Rick Perry because . . .

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/23/11

WSJ editor James Freeman writes yesterday: “A Republican campaign veteran tells us that Texas Governor Rick Perry has decided to run for President, though the official word from Team Perry is still a definite maybe.”

From The Hill on Dec. 9, 2008 (five months before Tea Party began):

“Could be that we are all destined to be born again as Americans in Texas. Could be that something will happen in Texas to make us different kinds of individuals in the world and a different kind of country. Something from which there will be no turning back. Could be that destiny awaits us in Texas . . .

“Conservatives are reaching a fork in the road; a split between the small government trend which took its initiative with Ronald Reagan, and more traditional conservatives like H.W. Bush with sensibilities formed in the Northeast . . .

“[There] is the fork in the road for conservatives and each trail now has a premise and a tradition. Soon each will have its own leader. The moderate, Eastern conservatives like Colin Powell and Peggy Noonan will call for Jeb or somebody just like him with hopes of following in the tradition of Father George. But a new path is growing here . . . . The natural leader for this new direction is Rick Perry, Governor of Texas.

“Here he is with [then South Carolina Governor] Sanford in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed: As governors and citizens, we've grown increasingly concerned over the past weeks as Washington has thrown bailout after bailout at the national economy with little to show for it . . . In the process, the federal government is not only burying future generations under mountains of debt. It is also taking our country in a very dangerous direction -- toward a ‘bailout mentality’ where we look to government rather than ourselves for solutions. We're asking other governors from both sides of the political aisle to join with us in opposing further federal bailout intervention for three reasons. First, we're crossing the Rubicon with regard to debt.

“Americans phoned and emailed into Congress ten to one in opposition to the Wall Street bailout first proposed by Hank Paulson. Neither party in power spoke to that group. Sanford and Perry do and if this is an awakening constituency, we too will have crossed a river; the Mississippi, like Davy Crockett, on his way to the Alamo . . . “

Let’s hear from General Petraeus

for The Hill on 6/23/11

When we went to war at the beginning we were fully unprepared. We went from peace to war overnight. Our army under Tommy Frank and administration with Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush had no hands on experience and Congress was made up of peace time people concerned with housekeeping issues. Not until Secretary Robert Gates came to position did a steady hand come to policy in the Middle East conflicts. But General David Petraeus also brought stability and success to a mess he did not create. At his confirmation hearing today to become the next CIA director he should speak plainly about his assessment of the situation as we enter the post-Gates period.

Because President Obama can no longer be trusted on this issue. Drawing down 30,000 troops in opposition to the voice of his military advisers appears to politicize the situation to fit not the needs of the troops on the ground in harm’s way and our allies and friends abroad, but the upcoming presidential election. The wisdom of his recent Libya incursion is questionable as well.

I opposed the invasion from the first day because it was misguided, advanced by those who had never served in war but did in political influence groups, and because the Congress, including leading members then like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden acted out of weakness and expediency. But to leave too soon is as wrong and dangerous as it was to go into the wrong war in the wrong way.

Every historic period ends with a military general and a philosopher politician. Rightly so, as a military officer on the ticket symbolizes the first and foremost job of a president; to lead the armed forces. In our history, Jefferson/Washington, Lincoln/Grant, Roosevelt/Eisenhower. There is no reason why our time should be any different. It has been said that General Petraeus would like to seek the presidency and he could well be chosen as vice president in 2012 or 2016.

It has been ten years since 9/11 and we are ready now to listen to mature and honorable voices be they Dennis Kuchinich’s or Wesley Clark’s or Jim Webb’s. Americans tend to trust Gates and Petraeus, likely more than they do Congress or the press or the president today. Let’s hear what Petraeus has to say.

Jon Huntsman Jr. is our own Dr. Carlisle Cullen

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/212/11

When two separate events occur simultaneously pertaining to the same object of inquiry, we must always pay strict attention, FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper advises. So for a minute there watching the clip of the most elegant and handsome Jon Huntsman, Jr. it was like that de ja vu thing all over again which Yogi Berra talked about. I thought I was back in the movie theater with my 13-year old daughter watching “Twilight.” Out of the mystery and danger; out of chaos, blood lust and barbarism, comes the handsome, young, dependable and strong father figure, Dr. Carlisle Cullen, who brings us back to order. A stunning figure, Huntsman/Cullen, but not really one of us. One who was one of us, but evolved beyond his bestial nature to a higher form; a celestial one, but one who was led back to us by compassion; back to us mere mortals who are still driven by the beast, come to us now to help us along, to guide us, to cure us. That is Carlisle, the Cullen patriarch, and that could well describe Joseph Smith, who led a small group out of the utter moral and spiritual confusion of 1830s Vermont, to a structured new enlightenment in the desert of Utah. And now, Huntsman comes out of exile and brings it back to us.

Huntsman is picture perfect and could well play Dr. Carlisle Cullen, father of the “good” vampires in the “Twilight” saga, and maybe for the first time in the post-war saga we can say that populism has failed us and has failed the world. Huntsman/Cullen is not “one of us.” He is better than us. And now, here because we need him, because if we continue along the populist path we will not only fail – we have already failed; no, this time we will fall apart. But maybe Jon Huntsman, Jr. can save us.

It is serendipitous that the movie version of the fourth and final book in the “Twilight” series, “Breaking Dawn,” which sold 1.3 million in the first 24 hours, will be released on November 18, 2011, when the campaign is in full swing. Because the connection between Jon Huntsman, Jr. and Dr. Carlisle Cullen in looks and personality can be mesmerizing.

