Sam Nunn/Wesley Clark: Question on Raising Kaine - "Will Wesley Clark be Obama's VP?"

Quigley's comment: Sam Nunn represents an old school which might be considered a Democratic Council of Elders. David Boren, Sam Nunn and elders from both parties recently held a conference in Oklahoma to call for Mark Warner style "across the isle" politics. But more important, the Nunn/Boren group bemoaned the narrowness of both parties in foreign policy, particularly in nuclear proliferation. This group precedes Clinton/Albright/Holbrook policy which some in this older group considered ill-informed and naive. In '98 thereabouts when Clinton took a page from the Gingrich Contract with America and pushed Congress to advance NATO to Russia's borders when Russia was considered weak and broken, some in this group including George Kennan considered it " . . . a mistake of historic proportions." General Clark was not policy maker to this but he was chief of NATO at the time so he is associated with this group of policy makers through the Clinton administration.

The only candidate to agree with Nunn/Boren (and Henry Kissinger) and to support Nunn's position on nuclear proliferation at the Oklahoma meeting last month was Barack Obama. So there is a clear generational break between these two Democratic visions of foreign policy and here and in other ways, Obama harks back to Nunn and leaps over the Clinton/Albright generation - and Hillary's point of view on this which should come as no surprise is the same as her husband's. That is probably why Obama was endorsed by Susan Eisenhower, who was at the meeting in Oklahoma and who also called together the foreign policy elders like Kennan to oppose Clinton's NATO initiative (which 90 Senators voted for) on incursion into Russia's near frontier.

Sam Nunn has been mentioned as a possible VP for Obama. An Obama Presidency will almost certainly take a different foreign policy tack than the Reagan/Clinton direction which was primary the same (Kagan/Kristol).

General Clark has been critical of Obama on many occations, starting at the Daily Kos convention last summer, about the time he went to work for the Clintons. I don't see that he had any choice but to support the Clinton camp as Bill was his Commander-in-Chief and the important work Clark did in his life was with Bill's approval and sometimes with the disapproval of the army.

In my opinion the best work General Clark ever did in his life was in opposition to the war on Iraq from '04 to June '07. He opposed the war when few other men and women of his credibility, character and distinguished personal history did. He gave the Democrats a new track and kept them on that track until the war fever had passed. Among politicians, veterans and soldiers, he carried this point of view virtually alone, like a candle cupped in his hands, for quite a long time.

That work is not finished. In one of his books and in the Amy Goodman interview he did last year, Clark called for an investigation of the roots of the war on Iraq as he had heard from friends in the Pentagon that this invasion would take place long before it had been made public. This fully needs to be investigated if America is ever to find credibility with the world again and with our new generations. It is clear that laws have been broken, crimes have been committed and they would be war crimes. This is a very delicate task and requires women and men of the utmost character. These hearings should start with Wes Clark. (And Larry Wilkerson.)

Upending Torture: Finding Equilibrium in the New America Condition

By Bernie Quigley

Shortly after it began, Wesley Clark, as a candidate for President in ‘04, demanded that the beginnings of the war on Iraq be dug up and found and publicly explored and explained before they got buried too deep. It is a good idea. Let’s have televised exploratory hearings. Let them be vast and let them last years and let them begin now.

It is an important idea, and now that senior members of the Government have admitted to torture, let’s also begin as well hearings and investigations into these and possibly other American war crimes. Because in our country, when one commits a crime there are hearings and investigations. And when those crimes involve warfare, they are war crimes.

Not to get all judgmental, but for myself, I’d like to see something a little less touchy-feely than the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Something more widespread. Something more akin to the McCarthy Hearings. Or better still, something like France’s war crime trials of the storied Vichy Swine which took TIME’s Man of the Year in 1931, Pierre Laval, and left him vomiting before a firing squad in 1945.

Here in northern New England, the newspaper editors who for the first time in the 800-year history of the English-speaking people proposed on our op-ed pages that torture be a rational tool of diplomacy, have in most places been delegated to the night desk.

But down the mountain; down there in the vast heartland, the actual torture buffs and advocates who wrote the stories before they went to the syndicates; the agents and fellow travelers of the Popular Front of American Fascism who have breached the faith of the American tradition as it has never been breached before have found their way out of that upper white trash journal, The National Review, to the most important newspapers and magazines in the country. And discussion of torture in venerable journals like The New York Times and the LA Times is now as common as hep-B and herpes duplex and as American as apple pie. First question to these people: Who raised you?

Perhaps we will need reeducation centers or rehabilitation centers like those set up in Southeast Asia after the war in Vietnam to reeducate communist soldiers, propagandists, prostitutes and others who lost their center to the heady and delirious fever of blood and ideology. Get them at least straight enough to be able to perform the simplest tasks of common humanity like cutting tobacco or gutting fish with humble pride and humility.

Let’s go back to the beginning: Let’s have public discussion of ideas like those openly discussed – bragged about – throughout the media leading up to the war on Iraq when most all the major columnists and journalists in this country and about 90 Senators felt for sure early in 2001 that the war in Iraq would be a cake walk won in a week. It would be the key career move and anyone who didn’t participate would be left behind.

World War II in a week. Let’s go back to the Weekly Standard crew. One of its old school talked openly about frequently sitting around the office and the whole bunch just trying to decide which country to cajole the compliant, submissive and accommodating Congress to invade first.

Are there not War Crime laws against conspiring to invade foreign countries? Shouldn’t there be? Isn’t it, like, unConstitutional? Isn’t it unConstitutional to repeal habeas corpus? Why did the repeal of habeas corpus not ring with the urgency of a suddenly lost talisman to the majority in Congress and the press? And isn’t it therefore a RICO violation or a conspiracy to advocate overthrow of the established Constitutional proceedings? Doesn’t this in fact present a bloodless coup; the substitution of a false government for the true government? Isn’t this against the law?

Let’s begin to ask these questions and let’s have soldiers like Major Tammy Duckworth, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Senator Jim Webb, Admiral Joe Sestak and General Wesley Clark start to ask these questions.

Are the instigators of these illegal issues American war criminals and to what degree are they culpable? To what degree are their fellow travelers in press and politics culpable? Should they at least be purged from our presence? Can’t they be sent some place like the Penal Colony of French New Guinea or the Galapagos Islands?

And let’s have some public and televised hearings and go way back to the beginning. Let’s bring in some of the old folkloric and vastly charming and creative radio preachers I used to listen to in the mountains of Appalachia starting in the early ‘90s and throughout who talked about the invasion of Iraq and gettin’ Saddam for years before in actually happened.

Let’s talk about Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ that our Appalachian free preachers told us we were going to help bring about by a war against Saddam.

Was this war simply millennialist religious hysteria of the kind which classically comes about at the turning of millennia? A nation-wide Jonestown to which the Congress, the press and 75% of the American people who supported the invasion drank the kool aid?

