry looks for a running mate he might now see the advantage of Mitt Romney. Perry, like Sarah Palin, rails against the nerd prom and the northeast political establishment, but he is not a radical. His swift sword is nearby and he is and was the first to raise the cry when the feds began the bailouts. But Romney spoke up in opposition as well when they bailout out Detroit. Perry does absorb the good, salient and necessary ideas that have come from Tea Party, Ron Paul et al and makes them fit. He metabolizes them and brings them to the mainstream and repudiates the rest. Romney on the other hand also speaks to these ideas and no one would be better at institutionalizing the new thinking and bringing it back home to the tradition.

But in my view the most important thing is that history must follow the contours of demographics and economy. Otherwise there will be trouble. And in our time demographics and economy have moved South, Southwest and West and demand western representation. Perry could well balance the ticket in the traditional fashion of bringing a northern pol in as VP. Romney fills the bill as he was Governor of Massachusetts and went to school here back east, but he is also as western as Perry is having made Morman passage through the Utah desert before he returned to us. This ticket would be about as American as it can get. And seeing them together they seemed to click. I think now they should not be pulled apart.

I’ve read their books, Perry’s “Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington” and Romney’s “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.” Each a kind of driver’s manual for the man. They tell you little more than the debates do. But my impression is that Perry fully knows and understands himself and has for a long time. That might come with Texas. Romney is more interesting than he thinks he is, there is more subtlety and complexity to him than people see and more than he sees in himself. Romney is actually more the Lone Ranger. He wears the mask and is yet unrevealed even to himself, but events ahead will bring him out.

2011-09-06T13:30:00.000-07:00

Ten years after 9/11, still stalked by the Vichy virus: Why we still need David Petraeus

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/7/11

General David Petraeus gave a very moving going away speech this last week after 37 years as a man of honor in military uniform. We will still need this most respected American general since Eisenhower because:

The NY times reports that President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority said Monday that he was going to the United Nations this month to seek membership for a state of Palestine. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said at a separate event that a Palestinian bid for recognition by the United Nations would “set back peace, and might set it back for years.”

On Saturday the Times reported that the Obama administration had initiated a last-ditch diplomatic campaign to avert a confrontation this month but it may already be too late. Obama is no friend of Israel. And credible Israeli sources report that Likud figures who hold sway told Netanyahu to annex Judea and Samaria if the Arabs declare a state.

I suggested here that Petraeus be considered as Vice President in 2012. Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin or Donald Trump should all consider Petraeus for this post. Historic periods tend to end and begin again with a respected general: Eisenhower, Grant, Washington. It adds stability, clarity and purpose to the “philosopher king” who attends the historic moment of change (Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jefferson). Such a time is just ahead. The presence on the ticket of a trusted and respected general transcends party bias and unifies the country on a singular path to singular purpose. Petraeus has come to the fore through Iraq and Afghanistan when others before him proved to be woefully inadequate.

We entered conflict in Iraq led by a five-time recidivist draft dodger vice president from the Vietnam era who still challenges and puzzles the world today with his compensation issues and a college dropout good ole boy at the head of the Army. Foreign policy then was from ad hoc to non-existent and state department is a shambles and getting worse, with diplomats today used as advance men for Lady Gaga. Petraeus returned honor to leadership and brought the term “warrior scholar” to usage among journalists. He came from us through necessity. We have found our man and his work is not yet over.

After 9/11 the enemy of Israel became the enemy of America but much of us and all of Europe are still stalked by the Vichy virus: accommodation, appeasement, nerdism (a neurotic resistance to adulthood and the difficult adult responsibilities, and the Obama administration manifests this) and denial. It did not work for France in 1940 and it will not work for America and the West today.

2011-09-04T05:54:00.000-07:00

Is China the virus in “Contagion”?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/6/11

As one review explains it, actor Matt Damon looks on hopelessly when his wife returns from Hong Kong with a virus that will poison the world. Would that be the storied “Yellow Peril”? Not surprising that this movie previewed this past weekend in Venice, scene of Thomas Mann's masterful short novel “Death in Venice” (1911) in which a cholera epidemic in Venice stalks the western soul. Mann's vision in the day of Freud and Nietzsche brought unconscious suggestion of something happening beneath the surface ("Why are they disinfecting the streets of Venice?") as futurism and fascism was beginning to bubble up in Italy and Lenin was brooding in Paris. In that more poetic day visionaries like Maud Gonne were dreaming of rivers flowing with blood.

It would not be far off to see in this movie something beneath our control rising in our time across the Pacific. Something we are helpless to defend against: The rise of China as a world power. What impact would the movie “Contagion” have if the virus came from, say, Norway or Leuchtenberg? It is based on a real threat of the SARS virus invasion when 5000 people were quarantined in Canada in 2003. As my local TV station is CBC out of Montreal, I watched nightly the mastery of control and impending panic on the evening news fueled really by the war on Iraq and a disintegrating global situation. In fact SARS caused little damage.