The books and movies were at first met with denial. Possibly because the vampires in this series are not bad, they are good and they are better than the humans. They are angels or “gods” and have risen to a greater nature than that of the everyday pudknockers of Forks, Washington. And these books appeared as a dream in the heart of a Mormon novelist, Stephanie Meyer, who learned to write, she said, to get it all down. They are not “Mormon books” and work ethic, discipline, a moral life and compassionate commitment, a commitment to becoming better are not exclusively moral values. But they are Cullen values and they are the values of Jon Huntsman, Jr.
In the four books a mythic marriage takes place. It is an American creation myth incorporating Native American heart with Mormon moral order. It bring in myth the return of the “white queen” – the chess figure on the cover of the last book; that is, it brings the white queen, Bella, to victory over the red queen, who’s name happens to be Victoria. This begins the historic cycle of the English-speaking people described by mythologist Robert Graves back to its beginning, and in that regard, it is an American “creation myth.”
It should be interesting. Maybe that is why they don’t like Mormons. They are intelligent, they are compassionate and they are better than us who have not yet conquered the beast.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry adds TSA bill to special session

- from Tenth Amendment Center

Texas Gov. Rick Perry presented legislation for consideration this week in the ongoing Eighty-Second Texas Legislature, First Called Session that would ban intrusive TSA pat-downs.

"We applaud Gov. Perry for presenting this legislation," Tenth Amendment Center communications director Mike Maharrey said. "James Madison said states are duty bound to interpose when the federal government overreaches its constitutional limits. Nobody can argue that requiring citizens to get groped by a badged agent in order to get on an airplane doesn't step way over the line."

The bill passed the Texas House unanimously in the general session in May and was poised to pass the Senate when a letter from U.S. Attorney John E. Murphy threatening to shut down air travel in the Lone Star State scared Texas Senators into backing down.

"It's an opportunity for redemption. Now its time for the Texas legislature to do its job and get this bill passed," Maharrey said.

Lord Stanley returns to the center of the universe

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/20/11

Those who took a course in journalism 30 years ago may recall the famous headline, “Hub man dies in Chicago fire.” It is how the populist press in Boston referred to the great Chicago fire. The fire itself was inconsequential. The big story was that a Boston man died in it.

Because Boston was “the Hub” and the Boston Bruins today is sometimes referred to as “the Hub of Hockey.” Actually the phrase was coined by Oliver Wendell Holmes as “the hub of the solar system” modified to “the hub of the universe.” Because the universe is not peace then but conflict and countervailing forces.

It was the height of arrogance unless of course the assessment was correct and Boston is the hub of the universe. Black Elk said the “center of the world” is wherever you are so maybe it works like that.

But this explains the symbol on the chest of the Boston Bruins who won the Stanley Cup last week and brought it back to Boston for the first time since 1972. It is an eight-spoked wheel, known in the study of the I Ching as a bagua. Viewers of “Lost” know it to mark the four corners of the universe or the totality of human consciousness; four, then four again in shadow, and then in the center – the hub – where the “B” is, resides the Creator.

For someone who grew up here it is interesting because the “land of the free,” the Constitution, Jefferson and Adams then were awaiting abstractions. Real life consisted of a fight on the ice between French and Irish working people. It became institutionalized in the game and now the great kids from Dartmouth, UNH and U Vermont who play fight to honor the tradition.

As they should. It is everything. It is freedom, it is being, it is the creation. A fight on ice between Montreal and Boston in Montreal on St. Patrick’s Day,1955, caused a riot with $100,000 damages, 37 injuries and 100 arrests. But it also brought about a new cultural movement and reformulated Quebec to a more Jeffersonian vision of cultural autonomy.

There is a beast in the heart of Canada today and it brings the gift of life. It is the most sacred and vital part of Canada. It comes from Boston and the Bruins flamboyant trickster coach Don Cherry brought it to Canada. Without it, Canada would not gel; it would fall apart. Without the kind of hockey Boston, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver (and Pittsburg and the Broad Street Bullies) play together, Canada would be Vermont.

So I was not disappointed to see the Vancouver fans riot in the streets after St. Timmie snatched victory from the strange red twins of Vancouver and brought the cup back to Boston. Vancouver is booming; the average price of a house is around 900 thousand. It is called the Paris of the west. The sight of turbans and beards on Sikh members of the RCMP at the anthem indicate a strong, authentic and creative multiculturalism. But it is new to the world and new to North America.

Vancouver is said now to hate Boston even more than Maurice (“The Rocket”) Richard and the Montreal Canadiens did back in the Fifties. This is good. It will form them to what they will be and what they will not be. It will make them whole as it did Quebec. It will make them strong, it will make them free and it will make them Canadian.

Rick Perry, Ron Paul and the “flatliners"

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/17/11

Ron Paul said on Fox News Thursday that Texas Governor Rick Perry “doesn’t identify with the people who are disenchanted with the status quo.” But a Texas Lyceum statewide poll conducted a few weeks ago showed Paul ahead of Perry by only an inch, Paul at 10% and Perry at 9%. And Paul has been campaigning constantly now for almost four years while Perry hasn’t even entered the race yet.

Paul is a different man today than when he ran as a quixotic anti-war outsider in 2008. He is part of the establishment; proud and smug at the grownups table after all those years. Today he quips knowing asides about Sarah Palin to the other black suits . . . not one of us, don’t cha know. Today he does interviews with the quintessentially mainstream Al Hunt on Bloomberg TV. Gone are the days when only outsider libertarian and tiny apocalyptic political journals listened. Days when he hoped to shock on Fox by quoting utopian socialist Upton Sinclair: "When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” - suggesting of course the last Republican administration. I didn’t hear that in the Hunt interview.

The Wall street Journal’s Daniel Henninger, on Rick Perry’s New York visit this week: “Say this—if the Texas governor gets in, you won't see another debate like last Tuesday's GOP flatliner in New Hampshire.”

Paul is no longer the “rooky pest.” He is now one of the flatliners.