Lets get the authors of the Left Behind books to explain to us again as they did to their 100 million readers how a war in the Middle East - something way like this one - was going to bring about the end of the world and bring back Jesus. How was that going to happen again? And let’s talk to the few New York rabbis who brought concerns to The New York Times just prior to the invasion about the apparent connection between these Appalachian religious visions and convictions and the plight of the Jews in this narrative. Was not the final end-game of this fantastic maelstrom of fire and blood the final end for the Jews? How could Jews possibly support this? How could anyone?

More questions arise: Why were so few others in big places like The New York Times and Congress unconcerned about this? How could they possibly claim not to know? One of the authors of the Left Behind books worked for one of our most prominent Representatives. Were they not curious? Was appeasement and accommodation of Bush and company the dominant survival strategy for those Senators who voted for the Iraq war as it was for Marshall Petain and Pierre Laval in France in the early 1930s? Is that why Indian activist Russell Means today calls these American politicians Vichy? Were they simply cowards? Youth wants to know.

And how did our allies not know a word about this?

Weeks before the invasion I’d lobbied members of the House of Commons like Glenda Jackson about the American religious zealots encouraging this war on Iraq and she said they had not a clue about this. She would be the first to bring it to the attention of Tony Blair, she said.

And how did the urban and urbane neocons connect so swiftly with this motley group of Free Church Christian preachers in the Appalachians? What were the external networks? Churches, elected officials, press? They seem unlikely colleagues. What were their shared purposes?

Let’s go back to the tapes of The Newshour with Jim Lehrer weeks before the invasion and look a second time into the eyes and smiles the camaraderie and excitement that the country’s most prominent journalists shared with the most common of agitators, political propagandists and outright thugs, each egging on the other to their Great Moment which they were comparing to the invasion of Normandy.

Let’s go to the deeply involved journalists; the coat carriers at The New York Times who were raising the call to throw France off the UN Security Council and quickly stick India in there, so’s to use a few millions of its minions as American Ghurkhas to hold territory in its new wars abroad in a new America century; and the top Washington Post reporter who advocated invasion of Iraq on the front pages every day for her own agenda - to get the Muslim women to be rid of their burkas and dress like her – the Priestess who accompanied the Conquistador; let’s go to the most famous of TV reporters cheering them on into Baghdad from a Humvee and telling the camera " . . . I think they’re greeting us," while the Iraqi people were throwing him the finger.

Let’s get to the bottom. Who was promoted to the highest perches of newspaper and media posts on the phony Mission Accomplished day and why? How much experience did they have? Compare the backgrounds of these new and present editors to the tradition; to an old editor like, say, Wayne King long of the NYTs, who took 20 years in the trenches and a Pulitzer Prize won in Detroit riots to get to the same position. What kind of newspaper experience did these new people have besides supporting the invasion that led them to such high positions? Why are they still there?

Who early proposed torture in the press and why now have they advanced to major media? Are they not American terrorists? Can they not be imprisoned or exiled? And if we are going to suspend the Constitution, cannot Bob Dylan’s folkloric Mr. Jones, surmised to be the archetypal and anonymous cowardly journalist and editor with neither face nor character, storied in song and generational folk lore for knowing something is happening but not knowing what it is, cannot Mr. Jones be banished outright and purged from the village?

Who were, who are, the central advocates? Who are the American Ayatollahs? Let’s talk to them all. Let’s have everybody watch and hear their explanations.

And while we have them there let’s ask them why they made so little fuss at the dropping of habeas corpus. Let’s ask them why at each and every turn these past few years only so very few like the venerable Robert C. Byrd and that Gray Champion, Ted Kennedy, and a few others like Senator Russ Feingold and Wes Clark spoke up.

Let’s ask the lawmakers why legislation to quit smoking or to ban transfats brings fire to their minds, but torture and habeas corpus are not that burning as issues for them.

But first of all let’s ask them this: Did you watch the Super Bowl? Did you rise and swell at the magnificent vision of the Declaration of Independence being read by Americans of every shape, contrast and color? Did you awaken to Russell Crowe’s primal American vision of perfection leading the artist’s heart, the troubadour’s intuition and the athlete’s gift - The Beatles and Jack Kennedy and Neil Armstrong and Jimi Hendrix and Satchmo and Randy Moss and Eli and Plaxico - to the moon and beyond?

Do you share in this sacred trust? Do you consider yourself to be part of this participation mystique? Do you consider yourself to be one of us?

Kosovo’s Problem: Frank Zappa is Dead

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network, 2/18/08

Issues of time lag were written about best perhaps by Kafka, who came from the darkest place and lived in the shadow of the castle. Kafka’s characters want to bring back the ancient time – the torturer in the short story In the Penal Colony, Wilhelm II and George Bush – when time has passed them by. France, living in its own shadow, has a tendency. It finally gets onto the rising Ronald Reagan era – building big, useless Airbus planes that nobody wants and electing Sarko – just as the Reagan Era has fallen into twilight.

But Kafka would find a true home in Kosovo. The region is vortex to Europe’s Four Grandfathers: Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox and Islam. And ancestral Jews as well. And they all hate each other.

But I blame the trouble today on Frank Zappa. He trumped the Black Madonna and even Joseph Stalin’s dark charm.

Youth wants to know: Who the hell is Frank Zappa? Just another God that Failed; a charming and witty troubadour who once compared his masculine aspect – which Canadians call a tool – with a Harley-Davidson (“ . . . you kick it to start.”).

They were called Velvet Revolutionaries and other things elegant and fey for a place where neighbors stoned each other to death. But they listened to Frank Zappa and Lou Reed who was even hipper and they were the darlings of an age that was unbearably light. They were featured on NPR and championed by the English Department. When the ancient regimes on the edge of Russia were suddenly cut loose from Stalin’s post-war grip, it was widely thought to be because of Frank Zappa.

To recall the first wave, there was a rush of entrepreneurs from Europe and America sent in to get them on track. What they wanted, it was said, was not Trotsky and Lenin. They wanted America. And not just Jefferson and Lincoln. They wanted Michael Jackson and Calvin Klein.

The neocon model – Gingrich and McCain’s current advisers Kaplan and Kristol - - appeared to make sense. There were a lot of Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Latvians and what not in America, no? Let’s hook up with them. Forget the Chinese hordes. This would be the basis of a new American global empire; the Project for a New American Century. The new diplomatic dogma had a simple plan; it was that we, the Americans, would find a dissident in every desert and swamp in the world that had one and send in the troops. Now that the Iron Curtain had fallen, there were a whole group of them over near Austria somewhere.

