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.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Saturday, January 21, 2012
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?
Friday, January 20, 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.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
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.
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.
Monday, January 16, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
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.
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.
Monday, January 09, 2012
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.”
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.”
Friday, January 06, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 04, 2012
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.
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.
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.
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.
Monday, January 02, 2012
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.
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.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, December 26, 2011
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.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
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.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, December 19, 2011
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.
Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 12/20/11
7.57 million viewed the ABC debate on December 10. Nallie Andreeva reports on Deadline:Hollywood: “ABC News’ Republican presidential debate drew 7.6 million total viewers on Saturday, 2.1 million of them in the 25-54 demographic. Titled Your Voice, Your Vote – Republican Presidential Debate in Iowa, the special ranks as the most-watched debate of the 2012 presidential campaign to date, eclipsing Fox News’ Sept. 22 telecast, which averaged 6.1 million viewers."
Suggests that “normal people”; people who do not compulsively follow politics, are only recently beginning to get serious about the upcoming primaries in the last week.
The Gallup poll out December 19 indicating Republican preferences for 2012 GOP Presidential nomination and recent trends indicates that since the December 10 debate Gingrich sank 7, bringing him even with Romney. Romney and Paul remain flat. Bachmann up then down. Santorum, Huntsman flat since Dec. 11.
Only Rick Perry graphs steady rising progress since last Tuesday, Dec. 13, when people started to watch in greater numbers.
Did George W. Bush destroy America? Will Gingrich?
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 12/19/11
Ruling class suggests Kim Jong-il’s son is in charge, as sclerotic North Korea like Greece pitches its third family member. And Jeb Bush likewise hovers this morning again at the top of the WSJ op ed page as his family seeks, strives and hopes for a brokered convention. Because without Bush (III) there is no America. And given the state of the Republican Party, crippled by money, influence, think tanks, nostalgia, the WSJ op ed page, too many Bushes and dead ideas as it seeks it's worthy, it is not unlikely. Newt Gingrich? That Gingrich this weekend brings in Abraham Lincoln, liberator of the world, avatar of the awakening centuries, to legitimize a miscreant like George W. Bush and advance his own feral visions of dictatorship and authoritarianism borders on the demonic. Iowa voters take note.
Time measures us by the size and status of our enemies: Nelson/Napolean, Grant/Lee, Churchill/Hitler, Roosevelt/ Stalin, George W. Bush/Kim Jong-il. But Gingrich begins the age. His claim that if elected president he would reign in the judiciary is a brilliant and dangerous ploy, peeling back the illusions of the American dilemma and slashing its idols, Lincoln, to expand his ever-growing girth. The Presidency has the right to reign in the Supreme Court, he claims, because it has done so twice before. The president of course has no right to reign in the Supreme Court and a president who does so should be thrown in the D.C. jail with the general population.
Then what was Lincoln’s authority in the invasion of the South and for freeing the slaves? Not the constitution. "Higher law." The law of God. In freeing the slaves Lincoln took the “higher law” path and even Rand Paul, primo libertarian and states’ rights advocate, acknowledges that morally, he did the right thing. Likewise, in the same theme and forum, God apparently gave Bush the right to torture the already pitiful foreign devils under the thumb of Osama bin Laden.
This authority came from God? As did Henry VIII, W. Bush declared himself to be the agent of “higher law” and the emissary of God. And Gingrich intends to do so as well.
In the Washington Post this weekend comes essential reading. The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq this month marks the passing of an era, claims Andrew J. Bacevich, a retired Army colonel and Boston University professor, who would make a very excellent VP candidate for Ron Paul if Wes Clark can’t take the job. President George H.W. Bush heralded the approach of a “new world order” he writes. But lacking poetry, his formulation never caught on. And that which never began ends today with American troops leaving Iraq.
Gingrich is today as always, the Trickster. But as Obi-wan Kenobi advanced it, the Trickster’s power is only advanced by the people’s inclination to deception. He tips the statues of our gigundous idols to find the weasel work underneath. But in this we find Newt, the Tea Party champion to be in fact the antithesis of Tea Party. Tea party speaks for the states as Rick Perry does and Ron Paul does. In that regard, Tea Party speaks to our future. Newt paves the way to Bismarck, Kim and himself and he understands that we are at the moment of essential change today and it can go either way.
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.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
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.