Paul was a charming maverick during the war in Iraq, the kind we used to sprout regularly up here in New Hampshire; seemingly touched by the Lord and out of touch with the world. He brought old ideas like the gold standard and Austrian economics into the conversation and they are good ideas. Thanks for sharing. But Perry brings management abilities like those of no other governor and certainly well beyond anything a gadfly like Paul could manage. As Henninger correctly put it, Perry brings to America at large, “Texas, Texas and the Tenth Amendment.” That would be the Texas where up to 40% of new jobs materialize and where California companies are fleeing to.

Tenth Amendment is the stuff and substance of the Tea Party. And economic competition between the states and regions which Perry pioneers is in fact a Petri dish for Hayek and the Austrian economists

And while Paul was till preaching to the few, Rick Perry was thinking of the many. On Dec. 2, 2008, well before the phrase Tea Party was born, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “As governors and citizens, we've grown increasingly concerned over the past weeks as Washington has thrown bailout after bailout at the national economy with little to show for it . . . In the process, the federal government is not only burying future generations under mountains of debt. It is also taking our country in a very dangerous direction -- toward a "bailout mentality" where we look to government rather than ourselves for solutions.”

Perry speaks as a governor to other governors like Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, South Carolina’s Nikki Perry, Virginia’s Bob McDonnell, Butch Other of Idaho and others who are revolutionizing governance on a primary Constitutional level. It is a door that has opened that will not be closed.

Paul will always have a useful role. He will be to this rising political sensibility much as Ralph Nader was to the receding cycle of liberalism of the past 40 years. And like Nader, his place will ultimately be on the margins.

Weiner and the end of liberalism

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/15/11

One of the more curious aspects of the Weiner situation – it might be called the Weiner phenomenon – is that it went on for so long and the messages got stranger and stranger. This morning’s Drudge headline: “New pictures show teen Weiner cross dressing and ’oiled up’ . . . .” He seemed to want to get caught. There is desperation to his behavior like that of the Soviets at the end of empire or Kim Jong-il threatening the entire outside world with wilder and crazier schemes when he is virtually alone and crated in isolation. My thought was that Weiner is not a stupid guy. He isn’t really perverted in any conventional sense. He is simply acting out political action and behavior to offend; oppositional behavior to offend the “Bible Belt” which he sees, probably correctly, as the rising wellspring of conservative cultural and economic vision in North America. Like the wacky Kim Jong-il, Weiner, so very distant from the center of the circle; so far from the master’s voice, acts out an inchoate end game. Possibly we are seeing the desperate end of western liberalism.

“It’s New York City. This isn’t Bible Belt tolerance; that’s not a New York thing,” Robert Liff, a New York Democratic political operative told McClatchy newspapers. “We’re a live-and-let-live city.”

It’s those gnarly red necks out there in the Bible Belt; cooking hot dogs on their Webber grills, doing cannonballs in their suburban swimming pools, going to church. Going hunting. Having children.

Worth suggesting the end of liberalism because that seems to be going on in Canada. In the recent election conservative Stephen Harper won again after serving since 2004. For once, Canada did not follow America’s cue and send up a pseudo-Obama. The Liberal Party won the fewest seats in their history and party leader Michael Ignatieff was defeated in his riding.

What is significant here is that Michael Ignatieff, a retired Harvard professor and liberal writer, won only 34 seats. It has been said that in Canada, the old liberalism – Roosevelt, Obama, Weiner-style liberalism – is dead.

My guess is that we are seeing something of the same happening here with the rise in influence of people like Ron Paul, Texas Governor Rick Perry, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.

Ted Kennedy, not only the Senate champion of liberal thinking, but the bearer of a family vision of liberalism which has dominated America and the west since 1960, has been dead now almost two years. Looking back to Jefferson, to Victoria and Eisenhower, an “avatar” or archetypal quality of leadership can be observed: When the archetypal leader dies the movement dies with him and the country quickly moves on. Just as the heartland moved to the rustic, two-fisted populist Andrew Jackson of Tennessee’s frontier just three years after the historic revolutionary Jefferson’s death.

The Sarah Palin show trial (Sarah Palin/Nikki Haley ’12)

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/11/11

From Washington Post coverage of Sarah Palin’s email cashe: “Palin, who since coined the phrase ‘Mama Grizzlies’ to warmly describe female conservatives, wrote an impassioned e-mail to an aide in March 2008 about criticism of female politicians: “ ‘they’ said the same thing throughout my career — ‘too young’, ‘pregnant’, ‘kids’ . . . ‘She won’t be able to do it’ . . . This coming from good ol’ boys who don’t like change . . . And so far along in my career we’ve proved them wrong at each turn.””

The good ol’ boys who don’t like change brought their women with them when they went after Palin in 2008. They also went after South Carolina’s new governor Nikki Haley with even more despicable attempts, reviving old South strategies used effectively during Jim Crow. What was telling in both these cases that women in the press stood to the side when Haley was under attack and in Palin’s case, actively initiated scrorn and contempt.

But there is a spider woman quality that lurks behind these women: Haley has since been on the cover of Newsweek and is commonly mentioned now as a vice president candidate in 2012. And South Carolina’s legislature, considered one of the worse in the country, is feeling her scourge. While those who lashed out at Palin or attempted to sandbag her (not “one of us” – she uses a Garfield calendar and reads C.S. Lewis, has children, shoots bears and eats them) like those who tapped the Egyptian crypts are followed by bad luck: Chrales Hanson and Katie Couric after deceptive, dishonest, garden path interviews are retired to the reading room after decent interval; after the giggles, Letterman found himself in a heap of trouble, and after the NYT’s, in one of the most bizarre and propagandistic pieces of front-page reporting in the history of the written word, claimed she was responsible for a mad killer’s shooting in Arizona, the editor was sent back to the trenches.