And these places would become American pseudo-states like Guam and Puerto Rico; Poland, Czech Republic and hey, all of Islam. But some of the less big visionaries; the poets, weaklings, pig dogs, even some at the NYTs – reflected modestly that to actually hold territory one needed more than an Air Force. One needed soldiers, and to hold a bunch of territory one needed proletariat. You couldn’t fight these global wars with undocumented Mexican day workers. And the U.S. had no proletariat.

Not a problem. It was actually suggested; it was actually imagined by these people, that India could supply a few million of its extra hordes and fight for Frank, Michael and Cal, much as the Gurkhas fought for England. All you had to do was throw those sissy French manboys off the Security Council and put India there. This was a plan.

Congress really got into it (it was the end of time, one Pentagon bodhisattva proclaimed). In 1996, everyone in the world wanted to be an American and George Soros, a rich guy, made the point that everyone in the world was a kind of American; everyone was a kind of an American by different degree. So Clinton took the Gingrich playbook and adopted Kosovo’s fledgling liberation movement. Bombing the beast chilled it for awhile and NATO – Don Cherry’s Euro-wimps – was sent in to keep the peace. But today, Peter Finn of the Washington Post reports that their only job is guarding things like Serb monasteries which are now surrounded by massive new walls to shield elderly nuns from being stoned to death by passing ethnic Albanians.

Youth wants to know: Who’s Newt Gingrich?

Kind of made you wonder, in a land where Orthodox Christians have traditionally hated Jews and Muslins have hated Christians and visa versa; indeed, where everyone hates one another, how long Frank Zappa, Cal Klein and Michael Jackson would hold on as god-kings. Soon, all the Frank Zappa guys might be stoning the Michael Jackson guys.

In Kosovo today they are waving American flags. They are yelling, “We love you Bill Clinton.” It was indeed Clinton and Al Gore who, when the Soviets fell, pressed into Holy Roman Empire and promised to line the edge of Russia with nuclear weapons. It was called “a mistake of historic proportions,” by George Kennan and the best foreign policy minds of the day. Even Jesse Helms, my old Senator in North Carolina, had to ask if America was willing to commit troops, alienate Russia and start a new round of nuclear proliferation for such small and relatively insignificant stakes.

Much as they cited Zappa as the true revolution, he was only, in the end, a modest comedian. And these were not really revolutions. In a revolution, the mice kill the cat and take over. Here, the cat simply died.

But like that charming children’s song from Sesame Street, the cat came back. And today the dollar is crashing while the ruble is soaring. And from then to now the same neocon playbook that sent NATO to Russia’s edge has sunk into the sand in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the late ‘90s in Kosovo, America challenged Russia, advancing the geopolitical playbook written at Yalta to the peak of its vision. Kosovo today is either an end-game of Yalta or the beginning of World War III.

I think the first. I doubt the neocons will be able to egg on loyal and decent Southern Baptists to fight another war for them as they did in Iraq. It worked in the Middle East because there was that Armageddon thing; there was the git Saddam thing which played big in my old neighborhood back in Tobaccoville, NC; there was that jump start the Second Coming of Christ in the Holy Land thing and there was 9/11. It might well have been much of it a millennialist fever; an end-of-the-world delusion like those which classically occur at the end of thousand-year periods; a Jonestown in big, and 75% of the American drank the kool-aid.

But, outside the Pole, Czech, and other lobbyists and their agents in Congress, the specifics don’t really hold much of a grip on the broader American imagination on its wandering path. I think it was Chris, the young hood in Tony Soprano’s gang, who showed a kind of diffident interest when Czechs started coming to New Jersey at the fall of communism. Like most new immigrant groups, they formed their own economic under-culture and one of them, Emile (who Chris called “E-mail”), wanted to join Tony’s gang. He graciously explained how Czechs had just risen up in revolution and cast off the Soviet boot. Chris asked: “What’s a Czech? That’s a kind of Polak, right?”

Somebody tell them in Kosovo: Bill Clinton is no longer the President. Frank Zappa is dead.

Notes on orthodoxy . . .

Ganesh is pictured standing on or above a rat and likewise Shiva stomping on a dwarf. The rat and dwarf represent the evolutionary body; the reflex path of human and animal life – the human can find awakening to the cosmic and leave the rat behind. The Christian likewise finds himself “born again” to the cosmic and rising out of the everyday unenlightened body, rising to the cosmic through the Christ. They rise out of nature. But Buddhism starts from alienation in the social order and comes after a long tradition of Hindu orthodoxy. Perhaps it is that as William James says the enlightened moment comes as a flash venture and is sustained by orthodoxy building walls around but killing the spark. Buddha said that when he first became enlightened he felt that he shared something “with the animals.” He left the artificial life of the calcified institutions of borrowed and inauthentic inherited “Enlightenments” behind to find himself first back to nature. From there he advanced again to the cosmic in a second awakening, but the first requirement was to leave the official orthodox culture bereft of spirit behind. So we have it is Japanese zen that all of the public social order is a conspiracy of “language and logic” which must be left behind to find enlightenment. This is in the Christ as well as he rose in opposition to the Pharisees who had banished the shamans and intuitives to written codification and law, creating the same structured orthodoxy, making it impossible to find the “father we cannot see” – the Self in the Vedic texts. For years I complained that the communion was an extension of the animal sacrifice of the pagans and that is what Christ yelled about and was in opposition to at the “money lenders in the Temple.” The King James version presents an anti-Semitic picture of Jews as money lenders in this episode at at time of a rising indegeneous trade class but the point of the story was not in that they were selling (blue laws), but in what they were selling: they were selling animals for the purpose of live sacrifice in the Temple and that is what Christ was railing about (See Tolstoy’s translation in The Gospel in Brief). So the substitution of pseudo-sacrifice or substitute sacrifice by the early Christian churches as a management strategy to engage and absorb the pagan cycle is virtually in opposition to the Christ’s direction. But it is fascinating; it travels the heart through space/time to the ancestors through the ages in a singular act; better if performed in Latin as it actualizes a koan mechanism, shifting consciousness to the Right Side of the brain. Tolstoy’s late writing incidentally, is excellent reading for people in their descent particularly those who were raised Christian, like Tolstoy. It offers a potential path back to the Gate.

For more see Entering Aquarius.

War Crimes Trials for Mr. Jones

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 2/8/2008

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

- Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man, 1965

Shortly before he disappeared into the dark night Wesley Clark demanded that the beginnings of the war on Iraq be dug up and found and publicly explained before they got buried too deep. It is a good idea. Let’s have televised exploratory hearings. Let them be vast and let them last years and let them begin now.

It is an important idea, and now that the Government has admitted to torture, let’s also begin as well hearings and investigations into American war crimes. Not to get all judgmental, but for myself, I’d like to see something a little less touchy-feely than the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and something more akin to the McCarthy Hearings. Or better still, something like France’s war crime trials of the legendary and folkloric Vichy Swine which took TIME’s Man of the Year in 1931, Pierre Laval, and left him vomiting before a firing squad in 1945.