Another film previewing in Venice, “The Arrival of Wang” presents the Chinese as squid-like aliens from another galaxy. As Dean Napolitano writes in The Wall Street Journal: “The film, directed by Marco and Antonio Manetti (known as the Manetti Bros.), is a modern-day morality tale for Western nations troubled by — and distrustful of — China’s growing economic power and influence in global political matters. . . The film, they said, ‘tries to reflect upon a few moral and ethical questions: How much should we trust our neighbors?’ and ‘What is a prejudice?’”

So much for diversity and globalization. We are going to need some new buzz words. “Red Corner” (1997), featuring Richard Gere, who is an advocate for Tibet, was an aesthetically excellent film which straight forwardly and responsibly questioned China' motives and authority and lacked the insidious racist undertones.

What is endemic today since 9/11 and even before is panic. The sense that things are beyond our control, beyond our reach, beyond our ability to change the outcome. It is the same sense of subliminal disturbance and doom which Mann felt wandering the streets of Venice at Europe’s fin de siècle, exactly one hundred years ago at the pending death of a different world.

2011-09-02T05:46:00.000-07:00

The Supreme Court’s processed mind

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/2/11

That most Supreme Court members went to one of the same northeast Ivy League law schools makes a mockery of Jefferson’s America; we have become a nation of world tribes really rather than regions. From the Jeffersonian perspective schools like U. Minnesota, Vanderbilt, U. Texas at Austin, U. Virginia, U. Michigan, all in the top 20 should be included. And Brigham Young, Wake Forest and UNC not far behind. The current composition of the Court illustrates an America afraid of itself and constantly defaulting to the absurd illusion of 19th century New England royal families. This is not authentic self government. It is imitation of perceived gentry.

Are Yale and Harvard better law schools? How then could a Yale Law School grad like Hillary Clinton not have passed the DC law boards directly after graduation? Surely plenty of Howard School of Law grads passed. And why can't we see the board scores and grades of these public servants? We have reached the edge of the spectrum when a sitting president can nominate his receptionist to be a Supreme Court Justice as George W. Bush did. And to be frank, at least one of these justices seems as dumb as a post. Possibly he speaks for the silent majority as he never opens his mouth.
As my favorite former Black Panther, the most eloquent H. Rap Brown, once said about something else, there are too many people today with natural hair and processed minds. And possible nowhere else in government apparatus are the minds so collectively narrowly and provincially processed as in the Supreme Court.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the original “Tenther” and spirit father of the states’ rights movement stands today as a titan among clerks. It was he who opened the gate to the Tea Party before it got into the hands of Glenn Beck, Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich and became a garden variety rant. But first concerns were states’ rights and regional responsibility.

“Will the Rehnquist Court’s federalism revolution outlast the Rehnquist Court?” asked legal columnist for The New York Times Linda Greenhouse back in 2005. “If Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist retires this summer, as appears likely, the court's ruling last week that federal drug law trumps states on the use of medical marijuana will be its last word on federal-state relations during his tenure.”
A hallmark of the Rehnquist Court has been a re-examination of the country's most basic constitutional arrangements, she writes, resulting in decisions that demanded a new respect for the sovereignty of the states and placed corresponding restrictions on the powers of Congress.

But it is with some irony that new groups like The Tenth Amendment Center and sovereignty movements here in northern New England began just at the same time, in 2005. And potentially Rehnquist’s theme will rise now to the Presidency with Texas Governor Rick Perry.

But in the rush to cut spending Tea Party populism has led North Carolina to make the misguided decision to defund its Governor’s School. It is the kind of narrow thinking that sends the best and brightest of the regions to be processed in New England.

Schools like the North Carolina Governor’s School, which gather the bright and motivated best of the state to work together in the summer, greatly contribute to state and regional identity, building an indigenous business and culture elite. Any state or region which still has this natural affinity to place should cherish and nurture it. It is this which forms the natural state as Jefferson intended.

2011-09-01T04:58:00.000-07:00

Gordon Ramsay’s apple

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/1/11

I guess I am the last to catch on but as the rabbis tell you, the gods hide in humble places and I should have looked earlier. Looked to Gordon Ramsay, the chef in the pop TV sensation “Hell’s Kitchen” who returns the life force to America. And not for the first time a fierce Englishman comes to beat us into shape. We call him out. We call him to awaken us. Without him we will die possibly and we call him out in the last breath. As we did Churchill.

I only first caught his act during the breaks in the football game last week, cutting away to other stations during the commercials. Then I sought him out. His genius is best seen and heard on the high channels, presumably in rebroadcast, which contain the profanity, elementary and necessary to the shows truth and anger.