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 12/13/11
Last year, when the idea of the Tea Party was beginning to catch on, the New York Times ran a story on the rising Tea Party in Israel. On stage was Moshe Feiglin, an Israeli leader and I would say authentic, indegeneous folk hero. Feiglin is the head of the Jewish Leadership Movement which seeks to turn “the state of Jews into a Jewish state.” Feiglin and company were Tea Party before Tea Party was cool and before it became loud. I was writing about the Tea Party at the beginning and for two years at least, every day, Ron Paul and I were on the same page. It was why I first became interested in Feiglin. As Paul rises in Iowa he will carry America, whether he wins or not. He will not go away. The same can be said of Feiglin.
The Tea Party has even become imperial with Glenn Beck’s resent sojourn to Israel to declare Christian solidarity. His call was famously repudiated by Feiglin and several well known Senators who planned to attend suddenly cancelled. But America’s vision has always been imperial regarding Israel. We intend to help, but imperialists always do. Many Americans see Israel as a pseudo-American state in which they somehow have a say. George Schultz, advisor to George W. Bush, once said on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer that as a Christian he “has a say” in Israel. With no mean intention. It is taken for granted by those who love Israel most; Christians in the heartland and American Jews in the northeast.
Israel in recent years has become more Jewish. Jewish Americans have become more American.
My interest in Israel is correctly described by former Mayor Ed Koch of NY: After 9/11 “an attack on Israel is an attack on America.” In a conversation recently, Feiglin framed it more elegantly: An attack on Israel, he said, “is an attack on freedom.”
Feiglin brings a challenge to Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership on January 31. Events there could very well parallel events here in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
Rafi Farber, a young Israel supporter, sees a parallel between Paul and Feiglin. “Ron Paul is to Government Spending as Moshe Feiglin is to the Oslo Peace Process,” he writes.
“America made a decision in 1913 on big government,” he blogs from Samaria. “To change that direction requires not simply a change in style. It requires a 180 degree paradigm shift in the way America thinks about itself as a country,” and as Paul brings that paradigm change to America, so does Feiglin to Israel. And that includes aid to Israel: “Both Ron Paul and Moshe Feiglin are trying to do the impossible and change the way their countries think about themselves. And both Ron Paul and Moshe Feiglin want America to stop giving foreign aid to Israel.”
Indeed, as Feiglin wrote years back in his book, The War of Dreams:
. . . the State of Israel, with the GNP of a modern country, can easily do without aid that amounts to just one and one half percent of its budget – aid for which Israel essentially surrenders its independence. Why do Israelis insist on developing a sense of imaginary dependence on the U.S. and Europe, specifically at the point that Israel is both economically and militarily vigorous? The answer to that question is not at all connected to Israel's military or economic capabilities. It is on a totally different plane.
The Hill
Newt Gingrich: The world begins with Trickster
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 12/13/11
The conventional wisdom is that Newt can’t get elected so Romney should be pushed. Same was said of Barack Obama. Certainly Newt can get elected and a Gingrich/Rick Perry ticket or Gingrich/Jon Huntsman ticket or a Gingrich/Nikki Haley ticket would bring a new political agenda. Possibly only Gingrich can bring it to Washington. The Trickster starts the world again and Newt is the Trickster.
What he says shocks because it is true. And we know it is true. We just haven’t been saying that since at least 1992 and the Oslo Accords or even before. I felt we turned the corner to cloud cuckoo land when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and George H.W. Bush began taking foreign policy advice from Bob Geldorf. (Geldorf, who can fairly be called squalid, was a singer in the Boom Town Rats, an Irish punk band. He was the Monkey Trickster who legitimized Bono and Lady Gaga as foreign policy luminaries.) Since then we say these things are true because we have accepted them to be, like taking Pinocchio to be the real boy, we know they are not true but they feel nice and if so many of us say the same thing we believe them to be. And we don’t want any trouble. The wooden boy is good enough. But they were never true and only the Trickster – he comes with the sword and cuts through the false consciousness of the establishment press like butter – can lift the curtain.
A Gingrich/Perry or Gingrich/Huntsman or Gingrich/Bobby Jindal operation in the White House in 2012 is a very real possibility, even at the moment, a probability. Gingrich understands the new day. He is not beholden to old family sentiment and the ancient regime. The new starts with the Trickster. And he is essential for the new to begin, like John Brown or Bob Dylan. There would have been no Lincoln without Brown – Thoreau and Emerson would not have brought in the New England preachers. And without Dylan the Beatles would still be in the floppy wigs, playing Bar Mitzvahs and weddings. They have said as much. The Trickster awakens the world.