The Washington Post’s initial coverage of the Palin emails, which hordes of reporters are filing through in an unprecedented action obviously looking to publically embarrass the VP candidate of 2008. One investigative reporter reported that she once said, “Sheesh” and is this time strangely fair and eventhe NYTs and Wa Post issued open calls to readers asking them to “investigate” emails fro mher tenure as governor of Alaska.

But headlines and leads are remarkably even-handed: “A cache of e-mails released Friday add vivid new color and fresh details to the complicated public portrait of Sarah Palin, who displayed many of the same strengths, and shortcomings, as Alaska governor that she would later bring to the national political stage.”

From McClatchy Newspapers: “Emails released yesterday from Sarah Palin’s time as Alaska’s governor show a double-fisted Blackberry user fully comfortable with handling nearly every aspect of state government from her private and state email accounts.”

Prediction: This will bring an Ollie North moment. In July 1987, Oliver North, a Marine colonel, was called to testify before televised hearings of a joint Congressional committee that was investigating Iran-Contra. Cards of support which came in were left in piles on the desk. The show trial attempts flipped and Col. North became an overnight national folk hero.

Is Romney sincere in his Tea Party pitch?
By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/7/11

I’d say so.

“I’m going to insist that Washington respect the Constitution,” he told an audience up here in New Hampshire last week. He said he would “return responsibility and authority to the states for dozens of government programs – and that begins with a complete repeal of Obamacare.”

Many who claim Tea Party status have already forgotten that was/is what it is all about: Constitutional government and state sovereignty as outlined in the Tenth Amendment. But Romney was listening to Tea Party ideas as governor of Massachusetts several years before the phrase Tea Party even appeared.

And he was first to use the phrase “one size does not fit all” in opposition to federal government long before it became popular with others.

Romney inherently understands state sovereignty as it is outlined in the Constitution. He didn’t have to “re-learn” it as so many others have done. Even when gay marriage arose as a political position in Massachusetts, he used a states’ rights defense. In a speech to the Federalist Society, he said that judges should not be able to trump state legislation and that Massachusetts already has statutes governing marriage. In contrast, Michelle Bachman, pride of the Tea Party, proposed a federal solution.

His claim that when elected President he would immediately grant a waiver on Obamacare to every state is clever and offers a path to easing into a solution without chaos.

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney showed that he would learn from new ideas and that he understood the contours of change on a historic scale. He was among the first of “establishment” conservatives to support the Tea Party movement and with Sarah Palin, came forth without hesitation to support beleaguered Tea Party favorite Nikki Haley in South Carolina.

Dems find courage, conviction and common sense in Dennis Kucinich

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/6/11

Kucinich’s anti-war Resolution might be the moment on which the Democrats can regroup and even begin again. Last Wednesday, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) made the following statement after his resolution, H. Con. Res. 51, to end the war in Libya was pulled from the Floor calendar and postponed:
“I am disappointed that the President and leadership feel the need to buy even more time to shore up support for the War in Libya. It’s not surprising that some are now wondering if a preliminary vote count on my resolution came out in favor of defending the Constitution.”

Been a long time coming. A turning seemed to be ahead five years ago when Marcos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos and a commentator at The Hill, talked of a new generation rising in the Democratic party with former governor, now Virginia senator, Mark Warner and Virginia Senator Jim Webb. But conservatives stole the agrarian fire.

Problem was the Clintons, said Kos. “ . . . the New York senator is part of a failed Democratic Party establishment -- led by her husband -- that enabled the George W. Bush presidency and the Republican majorities, and all the havoc they have wreaked at home and abroad,” he wrote in the Washington Post on May 7, 2006.

Will these Clinton-era Democrats never go away, asked Kos on his famous blog?

Apparently not. One appears now to be Secretary of State. And I don’t see that Obama has brought the cure to awaken a new liberal strategy and culture. He is an adult. He completes the Kennedy age. But he seems a one night stand and like the Clintons, a parlor liberal, more suited to the blithe sensibilities of the summer crowd at Martha’s Vineyard than to Sarah Palin’s mighty bunch of farmers, fishermen, veterans, bikers, preachers, red necks, guys named Darryl and Ted Nugent.

And this: The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation. – Barack Obama, Dec. 20, 2007.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

Kucinich’s anti-war resolution on Libya is a repudiation of the current Democratic leadership and direction.

During the war on Iraq, Moulitsas was a big supporter of Howard Dean’s anti-war position. I felt was a mistake: It went to the marginal in a time of crisis. But Moulitsas once mentioned that he first supported Clark. General Wesley Clark had the better ideas about the invasion of Iraq.

Clark was right again this spring in regard to Libya as well. And like Kucinich, he went again in opposition to the main thrust the Democratic leadership would take. Libya didn’t meet the test for U.S. intervention, Clark wrote in the Washington Post on March 11, 2011.

“. . . as Moammar Gaddafi looks vulnerable and Libya descends into violence,” wrote Clark, “familiar voices are shouting, once again: ‘Quick, intervene, do something!’ It could be a low-cost win for democracy in the region. But before we aid the Libyan rebels or establish a no-fly zone, let's review what we've learned about intervening since we pulled out of Vietnam.”

With the impending irrelevance of both Anthony “Sticky Fingers” Weiner (Google it) and John Edwards, north and south aspects of Clinton/Obama-era salon liberalism may be descending. Clinton/Obama seems today the party of the very rich and fashionable, and this is what has brought wind to the sails of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.
Kucinich brings the opportunity to start from scratch, back home with the people.