In one episode I caught, chef is riding through the American heartland, trilled and enchanted by the vast and fertile farm that it is. What wonders could be culled from such fullness in a local restaurant. He stops for a basket of fresh apples at a local fresh daily fruit stand and brings it back to the restaurant.

He gives an apple to the local chef and asks, “What is that?” “An apple,” says the rube, nonplussed. “You don’t get it, do you?” says Ramsay. And as per the theme of the show the local chef, the restaurant, the town and the viewing world will be torn to shreds. For chef sees all of creation in the apple.

This is a primal American dream of reawakening, a very positive harbinger to a people in trance, in turmoil – call it troubled or narcotic sleep – in a dormant state of between or bewitchment which really came from great success, but success which came from so long ago its generations and origins are forgotten. But beneath the broken glass and wilted flowers, the fat and the lazy, the self assured, those tenured in crates and tethered to false hope, chef sees a new creation.

Chef is kitchen god, the kitchen the alchemical center of the psyche where the dream of being given again to new creation awakens. Chef Ramsey like Shiva tears it down and burns it, layer upon layer, slaughtering outright the sacred cows – an entrenched chef who loves to put shrimp in chicken for example – which encase and calcify the old ways of thinking and prevent the new being born, prevents the new creation from being unleashed. And under the charred remains and scorched earth, chef alone sees the apple; the new beginning. The beginning again of all creation.

And he offers us the apple.

2011-08-31T06:23:00.000-07:00

Maya Angelou is right

A writer or orator’s second-to-worst nightmare is to be edited by a committee. A writer or orator’s worst nightmare is to be edited by a committee when you are dead. Great orators know what they mean and say it precisely as Martin Luther King Jr. did. Maya Angelou is right. The inscription on the statue makes him look like a twit.

From the Washington Post this morning. On Feb. 4, 1968, two months before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a haunting sermon at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church about a eulogy that might be given in the event of his death.

“If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice,” King told the congregation. “Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.”

But because of a design change during the statue’s creation, the exact quotes had to be paraphrased, and now one of the memorial’s best-known consultants, poet and author Maya Angelou, says the shortened inscription is misleading and ought to be changed.

Carved on the north face of the 30-foot-tall granite statue, the inscription reads: I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.

“The quote makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit,” Angelou, 83, said Tuesday. “He was anything but that. He was far too profound a man for that four-letter word to apply.

“He had no arrogance at all,” she said. “He had a humility that comes from deep inside. The ‘if’ clause that is left out is salient. Leaving it out changes the meaning completely.”

2011-08-30T06:02:00.001-07:00

Perry, Palin, Giuliani, Trump, pt. two

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/30/11

On July 22 this year I reported: “ . . . a connection between Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has popped up in the press . . . when I asked Giuliani last Friday at Dartmouth College if he would support Rick Perry, that characteristic great-big-sea of a smile spread across his face. ‘I might,’ he said. I took that as an ‘absolutely.’"

Now it would be more than Palin behind Perry, I claimed. It would be Giuliani as well, “ . . . and my guess is he will have another New Yorker who passes the NASCAR test: Donald Trump.”

This week several reports have it that Rick Perry has been on the phone with Donald Trump since he entered the race.

From Newsmax, 8/27/11: “Word is that Trump has spoken on the phone several times with Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the new front-runner for the GOP nomination. Sources say Perry called the billionaire and offered high praise for Trump's business acumen.”

Trump and Palin are already bonded and so are Perry and Palin. And Giuliani brought her to a Yankees game the night of the infamous Letterman slander.

A Perry, Palin, Giuliani, Trump quaternity could form a new political matrix. It could break the nostalgico political establishment, a cartel run by two royal New England political families, House of Bush, House of Kennedy. It could awaken a new political element, a new America and a new New York ; one that belongs again to America.

Quigley’s Grading Scale for Presidential Viability, grading presidential candidates as you would cheese or New Hampshire maple syrup, traditionally reserved second tier for “military commander” right behind “governor of a big state.” This year military commander is thrown out (although warrior/scholar David Petraeus should be considered) in favor of a leader of a vast corporation. America needs the business. Trump would fit right in.

The NASCAR test is a personality type test for political candidates. Imagine how Mike Bloomberg or Hillary Clinton would look at a NASCAR race. Those who do not pass are sent to tier seven with Zoroastrian fire worshipers, professional wrestlers and Charlie Sheen. But Trump and Giuliani fit right in as do Perry and Palin.

2011-08-29T08:23:00.001-07:00

When men wore pants: Chef Ramsay will save us

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/29/11

There is a world inside striving to find the will and intelligence to be born again. I noticed when my youngest son just entering college started listening to Tony Bennett and saving up for a suit.