Here in northern New England the newspaper editors who for the first time in the 800-year history of the English-speaking people proposed on our op-ed pages that torture be a rational tool of diplomacy, have at least in some places been delegated to the night desk. But down the mountain; down there in the vast heartland, the actual torture buffs and advocates; agents and fellow travelers of the Popular Front of American Fascism have found their way out of that elite white trash journal, the National Review to the most important newspapers and magazines in the country. And discussion of torture in these venerable journals is now as common as hep-B and herpes duplex and as American as apple pie. First question to these people: Who raised you?

Perhaps we will need reeducation centers like those set up in Southeast Asia to reeducate communist soldiers, propagandists, prostitutes and others who lost their center in the heady and delirious mix of blood and ideology. Get them straight enough to be able to perform simple tasks like cutting tobacco or gutting fish with pride and humility.

Let’s go back to the beginning: Let’s have public discussion of ideas like those openly discussed – bragged about – throughout the media when most all the major columnists and journalist in this country and at least 90 Senators felt for sure early in 2001 that the war in Iraq would be a cake walk won in a week. It would be the key career move and anyone who didn’t participate would be left behind. Let’s go back to the Weekly Standard crew. One of its old school talked openly about sitting around the office and the whole bunch just trying to decide which country to cajole the compliant, submissive and decadent Congress of Peeps to invade first.

Are there not War Crime laws against conspiring to mass murder? Shouldn’t there be? Isn’t it, like, unConstitutional? Isn’t it unConstitutional to repeal habeas corpus? Why did the repeal of habeas corpus not ring with the urgency of a suddenly lost sacred talisman to the majority in Congress and in the press? And isn’t it therefore a RICO violation or a conspiracy to advocate overthrow of the Constitutional government? Are these people American war criminals and to what degree are they culpable? Should they at least be purged from our presence? Can’t they be sent some place like the Penal Colony of French New Guinea or the Galapagos Islands?

Let’s go back to the tapes of The Newshour with Jim Lehrer a week before the invasion and watch in the eyes and smiles the camaraderie and excitement the country’s most prominent journalists shared with the most common of war criminals, each egging on the other to their Great Moment which they were comparing to the invasion of Normandy.

Let’s go to the deeply involved journalist; the coat carriers at the NYTs; the top WaPost reporter who advocated invasion to get the Muslim women to be rid of the burkas and dress like her – the Priestess who accompanied the Conquistador – and to the most famous of TV reporters cheering on the way into Baghdad from a Humvee and telling the camera “ . . . I think their waving,” while the Iraqi people were throwing him the finger.

Let’s get to the bottom. Who was promoted to the highest perches of newspaper and media posts on the phony “Mission Accomplished” day and why? And why are they still there?

Who early proposed torture in the press and why are they now writing for major media? Are they not American terrorists? Can they not be imprisoned or exiled? And if we are going to suspend the Constitution, cannot Mr. Jones, anonymous and cowardly journalist and editor, storied in song and generational folk lore for knowing something is happening but not knowing what it is, with neither face nor character; cannot he be banished outright and purged from the village? Who are the central advocates? Who are the Ayatollahs?

Let’s talk to them. Let’s have everybody watch the explanation.

Let’s talk to all of them and Colin Powell who lied outright and let’s have Alan Dershowitz explain to us again as he did last year how the Clintons’ position on torture was (is?) much the same as his. And while we have them there let’s ask them why they made so little fuss at the dropping of habeas corpus. Let’s ask them why at each and every turn only Barack Obama and Ron Paul spoke up.

And let’s ask them why they are so intent on getting people to quit smoking or transfats, but torture is not that big of an issue for them.

But first of all let’s ask them this: Did you watch the Super Bowl? Did you rise and swell at the magnificent vision of the Declaration of Independence being read by Americans of every shape, contrast and color? Did you awaken to Russell Crowe’s primal and sacred American vision of perfection leading the artist’s heart, and the troubadour’s and the athlete’s; the avatar’s and the politician’s - The Beatles and Jack Kennedy and Neil Armstrong and Jimi Hendrix and Satchmo and Randy Moss and Eli and Plaxico - to the moon and beyond? Do you consider yourself to be part of this sacred trust? Do you consider yourself part of this participation mystique? Do you consider yourself to be one of us?

We are Lost

Note to readers: The greatest show in the history of electricity has returned to TV. Tips to new Lost adepts:

- The island is in unique time which relates forward and relates back but has its own (cosmic) time qualities. Like Brahma, which links Shiva, the Destroyer, with Vishnu, the Creator but is neither: It is the center of time; the point at which all time revolves. In this, one can see time not going ahead in a line as it appears on a clock or calendar, but going in a circle or a mandala. Much as chronos is understood in the Greek Orthodox – all moments are many aspects of one moment.

- Ben is evil, but remember, in an earlier season he was identified as the Christ by spear mark, torture episodes and specific references to The Brothers Karamazov.

- Different characters have representative names identifying themes in time and history; Rousseau, John Locke, etc. Ben’s chief assistant, Richard Alpert, is the actual name of a Harvard psychology professor and associate of Timothy Leary in the 1960s who took the name Baba Ram Dass and started the LSD hippie movement to which Dharma Initiative relates.

- Lost can be seen as a story told on two levels: Danielle, for example, will have her 16 years on the island explained in practical terms. But she can also be seen as a wood spirit; the spirit of the earth or as in the Tibetan lore; a female deity who appears when she is conjured. Likewise, there is a logical explanation for the Polar Bears, but they also serve as mythical guide animals, much like the white Spirit Bears of British Columbia. Each of these stories is true; either level can be ignored and the other level stands well by itself.

Here are some notes from Quigley in Exile on former seasons of Lost. For your reading pleasure.

The Brothers Karamazov meets Night of the Living Dead: Lost is a Taoist Masterpiece

God doesn't know we're here. No one knows we're here. - Henry Gale

Note to Readers: Viewers of Lost will appreciate Miss3's dreams as well.

Like Shiva, Henry Gale casts aside his old body for a new Dance of Creativity - a dance of rebirth; the eternal dance of life and death. Hidden in its center of Lost is a contemporary Quaternity. With pseudo-ads for Hanso's Corp.'s (see Hans in Thomas Mann's 1924 classic, The Magic Mountain, for Lost prototype) "subliminal advertising" and spin offs like the Bad Twin book, Lost brings the Trickster forth like we haven't seen him since Sgt. Peppers or the Surrealist Movement of the 1920s.