Dennis Kucinich on 20-years of war

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/26/11

War changes people. After the Mexican War, contention between the urban, industrializing northeast and the rustics of the heartland was no longer metaphysical. It began to take form as physical contention. After the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, war which had been brewing – in Churchill’s estimation – since the Boer wars began to bring blood to the streets and it wouldn’t stop flowing until Yalta. It began in 1914 but America wasn’t fully ready to fight until Pearl Harbor, 1941. And as Ulysses S. Grant said about earlier conflict: If you didn’t serve you would be left out. We have been at war for ten years now and those pundits, politicians and salon diplomats most reluctant to go at first lead the way here at the end against Kaddafi. Last to serve, they end up at the front of the parade when the war is over. 'Twas ever thus in war. My uncles and cousins and grand uncles and great grand uncles, participants in peace and war from Cemetery Ridge to Khe Sahn, had a name for them: “flag wavers.”
This war will change us as well. In my opinion it will psychologically empower the heartland as the Mexican War did, because that is where most of the soldiers and veterans live. It already has.
Some of different opinion and culture, have been honorable throughout: Virginia Senator Jim Webb, General Wesley Clark, Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold, the late Robert C. Byrd, senator from West Virginia, and Col. Lawrence Wilkerson come first to mind. But the unique, creative and possibly most singular and different individual in a compliant and appeasing Congress, Dennis Kucinich, representative from Ohio, belongs to the “honorable throughout” group as well and it is worth listening to what he has to say about “Permanent War and the National Security State.”
Because it is more than ten years. It started more than 20 years ago when then President George W. Bush climbed the mountain then turned around, going after Saddam Hussein in 1990, then leaving him standing, like the noble Duke of York, who was neither up nor down.
From Rep. Kucinich’s press release:
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a leading advocate for peace, today offered a broad critique of the National Defense Authorization Act which continues disastrous policies in Libya, and allows for permanent, global war and reauthorizes harmful provisions of the Patriot Act.
“I am offering an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill which would defund the war in Libya.
“The war is unconstitutional. The President did not come to this Congress, he went to the U.N. Security Council, he went to a number of international bodies, but he didn't come to the United States Congress. Last week, the President did not observe the tolling of the War Powers Act, so he's in violation of the statute.
“The action over in Libya has already exceeded the U.N. mandate; it's in violation of the U.N. mandate and there have been violations of international law.
“What are we doing there? Why does anyone think we can afford it? Why aren't we trying to find a path to peace so we aren’t called upon to spend more money there? These are questions we have to be asking; that's why Congress needs to say we're not going to spend more money there.”

Proposed New York agenda for Texas Governor Rick Perry

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/3/11

From the NY Daily News: “Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who's been tinkering with the idea of a run for the White House, will be the keynote speaker at the New York Republican County Committee’s Annual Lincoln Dinner on June 14, 2011.”
Gov. Perry’s attendance at the New York County Republican Dinner proves that New York is still the center of the universe, for politics and otherwise, said state GOP Chairman Ed Cox, who will also speak.

But is New York City still the center of the universe? The great papers are gone, the Yankees have been beaten by Boston twice in the World Series, and when the stocks crashed in 2007 the bell broke on Wall Street. The legendary investor Jim Rogers, who co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros, said it was all over for New York and London, which had been booming with investor money since the 1980s. You don’t need Wall Street to invest nowadays. All you need is one of those nerd machines; smart phones or something. Rogers moved to Singapore.

Wasn’t always like that. Once was New York City boomed in letters and cash flow, and the most prominent among us – Willa Cather, Truman Capote and editors like Esquire’s Harold T.P, Hayes and Harper’s Willie Morris – were from the heartland. The idea then was that the South and the heartland and places like Texas had something that was part of us and we were only partial without them.

Even Imus – and I hope you talk to Imus when you are up here – said not long ago when NYTs columnist Frank Rich quit to write a column for New York Magazine; “New York Magazine? I haven’t read that since Clay Felker [of Missouri] was editor.”
It is all going on now in places in the middle where all the farms and commodities are, says Rogers, which is practically everywhere between New York City and Los Angeles. He advises his clients to trade in the Macerates for John Deeres and to buy farmland.

The shift of population, economy and influence to the southwest and west, has made us New Yorkers pouty. What role will we have in the Texas Century we wonder? Will 150 years of northern scorn have a price? I hope y’all not gonna hold a grudge. Because the question all Americans have to ask today is: Can France exist without Paris, China without Beijing, Italy without Rome, and America without New York City?

But there is still much timeless and some good new stuff here so here is a proposed agenda: A measure of any major western city today is the quality of its Chinatown and New York’s is the greatest. Lunch there or maybe meet Judge Andrew Napolitano at Fanelli’s Café between Mercer and Greene. I think the Judge works nearby. Then walk up to the Strand Bookstore, with 18 miles of new, used and rare books, and go left over to Chelsea to the new Rubin Museum of Art which features art from the Himalayas. I hear it’s terrific. Meet Donald Trump at the White Horse Tavern where Dylan Thomas died drinking on Hudson Street in the West Village. I’m sure he will take you someplace nice for dinner.

Anthony Weiner’s problem
By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/2/11

Anthony Weiner’s problem is that he is no longer a good fit for New York. It might be New York’s problem.

One absolutely Aquarian mystery arose in New York City in the real time of “Mad Men” which was about when Weiner was born - the sudden appearance of Jews with long whiskers and black overcoats riding yellow school buses to the diamond district.
When the orthodox Jews arrived from Russia, New Yorkers did not relate to torah as a guide. In the time of “Mad Men,” Israel was a secular state, a socialist state, led by kibbutznik Golda Meir, born in Ukraine but raised in Milwaukee.

But the return of religious, orthodox Jews to New York and Israel is one of the most important events in the post-war period and potentially in the history of faith. New York’s secular Jews like everyone else there then would have a difficult time relating to a sacred state – a state guided by God’s truths as prescribed by torah, and not necessarily John Locke’s or Karl Marx’s.