The Fifties are here. Just under the surface. Just bubbling up. And “Mad Men's” Don Draper, the fictional shaman who created America in the 1950s (“America is everywhere I am . . . as far as I can see.”) has created it. Now come knockoffs of men in suits and women in uniform: Two new TV shows this fall: “Pan Am” and “The Playboy Club.”

Every athlete does not get a trophy in this world. Every book is not a great book. Every president and ex-president no matter how nuts or squalid does not get a Nobel Prize. That is Oprah world and it is fast dwindling. Chef Ramsey (“Shut up! What is that? Do it over! Stop crying!”) is the antidote; the anti-Oprah.

And Don is the anti-Timothy Leary, the anti-Jerry Garcia: Turn on? Don will take two. Tune in? Don sees everything. But never, ever, ever drop out.

You could see this coming with Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of Truman Capote in “Truman.” The return of mastery with both Hoffman and Capote. And in Ed Harris's portrayal and direction resurrecting “Pollock.” Warrior artists and writers from the fifties who have found no match. Warrior monks then as well: D.T. Suzuki, C.G. Jung, Nancy Ross Wilson, Walpola Rahula.

Recently, in a speech in Toronto, Shmuel Sackett, who speaks for an Israeli group which calls for Jewish leadership in Israel, asked why Israel at war in the 1960s found such strong support here in North America and finds so little today although the situations are not that different. But that was before Bono started writing opinions for The New York Times. Before the Bob Geldorf School of International Studies. I mean, who are you going to listen to, Lady Gaga or Hannah Arendt? And who is Hannah Arendt?

But it was then that a few men still wore pants and not jeans. And they are starting to again.

2011-08-25T05:49:00.000-07:00

Signs in the heavens, signs following: A new age of Jefferson

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/25/11

“The spaceship has landed,” said Steve Jobs here at the end. Perhaps he was talking about several things. We at the turn of the millennium are sensitive to signs. Even the steady and solid same as the visionary holiness preachers who see “signs following” in the eastern hollows of old Kentucky. And this week we have seen signs. An earth quake in Louisa co., virtually in Thomas Jefferson’s back yard. One that shook the Washington monument and left a few cracks. And gold dropped more than a hundred bucks all in an afternoon.

That second is a good thing. Gold is a harbinger . . . a measure of wellness or weakness in the general economic environment. A drop in gold as dramatic as this, like a hurricane or an earthquake, comes from somewhere. Too bad that only the Natural Law Party which by the way very much likes Dennis Kucinich (and I do too) takes the view of physicist Wolfgang Pauli of what is called the collective unconscious. Pauli called it synchronicity: Nature and the human spirit is compliance. Everything means something, everything is connected. So what brought sudden confidence in the gnostic economic situation? Possibly the President leisurely taking to the sands in blissful New England and keeping his hands off things. Possibly the rise of a new figure from Texas who brings responsibility and maturity to government like we have not seen in at least 18 years in presidential politics. And it was as the earth awakened around Monticello that Rick Perry jumped to a big lead in the front of the pack after only one week away from announcing he would run for president.

Historian Frank Owsley in a famous essay titled “The Irrepressible Conflict” wrote that the American condition is always about two people and two places: Hamilton and Jefferson, New York and Virginia. New York took the advantage early on and so we had Yankees and Red Sox dominating the imagination. Until Ted Williams moved to Texas. And two politician families dominating still from that region. One basks at Nantucket the other at Kennebunkport. But Ron Paul, like the dutiful Amish, does not vacation. And Rick Perry will not be vacationing in Little Compton or Martha’s Vineyard. The sands have shifted. These two bring to us a new paradigm and Rand Paul and Mike Lee in the senate help enormously.

History has its zen moments and centuries stream from those moments as the seven rivers do from the Himalayas. One such moment was Jay’s Treaty of 1794 when Washington cast his lot with the New Yorkers in opposition to the Virginians, Jefferson and Madison. The men and the regions never got along after that and the northern dominance was sealed at that moment. But after the Second World War cultural dominance of the northeast. The energies dissipated. The karma shifted west. When they went to the moon they went from Texas. Norman Mailer said at the time that the “Protestants” had gone to the moon while we the “beatniks” in the northeast were out getting stoned.

All the people and all the regions would be coming up now as Jefferson wanted, not just the Hamiltonians in Boston and New York. This is a new day and could well be called the age of Jefferson. The true center now should not be DC but somewhere around Louisville. Or Peyton Manning’s Indianapolis.

It's all ahead. Whitman wrote back in 1869 that when we returned to earth from our journeys to Sirius, Jupiter and beyond, the “true Son of God” would come “singing his song.” The visionary Salvador Dali pictured this “second Christ” as an American football player in 1943. And again later as a Buddhist monk in yellow robes, descending from the sky to a desert in Texas.