Buffy is Prophecy - Lost is a "Returning to Earth" myth for our day

For young viewers who have not yet read The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, there is no better beginners guide to the tv show Lost. The Prisoner in Lost, marked by the Christ wound in the right chest, is Jesus, indicated by this book which is given to him by Locke. It comes from a chapter called The Grand Inquisitor. After the Bros K, go quickly to the classic spooky film, The Night of the Living Dead, for advanced insight into the Hatch & the Others. The X Files also has a Grand Inquisitor episode in which Jesus is an Alien, imprisoned and tortured by The Cigarette Smoking Man. (As it is with Dali's Orange Monk, and the Alien Christ of The X Files, Henry Gale comes from the sky - it is the mark of the Aquarian, from an air sign in the zodiac.)

Derived from Jefferson and the Enlightenment (John Locke), ours is a culture based on happiness and its pursuit and on individualism. It is an outward moving journey disconnecting each from the other. It may be reaching its outer limits. (What do people want on the outward journey? My spam mail suggests they want a loan, a college degree and a large penis.) Dharma is just the opposite; an inward moving journey connecting each to the other and those past and future as well. Dharma implies duty and a path to the state of being outside of our individual ego. It is the path to ultimate innermost state of consciousness shared by everyone and by all things in the Universe. Each individual who enters enters through a gate and leaves behind what she or he had or was before. When you enter you first enter a circle. The family is a circle, the place where you live is a circle. The world is a circle. Time is a circle. Within circles there are other circles and all circles (Chronos). It is the path to Enlightenment. Misteps cause madness or death. But everybody dies. In Lost, as Claire opens the gate to Dharma, here is a caution from Kushog Wanchen, a holy man of Eastern Tibet, told to Alexandra David-Neel: "It is only prudent to beware of opening channels without due consideration. Few, indeed, suspect what the great storehouse of the world which they tap unconsciusly, contains. One must know how to protect oneself against tigers to which one has given birth, as well as against those that have been begotten by others." (Note: The stacks of lines around the Dharma insignia represent the sticks of the I Ching. No doubt, Hurley's number sequence has references there. And the clicker in the hatch which counts to 108 and repeats implies the Tibetan beads in a string of 108 on which the sylable hri! is repeated again and again. As David-Neel states: "Some understand it as signifying an inner reality hidden under the appearances, the basic essense of things.")

Lost fans might be interested in my "Three Sisters" essay in this blog about Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. In the last Buffy episode, The Slayer is revealed to be the Earth Mother incarnate, scion of the Triple Goddess & the Lady of the Lake, the ancient-most archetype of the English-speaking people. She who put King Arthur's Sword into the Stone. (Buffy pulls it out.) I wrote the essay several years ago. (I just ran into Lost last month, when it came to my country store on DVD.) Buffy is prelude to an Awakening of the Earth Mother, the essay claims, to come in the first days of the new millenium. "But today, as it is heard in a song/a prayer by Amy Lee, Evanescence and 12 Stones, she falls in sleep and has been sleeping a thousand years. She cries to have her eyes opened again and to see again and to Awakened Inside Again and to Saved Again from the Nothing that she has become."

A Visit from Spirit Bear

“I have looked into the eye of this island and what I saw was beautiful.” - John Locke on Lost

Among the Haisla people of British Columbia the Kermode Bear; called Spirit Bear because it is a black bear that is colored white, is considered a sacred animal. The tribal elders say that when you meet with Spirit Bear the Creator has a message for you and your tribe, or some healing is needed. It is a sacred moment and a moment of transition. The TV show Lost begins with an encounter with Spirit Bear.

Synchronicity is an idea developed by physicist Wolfgang Pauli and Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung after a consultation with Albert Einstein. It means a relationship between Inner life and Outer life – parallel events expressed by coincidence. In the late 50s Jung wrote that the UFO dreams and visions of his patients were predictors of a new relationship with Space – a Space Age. Today prominent dreams are of returning to earth. All the prominent and forceful dreams I have heard of the last two years are of returning to earth. Likewise these dreams predict a new period of awareness of the Earth – psychologically a “return to earth” and an Earth Age. This psychological change is reflected in Lost. Spirit Bear, the Magical Animal, leads to a door and the door is called Dharma. It is a Creation Myth (a parable of Awakening) for the new millenium. (See Returning for "returning to earth" myth.)

Lost has the same psychic tone as early UFO dreams and movies of the 1950s. Naïve (popular, entertaining - the common stone of the culture) and unpretentious art and stories always reflects these changes. The Survivor TV series and all of its knock offs are a reflection of this “return to Earth” theme in the naive culture (as Close Encounters, E.T., Alien and The X Files were "entering the Universe" dramas in the Space Age). Lost is the mythic drama which portends a new period of cultural awakening to the Earth, just as Close Encounters did to space. The Earth shares consciousness with the humans and the humans are part of the earth. This is the natural state of humans in their natural environment. Princess Mononoke, the film by Hayao Miyazaki, the computer game Myst and Touching Spirit Bear by Ben Mikaelsen - three of my children's favorites and mine - make a contribution. And common themes from Jane Eyre, Women in the Dunes, Gilligan's Island, The Wizard of Oz (Henry Gale), Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, Gurney's Dinotopia ("Each person who arrives in Dinotopia becomes reborn, and the birth is different for each individual," says Levka) and multiple others are applied and suggested. Notice that there are only two old people in the story; an old African-American woman named Rose (who sits closs-legged and quiet on the beach) and an old shamanistic guide name John Locke. Rose the symbol of Inner Life and the Unconscious (Yeats, Jung and the Alchemists - the Rose and the "Rosy Cross" was their symbol - Rosacrucians, Templars; y'all seen The DaVinci Code?), John Locke the father of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. They are the yin and yang (Love and Power; in the narrative voice on Lost, "faith and reason") represented occationally throughout the story by two stones, one black and one white.

Lost is a generational story - all the characters are young, and it is a story marketed to teens. Notice as well that except for the child, Walt, all of the characters wear long pants all the time (on a tropical island - compared say, to Survivor). It is a sign of responsibility and serious intention. It is geared to the fourth post-war genertion; the first generation which will take full responsibility in the new millenium (see William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning).

Most of the names and relationships in Lost appropriately suggest the spiritual and psychological condition at the end of the Second Millenium after the brith of Christ and the awakening of the Third Millenium, which awaits the second face of the avatar. The baby born on the island is Aaron, for example, who started the Judeo-Christian procession millenia back, incarnate again in the awakening age of Aquarius (which began, technically, on January 1, 2001). Some of these relationships are quite uncanny. The birth of Aaron restores and reunites the Earth and the Earth Mother (Claire) to its human occupant and natural child, after 500 years of separation. The island itself has a yin spirit (a Dakini in Tibetan culture), a French woman named Danielle Rousseau (like John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau was father to the Enlightenment), who has been driven to madness because she "lost her baby." This is the core theme of the rise to the Renaissance as it found flower in philosophers Locke and Rousseau, discussed earlier in Madonna/Child portraiture in which the Christ Child, representing the human race, is snatched from the arms of the Divine Mother (or Earth Mother or Mona Lisa - who represents the Earth), causing 500 years of alienation, division and divorce between earth and human.