Caroline Glick, a prominent Israeli columnist, writes that President Obama’s “ . . . icy glares at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office last Friday, his address before the AIPAC conference on Sunday, and his subsequent press briefings have all made clear that he is not sympathetically inclined toward Israel, nor does he consider Israel an ally worth defending.” Why are American Jewish leaders defending Obama, she asks?

One plausible explanation, she writes, is that “Jewish leaders are concerned that their fellow American Jews are more attached to their identity as Democrats than they are to their identity as Jews.”

That is, more attached to Obama or Bill Clinton (who married Weiner, a Jew) than to the path of torah.

As I write about Israel rising today as a sacred state, I regularly receive mail from American Jews with anti-Semetic caricatures of orthodox Jewry and the followers of Dov Ber of Lubavitch.

Weiner has been a strong supporter of Israel, but his neurosis suggests a state of crisis of identity, and it is one that virtually all of my Woodstock Age Jewish friends are experiencing.

American democracy is a secular world (conquering) vision. Israeli today and likely increasing into the future, is rising to be a torah-based state.

They certainly cannot understand it to be a better state, a state of “higher law.” But in the end, the democratic, globalist vision which is the New York state of mind of recent times, and the sacred torah-based state rising today in Israel are incompatible.

Netanyahu, Perry, Trump and Palin

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/31/11

Did MSM really think that Donald Trump would go away because an elderly correspondent called him a “racist”? How did it work out back in June, 2009, when David Letterman called Sarah Palin a “slut”?

Donald Trump, interviewed by Neil Cavuto this week, had the same steam in his walk. He came across with ideas which are not coming up with the usually “establishment” candidates. They are powerful ideas and they are ideas which will be heard and taken seriously.

If anyone truly believes that Trump is a racist they share the moral complexity and density of a spider plant. It is a technique timeless to the demagogue, institutionalized in our time by Saul Alinsky. But his ideas will be considered because Trump, like Palin, now has folk status: the minions of Big Brother have tracked him down. Of course, he will be back stronger, bigger, better and more brash. He is writing a book on politics and people will listen because people always listen to Donald Trump – his is a mainstream American channel, like Oprah’s, like Letterman’s. And Trump has been endorsed by the two of the most popular religious leaders in America; Franklin Graham and Mike Huckabee. And that means to the America of big stormy stock cars and F 150s and .30-06’s. It means something to Sarah Palin’s America and Texas governor Rick Perry’s.

Which is saying something for a New Yorker. The only other I can think of who shares that true heartland karma is Rudy Giuliani, who was last married at Graceland, I believe. In fact, Trump and Palin might be considered, for lack of a better phrase, “Giuliani conservatives.” To recall, Palin was at a Yankee’s game with Giuliani when Letterman slandered her. It gave her a fresh future. This will give Trump one as well.

Trump will kick off the evening session at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference and strategy briefing this week. Get ready: Applause will come from this major group of social conservatives like that which came to Benjamin Netanyahu in his historic address to Congress.

Worth observing that there has been a regular occurrence of roaring this week with Netanyahu, interrupted 57 times in Congress, Palin who rolled with the thunder into the nation’s capital on a Harley, and Trump, reemerging on the Cavuto show. And wait till they get to hear Rick Perry. Market-wise, this accidental quaternity works well together are bringing something new; a power, a determination, perspective and enthusiasm that did not appear in politics in recent decades. It is a door that has opened – it was opened by Sarah Palin - that will not be closed.

Trump may be out of the running for president in 2012, but like Mitt Romney, Ross Perot and other corporate chiefs – include Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, Mike Bloomberg and others – his positions and work and life experience should put him in the highest rank of candidate. He might make a nice running mate in this rising campaign which is delightfully outside the box and rapidly leaving the pale and watery behind.

Consider Perry/Trump ’12 or Palin/Trump ’12. There could not be a better salesman for the American spirit as it rises as if born again fearless and free into the new century.

Will Sarah Palin denial now turn to panic?
By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/26/11

The horror! The horror! Mr. Kurtz last words

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Sarah Palin might run for president in 2012. The Washington Post headline is “Palin signals she still has White House ambitions, stokes speculation with latest moves.” The NY Times reports today that “Signs Grow That Palin May Run.” From the NYTs:

Sarah Palin is fortifying her small staff of advisers, buying a house in Arizona — where associates have said she could base a national campaign — and reviving her schedule of public appearances. The moves are the most concrete signals yet that Ms. Palin, the former governor of Alaska, is seriously weighing a Republican presidential bid.

A new Gallup survey out today, completed after decisions by Mitch Daniels, Mike Huckabee, and Donald Trump not to run for president, shows Palin in second place, close behind leader Mitt Romney.

It may be that the MSM no longer reports news, but denies news. This was reported first by Real Clear Politics and repeated by Drudge. It has been said here from the beginning: It is now and always has been about Sarah Palin. On the Republican side, the rest is side meat.

Netanyahu speaks as America’s patriarch. Sarah Palin prepares to enter.

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/25/11

The century ahead could be seen to have taken shape this past week with President Obama’s stunning claim – a wish really – that Israel repeal 50 years of history and return to its indefensible 1967 borders. It was followed by an address yesterday by Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that shook the halls of Congress. Obama then, travelling in Europe, where he feels most comfortable, brought forth an op ed in The Times of London with England’s Prime Minister David Cameron, calling the “Arab Spring” a situation similar to the fall of the Soviet Union, and comparing themselves to be the modern day Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Possibly this helped Netanyahu. His speech was greeted with roaring applause and dozens of standing ovations. For the first time in my memory, and Israeli leader appeared as an authentic American patriarch; a strong and ancient Father Abraham here to speak – to intervene, perhaps – on our behalf.