2011-08-24T14:14:00.000-07:00

China without the Tao

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 7/6/11

Tao in the world is like a river flowing home to the sea. – Daodejing #32

Henry Kissinger’s new book, “On China,” explains what might be seen as a modern telling of China’s fourteenth-century epic novel, “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” the three kingdoms being Mao’s China, the Soviet Union and the United States. What I found to be of particular interest is how the diplomatic relationship developed between China and the United States. Ambassador George Kennan had proposed that the Soviet Union would not survive if it could not expand and would fall apart internally. A U.S./China diplomatic friendship would fence the Soviets in and sure enough, less than 20 years later the Soviet Union fell apart.

But something – someone – is missing from Kissinger’s book. Laozi, Taoist sage and author of the “Daodejing.”

Rightfully so, as Tao played no role in Mao’s revolution nor does it in today’s China. I began to worry about China and ourselves, because China without Tao is not a place but an economic zone; it is Israel without torah or India without the Bhagavad Gita. Kennan’s observation could just as easily be made about American capitalism and the “Beijing model”; without expansion, they would fall apart. China has survived these six thousand years with the Tao – the path of integrity – the path of receding power or the way of return. Without Tao, the only way of return is crash and burn.

Liu Junning, an independent scholar in Beijing, suggested in June in a Wall Street Journal essay titled “The Ancient Roots of Chinese Liberalism” that Beijing’s power path without Laozi is brittle. At the Chinese Communist Party’s 90th anniversary, Hu Jintao said “Success in China hinges on the party.” Liu Junning writes:

“That view is to be expected from the party secretary. Perhaps more surprising is the extent to which outside observers have come to believe it, too. These foreigners—academics and journalists prominent among them—look to the "Beijing model" or the "Beijing consensus" as a desirable alternative to Western-style economic liberalism.

“The Washington consensus counted on free trade and open capital flows, plus deregulation, the rule of law, and the pre-eminence of the private sector to spur development. China at first glance appears to have achieved 9% annual growth rates or better for years by challenging that rule book. Visiting dignitaries and columnists see gleaming skyscrapers, straight roads, booming industries and upwardly mobile citizens . . . Yet on closer inspection, the most significant transformations from the perspective of boosting prosperity have involved loosening of control over the people, not some alchemy of power and Marxism.”

The Beijing model has the "virtue" of allowing the government to act quickly and decisively, writes Liu Junning. But when Beijing makes mistakes, the result historically has been a Cultural Revolution or a Great Leap Forward.

What we now call Western-style liberalism has featured in China's own culture for millennia, he writes. We first see it with philosopher Laozi, the founder of Taoism, in the sixth century B.C. Laozi articulated a political philosophy that has come to be known as wuwei, or inaction. "Rule a big country as you would fry a small fish," he said. That is, don't stir too much. "The more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people become," he wrote in his magnum opus, the "Daodejing."

2011-08-23T05:50:00.000-07:00

Did the Stanley Cup loss reverse Canada’s fortunes?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/23/11

Pimco’s Bill Gross, leery of the wobbly American fundamentals told Bloomberg recently they are looking for new investments, mentioning Canada, Germany and others. The Canadian banking system is solid, there have been no bailouts, and the Canadian dollar has been growing strong against the American in recent years. But uh-oh. Something happened in early summer. What happened? The Vancouver Canucks lost in the Stanley Cup final to the Boston Bruins.

FOREX (FOReign Exchange market) blog author wrote on June 8, 2011: “In April, I wrote a post entitled, ’Economic Theory Implies Canadian Dollar will Fall.’” But did FOREX author take into consideration hockey theory and the Canadian psyche?

Perceptive FOREX blogger argued that the currency’s impressive rise was belied by fundamentals: “It seems the gods of forex read that post; since then, the loonie has fallen 3% against the US dollar alone. Based on my reading of the tea leaves, the loonie will fall further over the coming months, and finish the year below parity.”

Or possibly the hockey gods knew what would occur on June 18 when Canada, uncharacteristically confident that they would win, lost to Boston. Since then the graph for Canadian dollar conversion to American has bounced around like a lie detector graph for a liar.

It is a problem when national identity is so closely linked to sports as Canadian psyche is to hockey. Hockey is in Canada, as one commentator astutely says, a “national religion.” With such intense identification a sports victory or loss can have the same psychological effect as a military one.

When Canada took home the gold in both men and women’s hockey in the Winter Olympics of 2002 I compared the win to Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in 1805. As Richard Nixon once wrote, England got an extra hundred years of history from three hours at Trafalgar. Making the Canadian victory sweeter was the presence of the dour American Vice President, Dick Cheney, basking in the contempt he awakened in almost everyone in the world outside the Bush administration, to remind the crowd of the obsequious “Miracle on Ice” – a make believe moment in the Jimmy Carter presidency when the Soviet Union lost to America in an Olympic hockey game. The addled American mind, worn to a thread by Vietnam, conjured a real victory against the Soviets. A summer reading of Henry Kissinger’s “On China” gives the cleared picture. It was America’s linking with Mao’s China that blocked off future growth for the Soviet Union. As George Kennan had advised, if the Soviets could be kept from expansion it would collapse internally. And it did barely a dozen years after the Nixon/Kissinger initiatives. It had nothing to do with hockey.