Jung and Pauli’s book on the subject of synchronicity is The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, published in 1955. The tragic mine accidents taking place today in West Virginia and Saskatoon all in a sequence are synchronistic events reflecting the prevalent “returning to earth” myth – the prominent and directing myth in the culture today. Of course, no government officials will view this prognosis seriously, and increased shifts in the mines is an obvious contributor, but just the same, they should shut down the mines until they have reviewed all safety procedures as West Virginia is doing and look at safety for the miners with new eyes to insure their safety throughout the industry in The United States and Canada. Congress should also reconsider its proposed spending for Space exploration and use as a barometer for public interest in these efforts evidence in the pop culture. The only space story generating interest today is that of an empty space suit, silently orbiting the earth, which was thrown out of the international space station. Space exploration is a scientific venture. If adventurism and novelty are removed from these projects they will be safer and more successful.

Notes on Lost – 3^rd Season, Episode One: Lost is an Aquarian Creation Myth

Ahead, Mr. Eko has been shown to be the man of unequivocal faith, while John Locke’s faith is all in the head. Locke fails, but Eko will bring the Dharma Inistative forward – Locke to be his second, following in Eko’s faith. Ben as a Christ figure is way interesting because although he is identified by the Christ wound and the Bros. K book, we see him and we know him to be a bad character – manipulative and self centered – he leaves his girl to die in the prison and Jack saves her. Easy to see that the entire Others cult is tired of Ben and the whole Dharma deal. But Mr. Eko does not see the bad parts & could take him – Ben – as the second Christ; the second face of Christ in the new Platonic month. FYI Lost is about a shift in Platonic Months, a 24,000 year journey around the sun under 12 signs of 2,000 years apiece. The procession started with the Birth of the Christ, 2,000 years ago. We have just left the Age of Pisces, the age of Christ and Mohammed (the dual fish in the zodiac sign) and entered the Age of Aquarius on January 1 of this year. From Madame Blavatsky to Salvador Dali, there has been the suggestion of the Second Christ as a Buddhist monk. Eko, most sincere of the faithful, is making the transition from traditional Roman Catholic to New Age Buddhist/Taoist (the 108 clicker suggests the Tibetan rosary which has 108 beads – the Dharma insignia is the Ba Gua, sing of the tai chi).

Notes on Lost: 10/18/06 episode - Hurley, Locke and Mr. Eko Encounter Spirit Bear They always call them Polar Bears, but like many things in this thoughtful TV show, it works on two levels. In Dharma culture, these two levels are Nirvana (the Unconscious or inner life) and Samsara (the Conscious or outer life). The white bear can best be understood as a Spirit Bear. Hurley fears the bear. Mr. Eko has a full encounter with the Spirit Bear. Spirit Bear is actually a white black bear which is sacred to the Haida Indians of British Columbia. Spirit Bear finds those in the forest who are psychologically Lost, as all the characters on the island are. When Spirit Bear finds you it will take you on a devastating adventure of transformation & awakening. You come out a transformed person with heightened sensitivities and spiritual awareness. Walt has had a Spirit Bear encounter. Now Mr. Eko has had an encounter with Spirit Bear in a cave (and encounter with the Earth). He finds a preternatural sense and is able to see John Locke’s true nature (“You will find them John because you are a hunter.”) Notice the cross has been torn from Eko’s neck. Eko’s faith is pure as it must be with a shaman, but he will find now a fuller context for his newly awakened state. Perhaps Locke is unable to undergo a Spirit Bear transformation as his faith is thin and based on intellectual properties. He needs “signs” and proofs. Mr. Eko’s faith is innate. Locke will anchor in Eko’s faith. Notice that Locke turns Mr. Eko's church into a sweat lodge, a house of transcendence of North American First People. Notice that Mr. Eko also loses his Jesus Stick to Desmond during the explosion. Desmond, Mr. Eko and John Locke are sure to evolve as the Three (see "Three Celestial Ones" on this blog). See Touching Spirit Bear by Ben Mikaelsen.

Kennedy, Obama, Webb, Sebelius: The New Democrats

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 1/29/08

I began my journals here several years ago when the country was at the breach between generations. We were at that classic 60-year shift between the third and fourth post-war generation; a time, say historians William Strauss and Neil Howe, when the country falls apart and reformulates – saved by the bell by the fourth and last post-war generation which begins the world again. In this case, they are called Millennials.

In her excellent response to the President’s State of the Union speech last night, Kathleen Sebelius, Democratic Governor of Kansas, made reference to this new generation in the abstract. In the last historical period the saving generation was dubbed “the Greatest Generation” by Tom Brokaw who named a book that and who understands and has written well about the Strauss & Howe theory of generational breaks and politics. Sebelius referred to Brokaw’s “greatest generation” but made the case that the “greatest generation” is not behind us but ahead of us.

And we have seen it awaken these last few weeks.

I first made the claim here several years go that the new generation could form a new political party and/or one of the existing parties could split in half and eventually jettison its baggage and fully restructure, much as the Whigs dropped from view in the mid-1800s and found a replacement in the Republican Party.

Ron Paul offered such a direction and long term he still does. As the Republicans go home in tatters, they will look for an entirely new direction. The recent bonding of Ron Paul and Richard Viguerie of the Christian Coalition promises to incubate this embryo into a new formula. Viguerie built the Christian Coalition into a vastly influential political movement which has now fallen to ruin. He took his first cues from Ronald Reagan and a perceived vision of states rights which proved an illusion when the Reagan Republicans went Federalist and sent America into debt beyond the wildest imaginings of Alexander Hamiltonian. Paul offers Viguerie a better fit and a new direction; one based on Jefferson and the organic Southern traditions rather than Hamilton.

Mike Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, did and still does offer a path; one of straight-ahead management, excellence and competence. But it hinges on events immediately before us. If Romney wins today in Florida and if Hillary wins Tuesday, Bloomberg, with a brilliant cast of “post partisan” operatives including the California Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, will offer a better option than both parties and could well find success in a country sick of war and fully disgusted now with the Clintons.

Another path opened up when Mark Warner, Governor of Virginia, considered briefly running for President several years ago. Warner offered a fork in the road for the Democrats.

Warner, Yankee-reared and Harvard Law School-educated, ran successfully in the Old Dominion by ignoring and condemning the polarization that had occurred in small-town Appalachia since the 1960s dividing people by class and religion.

We [Democrats] can’t take a pass on region or religion, said Warner.

“We’ve never believed that some people count and some people don’t,” he said. “So we need to stop acting that way. That’s not who we are, and we’ve got to make that clear.”