This administration, which clearly takes its initiatives from Bono and pop culture mavens like Bob Geldof of The Boomtown Rats, should understand: We are not the world. We are Americans. We play football. They play soccer. In one way Cameron’s and Obama’s comparing the Arab uprisings to the fall of the Soviet Union two decades ago is correct. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the cat died of natural causes and the mice declared a revolution to have occurred. The same might be said of the movements in the Arab desert today. In fact these movements are the final degeneration of states which flourished in marriages on harmony and contention hundreds of years ago but began to die around 1914, compartmentalized and crated today as new states with new ideas like The Boomtown Rats, but as writer Robert Christopher has quotes Japanese views on post-war Europe, they may merely be a bunch of restaurants.

America is a rising arc and today, it is clear, so is Israel. As we inherently feel England to be our ancestor, so we feel today about Israel in a way we have not felt before. Possibly because 9/11 has finally sunk in and we understand that we share a common enemy.

Two items related to that:

The Boston Globe reports the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston will vote on whether J Street, a fledging Jewish advocacy group that promotes vigorous US actions to help create a Palestinian state, should be stripped of its membership. J Street is widely expected to be allowed to remain one of the 42 organizations represented on the council. But the discussion over J Street’s membership — and whether the group is truly “pro-Israel’’ — reflects a passionate debate among American Jews over the meaning of the term.

And Sarah Palin: Because Palin understands that we are not the world. But we are Israel. And Real Clear Politics reports that the Palins have in hand a two-hour-long, sweeping epic, a rough cut extolling Palin's governorship and laying to rest lingering questions about her controversial decision to resign from office with a year-and-a-half left in her first term. It was screened privately for Sarah and Todd Palin last Wednesday in Arizona, “where Alaska's most famous couple has been rumored to have purchased a new home. When it premieres in Iowa next month, the film is poised to serve as a galvanizing prelude to Palin's prospective presidential campaign -- an unconventional reintroduction to the nation that she and her political team have spent months eagerly anticipating, even as Beltway Republicans have largely concluded that she won't run.”

Chief of Staff Bill Daley: Obama’s “man in the center"

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/23/11

As photography goes, this one brought the perfect moment. President Obama had ordered the SEALs to descend on the den of Osama bin Laden and kill him. 12 are framed waiting pensively in the War Room, waiting to hear the code phrase, “Geronimo E-KIA” indicating that bin Laden had been killed and the assault successful. And spontaneously and naturally composed by the moment, it was the perfect photograph.

It is always 12, as in Leonardo’s “Last Supper.” The full deck of the zodiac; six yin (three water, three earth), six yang (three air, three fire). But this photo, with the President dressed casually to right of “man in the center” was even more holistically balanced. To the right of “man in the center” - the “power” side, sat the three: Vice President Joe Biden, President Obama and the Air Force general running the show at the computer, which could almost be seen as Captain Kirk’s starship. To the left of “man in the center” are the advisors, including Hillary Clinton and the wise Robert C. Gates; the “spirit” force.

This illustrates the most primary of psychological relationships; three left, three right, with the Transcendent Seventh in the center. This is how a menorah presents the universe and the many Buddhas and Brahmas in the east do as well. In the Hindu, the right hand represents advancing karma, like the positive numbers in math (Vishnu). The left represents receding karma or the negative numbers (Shiva). The “man in the center” is not a man but Brahma, neither man nor woman, neither left nor right, neither one nor the other but all and none.

And in this historic photo, the key ‘three and three’ are balanced, sitting on each side, sloping downward; the world partial, in its parts, made whole by the “man in the center.” Only Brahma/”man in center” is fully awake, aware, fully dressed, the center of the six, like a Templar in action.

But in this picture, the Transcendent One, the Brahma mind, the “man in the center” is not President Obama like it is supposed to be. It is Bill Daley, the President’s Chief of Staff.

So what’s up with that?

Obama and the Nerd Conquest

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/20/11

The Washington Post reports that President Obama’s speech was greeted with apathy in the Arab world. There is a picture of a “rebel fighter” in Libya in dashing beret, Che whiskers and an AF-47. 15,000 have died in Libya alone in the “Arab Spring” – the phrase popularized by nerd American journalists like those who politely raise their hands at Obama press conferences. It was supposed to make Egypt the new Silicon Valley for hip young Muslims who use smart phones, not AK-47s. All conquests are attempts to make The Others like us. This one to make the random hordes of the Arab deserts more like nerd generation archetype Mark Zuckerberg.

The idea of this slaughter was brought to Obama by his National Security advisor Samantha Power. It can’t be all Power’s fault; the rush to invade – to make Islamabad a hip, Muslin, Mill Valley – pervaded the nerd press. But perhaps they had heard expressions like “Repression will fail . . . tyrants will fall” and America “cannot hesitate to stand squarely on the side of those who are reaching for their rights” before, from the Ayatollahs, from the Soviets, from the Americans.

So it comes as no surprise that the Obama administration has no use for Israel’s Jews. Jews are dense. You cannot abide the wise Dov Ber of Mezeritch in your cannon if you have Bono. Hannah Arendt and Lady Gaga do not flush. Jews have anchored Europe to the earth for two thousand years; they are the egg from which our universe hatched. The rising reichs of Europe were the first to recognize that certain deeply extroverted material progress in the world was deemed impossible by the presence of the introverted Jews. The Intelligentsia of Russia in the 1840s as well – the “new man” had no use for the Jew, who anchors the human race to the ancient and the cosmic. Losing the Jew is first necessity of virtually every “new man” movement. Likewise, the newly hatched Nerd Mind cannot abide such complexity; it floats aloft in a hundred balloons, a celebration of the unbearable lightness of being endlessly young.