Canada might have gone through a cultural renaissance since their great 2002 victories, gaining confidence in dealings with both the United States and Quebec. But Nixon left something out: Yes, Trafalgar, but what if Napoleon had came back 10 years later and beat England into the ground at Waterloo? The tune would be different. England would not have gotten its next hundred years and there would be no Victoria, no Beatles and no Stanley Cup because there would have been no Lord Stanley.

Too early to tell, but if the 2002 games were Canada’s Trafalgar victory, they would have needed a win like the Duke of York’s victory against Napoleon at Waterloo this year in Boston to rise to a booming Canadian Century like that predicted. But something celestial was going on. The presence of a giant before the Bruins’ net should have been the tip off. And Canada did not get its victory.

The FOREX blogger may have it. Not that I would advise Bill Gross or Pimco on this. I’m just saying.

2011-08-20T10:22:00.000-07:00

Clinton v. Perry: Bill Clinton should start a new party

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/22/11

I’ve been writing about Democrats and Republicans as anachronistic appendages of history dominated by two wealthy and influential New England industrial-era, Gilded Age families, the Kennedys and the Bushes, holding the culture in sway – in a trance, maybe - for decades. It was only Bill Clinton who successfully broke free from this family pattern.

But Hillary’s hopes for the White House were dashed overnight by Carolyn Kennedy when the whole clan suddenly rose against her. Just as Jimmy Carter was sandbagged by Uncle Teddy. Just as the Bush team today hopes to demobilize Texas governor Rick Perry.

When Clinton said famously, “The age of Big Government is over,” it was a correct statement and a historic one. The age of the plantation was over as well and the age of the vast factory floor with its horde of immigrant workers pouring out together at the lunch whistle. America is no longer an empty, endless primeval forest awaiting occupants but rather a fully developed and diverse group of regional cultures. One size no longer fits all. We need new regional thinking. Today up to 85% of Americans work in small business. But the Kennedy/Obama Democrat’s mind set – like the Bush Republicans – is still bound to the age of field and factory.

For awhile between Reagan and Clinton the economy worked well. Now, with Pelosi, Barney Frank, Reid and Obama, it is clear that the old Roosevelt-era industrial vision was only in hiding; quietly lurking under the stairs of the university and planning a vengeful sequel.

But I see this as the last hurrah. Tea Party rose in direct opposition and America repudiated the old ideas. The people opposed. Virginia Senator Jim Webb said when the Bush-era bailouts were announced by Hank Paulson that calls were ten-to-one against to his office.

It is unfortunate that Bill Clinton came to the support of Obama during the debt ceiling crisis this month because he should have been on the other side. In fact, he should have been leading the other side. This and all of the original thinking of states’ rights, sovereignty, opposition to global empire, freedom and individuation that we hear today from Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, Judge Andrew Napolitano and the Tea Party pretty much started here in Vermont and New Hampshire in opposition to the imperial Bush/Cheney/Rove adventures. A quick check of the Vermont Commons: Voices of Independence web site and its thoughtful newspaper can confirm.

Today, with no place left to turn, New York looks to Vermont for direction. As NY mayor Mike Bloomberg hopes to buff his shine by presiding over the wedding of the first gay couple in NY, it is old hat here. Democratic Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin does so this week.

Our America today is no longer Marx v. Keynes in imperial global projection. It is now Keynes v. Hayek in regional competition. The regional competition which Texas Governor Rick Perry today advances was suggested first in the most liberal quarters of New England during the George W. Bush administration. These ideas are not yet fully formulated in either party and need someone with the status and cache of Clinton to advance them on the left. He is on a vegan diet; he advocates David Lynch’s Transcendental Meditation; he is a man of the geist, he’s still hungry and he comes from a different creative place. He needs a new vehicle; his own vehicle. And at least half of his generation can think of nothing else.

Conservatives have been the first to begin to grasp the meaning of the new century in the new libertarian and regional thinking. But that could easily flip.

When people live in an outmoded system their lives become strange and temporary. Revolution beckons to them. As Peggy Noonan wrote recently, today no one dies here where they are born. We have no cousins. Maybe this will find improvement.

2011-08-19T07:11:00.001-07:00

Rove joins the Bush anti-Perry campaign

Karl Rove, that dutiful Jeeves of the Bush family, has joined in the loyalist chorus to have someone – just anyone – run against Rick Perry in the primary, so to get Jeb Bush on the ticket as VP in 2012 and have him advance in 2016.