Warner and Sebelius were voted by Wall St. groups as two of the five best Governors in the country. Warner pioneered what he began to call “across the isle” politics, working with Republicans, working with Democrats, working with everyone willing to work. It was a new idea for the Democrats: Democrats with advanced management abilities and without ideology. My Governor here in New Hampshire, John Lynch, brought the same approach to New Hampshire with great success and was reelected in a landslide.

These Governors were joined by a new wave of Democrats in ’06, including Iraq veterans called Fighting Dems. Some, like Carol Shea-Porter of NH and Joe Sestak of PA, entered Congress in ’06. Jim Webb, the fierce new Senator from Virginia, was in the avant garde of this new movement. As Sebelius said last night, this new group in Congress has brought a new spirit of cooperation to Congress. Her speech last night brought the “across the isle” spirit of the New Democrats pioneered by Warner and Lynch to the mainstream. And in sequence with Jim Webb who did the post-State of the Union speech task last year, a theme begins to develop. No doubt Obama, who claims the mantle of “post partisanship,” will be looking to Sebelius when he is thinking of a Vice President.

Warner was also the first to breach the generational divide. He had a great appeal to a younger generation just rising to politics; Sebelius’s “greatest generation” just ahead. Jim Webb, novelist, warrior and former Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, brought almost avatar qualities to the new generation. Political blogs like Daily Kos were given some large responsibility for his successful victory against big odds in Virginia.

But ‘twas ever thus: The old generation refused to move out of the way.

Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos, who coined the phrase Fighting Dems, suggested in an op-ed article in The Washington Post in May of 2006 that there were now two Democratic parties; old Democrats, and he mentioned Senator Clinton, and new Democrats, and he mentioned Russ Feingold, Senator from Wisconsin and Mark Warner, who had recently scored one and two in his monthly survey of readers. (Hillary hovered around zero.) In ’06 Moulitsas actively promoted the new wing of the Democratic Party, featuring a new Fighting Dem every week.

“Hillary Clinton has a few problems if she wants to secure the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination,” wrote Moulitsas in the Post article. “She is a leader who fails to lead.” She does not appear "electable." But most of all, he wrote, Hillary has a Bill Clinton problem: 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.

Moulitsas was right then and he is right today. The Clintons, who claim to have offered a “bridge to the 21^st century” now offer a bridge back to the 20^th century. In fact, the ’08 race is rapidly becoming a farce because of the Clintons. For anyone who cared to look, it was then and is now always about Bill as has became crystal clear these past few weeks.

Peggy Noonan of The Wall St. Journal writes that John McCain makes the mocking, red-faced Bill Clinton “look old.” The former President race-baiting Obama, is an embarrassment to the country. He could very well have lost the whole absurd drama for his wife (and himself) this past week.

The older Democrats are rapidly coming out of "Clinton Denial.” This week The Nation and key writers for The New Republic have turned against the Clintons, using phrases like, “maybe the conservatives were right about Bill all along.” So have virtually every important Democrat - Ted Kennedy, John Kerry and most important of all, Carolina Kennedy.

This week brought the major turning point for the Democrats. Ted Kennedy has found his status as venerable senior statesman. He was right about the war on Iraq from the beginning and now the fourth post-war generation is beginning to look at him as their Gray Champion; the senior statesman who stood up to Billary and a corrupt political machine and sent them to marginalia. This week endorsements for Barack Obama came in from every major newspaper in the country except The New York Times which endorsed Hillary but was trumped by Caroline Kennedy endorsing Senator Obama in the Sunday edition.

For people of the age which heard of the death of JFK over the loudspeaker in high school, nothing goes deeper than Caroline Kennedy. It goes to the beginning. We saw her and her brother as children in the White House at the time of our first awakening; the First Family was our family and the first children were our American family. And time is a savage: when C Span and The Jim Lehrer Newshour cut between the thin elegance and grace of Caroline Kennedy on the stage at American University with Uncle Ted, it held a dreary contrast to the Senator from New York, prowling the stage cornered and alone like a predator cougar, as aggressive as Big Nurse, a commissar or party aparatchik, threatening and demanding her entitlement, and virtually trying to steal Florida in defiance of party rules.

The contours of the New Democrats are now coming clear through a glass darkly: Ted Kennedy, Barack Obama, Jim Webb and Kathleen Sebelius. A new party is awakening with a new generation. The old party is the Clintons and a couple of party-bound Kennedys, secondary family members whose names we can’t quite place.

The Democrats could finally push Elvis from the building and begin again with a fresh slate. The question now: Is there time before Super Tuesday?

Pats 21, Chargers 12: Tom Brady and Randy Moss

The New England Patriots should never play at home under the full moon; ok for the Red Sox; they got the Old Soul and know how to deal (and pray). But there is the witch spirit in Boston; the reason they can't properly give directions or post signage (comes from those crazy Puritans, who stood up in church for 14 hours). Brady and Moss have become symbiotes; like Lennon and McCartney, Fred and Ginger – hence on, when they are apart they will always feel somewhat alone. The one is part of the other's Dance of Creation - the Irishman feeling the Confusion and Pain of his Dual Nature who lives on the Edge of Trouble, and on the Edge of Awakening. But Moss is the Celestial One: He is Hanuman, Trickster and Monkey King. Brady will never miss; Welker will always be on spot; but Moss extends the Creation to realms we thought not possible or never imagined - the most fragile and delicate of all artists and the Original Force from which all Creation arises. They will win big, big on Super Bowl - 20 points at least, and the Patriots will have rounded the Puritans’ square hole in New England and sent Karma, which has been meandering through Texas, the Deep South and Crazy Places these dark years since the death of JFK; a turn from which we here have never felt quite right – back to the True Home of the organic and original American Condition. In that, Tom Brady is Avatar and he has changed us. And likewise, Randy Moss.

The Mike Bloomberg Quarter: Bloomberg, Christie Whitman, Sam Nunn, Arnold Schwarzenegger

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 1/15/2008

In politics, the gut has to be satisfied and that has been the job of Fox News these past few years. In a recent interview with Mike Huckabee, the Fox staff got a big kick out of it when Huckabee made a joke out of Fred Thompson, calling him constipated; telling Fox that Fred forgot to take his Metamucil in the last debate. Great for a laugh; great for bonding; satisfying to the gut. It is standard Huckabee charm; more than charm; it is a burgeoning new political genre – Ozark political shtick.

Bush is a gut President: The gut has been telling the Republicans since 1992 to git Saddam. In my old neighborhood of Tobaccoville, NC, where we lived for ten years, when they finally nabbed him someone xeroxed and photo-shopped a picture of Barney Fyfe driving a patrol car with Saddam in the back seat.