But it would be egregious to refer to these people as anti-Semites because they support the Palestinians and dislike Jewish Israelis. Like movie director Lars Von Trier, who the Beautiful People threw out of Cannes yesterday for joking he was a Nazi, saying they were “disturbed” by his comments, they find Israeli Jews merely annoying. Anti-Semitism requires a certain heft of passion and dark character which is antithetical to nerd karma. Frankly, it requires manhood.

Every phase of the Euro/American imperial conquests has been the same: First we send the soldiers, then the priests, then the anthropologists and now at the end we send the nerds. Now there is nothing left to conquer. It is the last inning, when they send the fat kids in to play. The conquest is complete and the nerds are given the last stronghold: Jerusalem, the cosmic egg, the center of our humanity, the unconquerable.

YouTube: “Obama advisor calls for an invasion of Israel”

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/19/11

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” – William Butler Yeats, 1920

The Ayatollah is long dead, Saddam toppled, Osama bin Laden gunned down and Kaddafi on the run. But now Israel faces its greatest existential threat: America. In the end, Obama will be crowned caliph and conqueror of Israel. Those who for 90 years now have puzzled over the Irish wizard’s occult vision of the time of turning; the time when the falcon cannot hear the falconer and things fall apart, the time when golem “finds its way out of twenty centuries of stony sleep” and heads to Israel at the end of the world, look no further than Samantha Power’s conversation about Israel as a “thought experiment.” This conversation before she held her current post. That this woman – who has called Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a “monster” - has since become (from Wiki) Special Assistant to President Barack Obama and runs the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights as Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs on the Staff of the National Security Council (whew!) is beyond imagination (YouTube the full conversation: - “Obama advisor calls for an invasion of Israel”):

“In the Palestine/Israeli situation there is an abundance of information and what we don’t need is some kind of early warning mechanism there, what we need is a willingness to actually put something on the line in service of helping the situation. And “putting something on the line” might mean alienating a domestic constituency of [chuckles] tremendous political and financial import. It may more crucially mean sacrificing - or investing I think more than sacrificing - literally billions of dollars not in servicing Israeli’s military but actually investing in the new state of Palestine investing billions it would probably take also to support I think which will have to be a mammoth protection force. Not of the old Srebrenica kind or of the Rwanda kind but a meaningful military presence because it seems to me at this stage – and this is true of actual genocides as well and not just major human rights abuses which we are seeing there – but is that you have to go in as if you are serious . . . you have to put something on the line and unfortunately in position of a solution on unwilling parties . . . .”

Moshe Feiglin, leader of the Jewish Leadership political faction in Israel which desires to turn “the state for Jews into the Jewish state,” writes this week in the Israel newspaper Makor Rishon: “There is a strange factor common to the developing revolutions in the Arab world: They present no real alternative to the existing regime; no ayatollah in exile in Paris is waiting to take the reins of government in any particular country.”

No, beneath the “blank and pitiless” gaze of the nerd conquistadors – what Galbriath called the (global) “culture of contentment” of the Clinton era - and within the indecipherable and cryptic language of evasion, comes Yeat’s golem, “A shape with lion body and the head of a man”; Samantha Power in New York and Barack Obama in Washington.

Visualize Rick Perry

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/18/11

I’d like to see them do away with the New Hampshire primary. It no longer means much. Ours were once considered the heart of rugged independence; itinerant mountain brahmins making do in pickups held together with Bondo and houses built by the hands of husband and wife with wood cut and milled from their own land. I know more than a few like that up here today, but many who can change both a diaper and the engine of an F150 have moved to Alaska. Or Texas.

What happened is the roads got too good and the cars too pleasureable to ride in; air conditioned, four-wheel drive – you can listen to opera all the way from New Hampshire to the job in Boston. Today it is all about Iowa.

In a forecast for The Week, the NY Times’ Ross Douthat is quoted as saying that with Huckabee out, Tim Pawlenty, “has an excellent shot at a clean victory in Iowa.” That, of course, if Palin stays out. But one problem, says Amy Sullivan in TIME. Evangelicals and value voters “don’t know who he is,” Tim who? But they know who Sarah Palin is.

And in The Wall Street Journal this morning, “The stumbling start of Newt Gingrich and the withdrawals of Mike Huckabee and Donald Trump from the presidential race have boosted Mitt Romney's standing in the Republican nominating contest, while opening lanes for other candidates to jump in.”

But what about Iowa? How’s he going to do there? And as Iowa goes so goes South Carolina. And how’s that Romneycare thing working out with heartland voters?
Last year Sarah Palin said she would enter if no one else with Tea Party karma came forward. I thought she was talking about Rick Perry, Governor of Texas. Then Perry said the same thing. I thought he was talking about Sarah Palin.

Real Clear Politics reports that a presidential push for Perry is quietly gaining steam: “Gov. Rick Perry has insisted on multiple occasions that he has no interest in the presidency, but RCP has learned that political associates have begun to nose around quietly on Perry's behalf.”

And this phrase well sizes it up: “As many grass-roots Republicans remain in search of a conservative candidate with the pizazz to go toe-to-toe against President Obama, a man from deep in the heart of Texas who was tea party before the tea party was cool appears to be giving the presidential race some thought.”

Don’t underestimate the pizzazz thing. It is an absolute necessity in Hamiltonian populist politics. It has been since Lincoln, since Jackson, since Washington. And Mitt Romney has zero pizzazz. Same with Pawlenty, Daniels and what’s his name. When they pull out the Harleys and the electric guitars to show they’re not squares it makes it worse.

History naturally follows the contours and demographics of power; it goes where the people and the economy goes. It must. Otherwise it will bring neurosis, novelty candidates and kook presidents (or relatives of former presidents or people who look like former presidents), division, culture clash and even warfare. America has been heading west since the post-war period began and even since the beginning. That is the meaning of Ronald Reagan. Rick Perry is the next best step in this original American journey of natural statehood.