What kind of man wants to be VP anyway?

Via HotAir by Tina Korbe: “Karl Rove: Christie, Ryan, Palin might still grow the field”:

“We’ve got a good field,” Rove said on Hannity on August 15,”. . . I think we are likely to see several other candidates think seriously about getting in . . . I think Chris Christie and Paul Ryan are gonna look at it again . . . I’m starting to pick up some sort of vibration that these kind of conversations are causing Christie and Ryan to tell the people who are calling them, you know what, I owe it to you, I’ll take a look at it.”

Dude, I wonder who is calling? Jeb Bush? Former Bush employee Mitch Daniels? Karl Rove?

This is Rove street theater to have Jeb Bush as VP on a Christie or Ryan ticket, to win or lose in 2012 is irrelevant. It will return it to the Bush family via Jeb in 2016.

As said here months back, Chris Christie is the Bush family’s Barack Obama; the last chance for the family fortune before the millennium finally awakens, as Obama was/is for the Kennedy family. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard blurted it out on TV months back when Christie was the flavor of the month. The ticket should be: “Christie with Jeb Bush as VP.” Got it.

The problem here of course is that Mormon, Mitt Romney, who demands to be heard as a free man in America. As Anne Coulter blurted out some months back, Christie should run because Romney cannot win.

That is, he cannot win in the heartland because he is a Mormon. Perhaps. But at this moment, Mitt Romney virtually holds the future of the world in his hands. What the Bush proxies want is for Romney not to win in New Hampshire’s primary. Because Christie or whomever the push ahead will then have gone through Iowa with nothing, then a big win for Romney in New Hampshire, then a big win in South Carolina for Perry and onward and upward for Perry/Bachmann in the red states.

Even the jolly, likeable and apparently loyal Bushido Christie would not have a chance. He doesn’t have a chance in South Carolina or Iowa anyway. He would have to win New Hampshire to go forward.

The only way he could do that is if Mitt Romney, ahead by a large margin in NH right now, dropped out of the race completely before the primary. Mitt’s decision is, do I take one for the team? That is, do I fold in with the Bush plantation or take my chances in America? Anyone who has watched Romney in Massachusetts and anywhere knows one thing; that he is his own man and he is a free man.

2011-08-18T03:45:00.001-07:00

Why doesn’t Jeb Bush just enter?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/18/11

Possibly Jeb Bush demurred about a run for the presidency in 2012 as he saw Obama to be unbeatable when the first Republicans headed toward the primary season. 2016 would be the better time. But with Gallup showing Obama today with a low approval of 26% on the economy that might have been a miscalculation. And now that a wily coyote has slipped in under the shadows of a Comanche moon and taken the lead over Mitt Romney and the rest of the pack after only having signed on three days ago, it is starting to look like a big mistake on Jeb’s part.

They, the Bushes, have been looking for a proxy; Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, John Thune, just anybody. All they need to do is win the primary and let Obama have it another four years. They can wait. Then it will be Jeb. But Perry is big, strong, unpredictable. Feral, dangerous and alive like west Texas. To think that Paul Ryan, running as a Bush proxy – he is being encouraged to run by former W. employee Mitch Daniels, Jeb and other Bush loyalists - would do any better than Daniels, Tim Pawlenty or the others against Perry, who has long been the Bushes worst nightmare, is the end of imagination.

Which is why this race is so interesting. The Bushes, like the Kennedys, have reached the end of imagination. Like Holmes and Moriarty, they may now be going over the falls together. Why doesn’t Jeb just enter himself against Perry? If Perry wins it will be a new strong force in American politics. A new political culture awakened in America. Jeb won’t have a chance in 2016 and will thereafter be long forgotten.

Always disliked that Bush senior compared himself and W. to the Adamses, who served as father and son presidents. A stunning presumptuousness to make such a claim about a Founding Father. And many Jeffersonians consider John Adams, father of the totalitarian Alien and Sedition acts, to be among the worst presidents. Second only possibly to W. who may have taken his cue from Adams when he repealed habeas corpus, virtually suspending the Constitution. That Janus image was rather suggested; the god had two faces, because the Romans understood that things ended as they began.

But with Rick Perry, America gets to begin again and bust free from the two northeastern families; Montagues and Capulets that have masqueraded as political parties these past 40 years. As Ronald Reagan said, it is morning in America. But it is getting now to high noon.