Then he goes away. A classic Trickster run today would be a Gingrich/Perry or Huntsman ticket. Changing everything. New foreign policy, balanced budget, the whole nine yards. Then two years in the horde that brought him there tires of him and decides to throw him out. And as quickly as he slips in, coyote Trickster slips back into the forest. Then the great man takes over, whoever that would be. Probably who Newt brings in now as his VP: Huntsman, Perry, Haley, someone else yet unsuspected as Gingrich always does the unexpected. It is the way of the Trickster.
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.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
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.
Friday, December 09, 2011
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.
. . . 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.
Thursday, December 08, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 06, 2011
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.
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 11/7/11
In the new Gallup poll virtually all of the support for Herman Cain has translated into support for Newt Gingrich. He stands at 37% now and Romney is at 22%, where he has been all year. Everyone else is in single digits. Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney? Really? How about Mike Huckabee? I can’t think of anyone better prepared to be President. I can’t think of a better man. It is not too late.
Huck gave it long consideration early on. He might have seen Texas Governor Rick Perry riding over the horizon pretty tall in the saddle. As Gingrich said, if Perry could adapt to the national scene there would be no stopping him. Then something happened with Perry and I still can’t figure out exactly what. For whatever reason, he decided in that environment to stay out. It might be wise in this environment to get back in. Gingrich and Romney are not satisfying options.
He won Iowa last time around. He would likely win this year again if he was in. And against Gingrich and Romney in South Carolina he would likely do well. Florida too. There is a pall over this race now. GOP leadership is not pleased with the contest between the current front runners. No one is except Team Obama.
And Huck has very good Tea Party kung fu. Not the shouting and hollering kind like Gingrich, Dick Armey and Glenn Beck bring forth. Huck is no iconoclast or renegade. The mature format of his forum over the weekend brought high marks from the Tenth Amendment Center, on the front lines of Tea Party relevance.
“The emphasis you saw placed on limiting the powers of the federal government during the forum reflects an awakening we’re seeing across America,” Tenth Amendment Center communications director Mike Maharrey said. “People are concerned about the growing power and intrusiveness of the federal government – from the whole health care issue to concerns that the government is disregarding our civil liberties in the name of security. People are recognizing we need to return to the proper balance of power between the state and federal government intended by the founders.”
“Huck’s forum brought us back to the philosophical underpinnings of conservatism,” said Janis Cherry, Director of Policy during his presidential run. “Too much of this campaign so far has been about nonsense like the HPV vaccine causing retardation or children working as janitors or ‘corporations are people’ that has made the GOP look stupid and silly. Huck showcased the candidates in a setting that was serious and substantive, something Bill Buckley would have approved.”
Exactly. Probably why his popularity today seems broader and deeper than it was four years ago. A Catholic journal likewise gave his forum highest kudos.
Huck should rethink. In hindsight, he was a man ahead of his time and ours and maybe his time is now.
Perry should attend the Donald Trump event
By Bernie Quigley
For The Hill on 12/7/11
They come in twos, it is advised in Star Wars, but which is the emperor and which is the sith? And there are still today two New Yorks, the high brow brahmins and the broad shoulders of the working class. Everything else is precariously perched in the in between. Jimmy Breslin and Norman Mailer. The gut brain and the ethereal. But New York today as always gets its power from the broad shoulders. And say what else you like about Donald trump, he's down with the people. And he represents New York, still the center of the world, in its gut. All candidates should attend his debate.
The Bloomberg/Washington Post debate was supposed to be the high brow event in this race, featuring Charlie Rose as moderator, bow tie wearers and Al Hunt. Good for the people who read the New Yorker and dine at The Leopard at des Artistes. But are you likely to run across Rose at the Frazier/Foreman fight? You might have run across Norman Mailer there with his bud Donald Trump.
Particularly among conservatives, that which we used to proudly call working class, as working class hero John Lennon did, has been commandeered today by ideologists, religious fanatics and the dangerously disturbed like Glenn Beck. Trump today is quintessentially New York, although Tom Wolfe snarks at his tacky architecture. That is part of it. This is New York, not Versailles. Let Trump ask the questions.
All who attended the Dartmouth debate should go to this one as well as more than any of the others in our times it is likely to be the people's forum. Especially those who took the free meal; Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann and didn't slip out the back door. It's the Donald buck. He should not let that one back in.
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.
Monday, December 05, 2011
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.
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.
Sunday, December 04, 2011
‘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.
Friday, December 02, 2011
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.
Thursday, December 01, 2011
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)