2011-08-17T05:52:00.000-07:00

Petraeus for VP in a Rick Perry administration

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/17/11

Felt that Massachusetts senator John Kerry lost his presidential campaign – and I campaigned relentlessly for him in New Hampshire in 2004 after Wes Clark dropped out – because he was successful as a soldier and proud of it. Had he strode resolutely to the podium with a metal leg and a cane when General Wesley Clark introduced him at the Democratic Convention, he might have had it. Success meaning just that: Like Arjuna in battle, he saw the eye of the enemy and hit the target. Not to cast aspersions but so many who fought honorably and were later successful in politics – Jack Kennedy, H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, and McCain – would not have met the Arjuna standard or those of Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff.” To those who flew fighters out of Southeast Asia and remained alive to talk about it today on the History channel, the only course was to hit the target or die trying. Nothing else matters to samurai. We love our military, especially those who sank the boat, were gunned down or crashed the plane. I take this to mean that we love our military but are afraid of them. Until everything gets unraveled and then we call them up. But when we do it maybe brings clarity of the heart. Eisenhower, for example, brought America to accept the conquest. The war was over. We won. Let’s build on the confidence and success which comes with victory.

We will have that moment as well with this war and soon and when we do I suggest we will look to General David Petraeus, recently installed Director of the CIA.

Michael Brenner, Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations; Professor of International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh, seemed to suggest yesterday in the Huffington Post (“I Petraeus”) that Petraeus may be tempted by higher office:

“Petraeus, as CIA Director, is operating in a foreign policy environment that leaves much room for individual initiative. His counterpart at the Pentagon, Leon Panetta, is known less for his subtlety and bureaucratic skills than his heavy-handed use of the hammer. He has none of Robert Gates' suave manner and gravitas. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is vocal on a selective basis, travels relentlessly, but lacks both a coherent strategic vision and diplomatic finesse. As for the National Security Council apparatus, it is the marked by weak leadership, thin expertise and a view of the country's external relations shaped by domestic political considerations. That leaves President Obama. His recent abject performance on the debt ceiling issue underscores the distinguishing traits of his person and his presidency. He is indecisive, yields to the pressure of those more willful than he, and has few pronounced views on any matter other than an all-consuming desire to occupy the White House until January 2017. Within 48 hours of the dramatic surrender to the Tea Party, and its profound consequences hitting home, he was prowling the moneyed precincts of Chicago and Hollywood on the hunt for big bucks from fat cat contributors. . . . For a man of ambition like Petraeus, it is a tempting -- irresistible? -- opportunity.”

Petraeus would be a good fit for VP in a Rick Perry administration. It would enhance the states’ rights position which Perry emphasizes in his book, “Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington.”

A President’s first job is to run the military. She or he must also secure the borders and deliver the mail. The rest is up for grabs.

2011-08-16T06:14:00.000-07:00

Obama’s good bye bus tour

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/16/11

The President travels the country in a Greyhound bus now in a new campaign pitch. Stops at 7-ELEVEN maybe for a slurpee. Get down with the people. I suppose they are feeling Sarah Palin. Sarah rides a bus. Better ride a bus. Sarah Palin rides a Harley. No, better not. It is a mask that fits with her. Not Obama. On this long hike since 1960 the Democrats have been cursed by a monarchist trend, starting with Jack Kennedy. Ending with Obama. And Jack Kennedy would have seemed ridiculous riding a bus.

Anything is possible in America. You can break the chains of a thousand years and find the dharma path. Or you can get a tattoo of the Zig Zag man on your arm and ride a Harley. But for Obama now nothing seems to fit.

Among us Irish immigrants, and Kennedy was married in my high school parish, the general direction was to build our own parallel institutions like Notre Dame. Previous Catholics had done the same with Georgetown, which still, more than most, carries the karma. But the Kennedys instead went right to the citadel and sent their kids to Harvard, seeing themselves in direct shadow opposition to Protestant New England; Lodge then, Bush today. Kennedy then, Obama today.

Not sure it was the right move for us and Obama seems an extension of us, to go take the citadel of the WASP and their so-called Protestant Work Ethic. Even we proles from the public schools like University of Massachusetts had heard about the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism from Max Weber. The storied work ethic may have been a fraud as the Marxists taught us but the only ones who seem to have it now are Mormons. Maybe they took it with them from New England to the desert.

The lesson Obama learned when Harvard professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr. charged a Cambridge cop with racism in Obama’s year was one of image, not a lesson of the heart. Obama looked silly affirming Harvard Yard’s pretentions as his own in opposition to the meat and potatoes cop of Fenway Park. Now he looks silly riding the bus trying to get along with “real people.”

The real people are practically in revolt. Democratic commentator Pat Caddell has called it a “prerevolutionary state.”

I don’t think so. I think it is 1979 part two and much akin to the first when the country shifted from the frivolous, make believe and escapist representative image of itself as a peanut farmer, Sunday school teacher from the Deep South with a crazy brother to a more authentic reality. Four years later Ronald Reagan was reelected in an unprecedented landslide, carrying every state but one. He even carried the storied land of Obama’s Harvard, long conquered and broken by us Boston Irish.