This bonding they are doing here with Huckabee will however finally destroy the Republican Party because the gut cannot lead and when it tries it will only lead to disaster as it has is Iraq: It is or should be axiomatic in war and management in general that the head leads and the heart and gut follow.

Huckabee, traveling New Hampshire with Chuck Norris by his side these past weeks has been big entertainment for us. But it has also brought us an aye chi wawa moment. Chuck Norris? Mike Huckabee? Aye chi wawa! We are talking about the President of the United States here.

We had such a moment in the early fifties as we settled into post-war complacency but with an out-of-control state department and an economy which threatened to spiral back into recession. Truman had already nuked the Japanese and State was panting to nuke Russia. Likewise, on the Democratic side, today we have people in the Presidential race with no war experience nor any management experience of any import whatsoever, casually threatening to nuke Islamic tribes which they suspect of hosting terrorists (and not folkloric Ozark hoots like Huckabee or too-tighted-wrapped civil servants like the Dulles boys; some of them and their direct advisors – at least two of them - with advanced degrees from Yale and Oxford).

Back then, a very decent old New Hampshire gentleman who happens to live three doors down from mine quietly seized the moment and teamed up with Governor Sherman Adams to draft Eisenhower and send him to the Presidency. At least for a term while we came off our WW II victory high which was rapidly leading us to Armageddon. (Those were the days. Sherman Adams, who became Eisenhower’s Chief of State, lost his position in a scandal over a fur coat. Today, a million dollar bribe barely raises an eyebrow to Clinton Tribe.)

It was a moment when the entire world threatened to spiral out-of control. We may be there again but this time Mike Bloomberg is watching. Talk of Bloomberg entering the Presidential race has reached the daily main stream after he appeared with Sam Nunn, David Boren, President of the University of Oklahoma, Christie Whitman, former Governor of New Jersey, Susan Eisenhower and others recently at a forum in Oklahoma. Bloomberg is watching Huckabee, Clinton, Romney and a political system which has descended into the politics of personality cult; two parties, each of its own family and each with a political machine which would put Boss Tweed to shame. And he has enough cash on hand to possibly put one or the other or both out of business.

But maybe what Bloomberg is planning is not so much a third party as a replacement party. There is really nothing left of the traditional Republican Party, at least as we came to understand it through men like Sherman Adams and even Nelson Rockefeller up here in the cold parts. And the Democrats had lost their purpose and perspective even before Clinton went Wall St. Today, there is no Democratic Party perhaps. There is only the Clintons. Picture a replacement party with Bloomberg as POTUS, Christie Whitman as VP, Sam Nunn as Sec. of State and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Chief of Staff. And picture a team like this with endorsements from George Schultz, Warren Buffett, Gary Hart and Ted Turner, running against Hillary on the one hand and Huckabee with Jeb Bush as VP on the other.

Much of the commentary on Bloomberg has centered on Ross Perot’s third party run against Bush Sr. and Clinton, and on Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose effort. I think both these comparisons misread the times, the Perot comparison in particular. Perot was a trickster who is said to have disliked the Bush family. The country was in a fairly healthy balance rising to that day. The only surprising thing about the Perot effort was that at one point he led with 39% in the polls and in 1992 he received almost 19% of the popular vote.

I was taken to the third party idea several years ago when Unity 08, led by former Independent Maine Governor Angus King and Jimmy Carter Chief Ham Jordan got together to try to find the middle in a political realm which was rapidly polarizing. Unity 08 is recently defunct, but rumor has it that part of it has morphed into a Draft Bloomberg group. I felt it was a good suggestion because the conditions in America in the 1990s had begun to resemble those in the 1840s and 1850s when the Republican Party was born and the Whigs collapsed. We saw internal contention in the 1800s between North and South all century - Jefferson expected invasion from the North from as early as 1797; New England moved to secession in 1812 at the Hartford Convention and Jefferson and Madison prepared secession papers for Virginia and Kentucky during the John Adams Presidency.

North/South contention arose again in our time and turned the states Red and Blue during the Clinton administration. But that contention (the so-called “culture wars”; Civil War by other means) had been building since the 1960s. In his very good biography of George Wallace, historian Dan Carter writes that the rise of the Christian Right from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty forum in Virginia was largely a nationalization of the Wallace idea, which was from the start a reaction to the Sixties and the perceived decadence of the hippies.

The Republicans of the 1860s restored the purpose and identity of a good part of the country and sent it back to the dynamics of governing. The Whigs had become effete, abstract, self absorbed and ineffective. Organic decline can be seen in both parties today; they have become the politics of families rather than political ideas and strategies; the politics of personality cults.

But at the same time in 1985 we also had a new movement going on in this country. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. writes that in the American tradition local governance has always been suspect and weak, and beholding to local interests. Federal politicians were always better. That may or may not have been so in an earlier day when Presidents would draw their staff and Cabinets from an elite WASP establishment, but by the 1990s we began seeing better governance in states than we were seeing in the federal government.

Suddenly, we were getting great local people including independent-minded Governors with advanced management instincts; Christie Whitman in New Jersey, Angus King in Maine, William Weld in Massachusetts and others in the South and Middle States, while the feds were descending into a culture of incompetence. That condition of regional excellence is advancing to new strides today with Mike Bloomberg in New York and Arnold Schwarzenegger in California.

Under the Bush administration it has become a maxim that when the feds try to do something big and important as they tried to do in New Orleans after Katrina and in Iraq, they will fail. But the Clinton administration should not be let off the hook either as the culture of incompetence got its head start with the Clintons. My personal highlights were the Rwanda slaughter in which a million were killed by knife, ax and club while the President did nothing. He later apologized and his apology for the death of a million satisfied his constituents and that was more or less the end of it. (I wonder how Telford Taylor would have felt about this?) Then on a trip to China, First Lady Clinton gleefully endorsed China’s “reaching out” to religious groups after visiting a phony synagogue – something the Chinese had set up for American political visitors such as her which no one actually went to - while the government was literally sweeping Taoists off the streets by the thousands never to be seen again and imprisoning and executing Tibetan Buddhists by the tens of thousands.

Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell and Schwarzenegger have made the point that the federal government now holds the states back and retards their progress on environmental issues and in other areas. This is the sign of the times and the path of the American future.

The new vitality of the states and these new Governors brings us possibly to a turning point in our history. Perhaps we are becoming regionalized; perhaps we are outgrowing “one-size-fits-all-federalism”; perhaps we are becoming more Jeffersonian and less Hamiltonian. Whatever the reason, the good governors who started this movement were self-reliant and independent and Bloomberg as Mayor of New York and Schwarzenegger as Governor of California have advanced this same independence and set the model for other states and regions.

It is a good contrast experience to listen (posted on his site) to the California Governor’s State of the State the other day and compare the strength and discipline and positive charge of the “post partisan” California Governor to the tired rhetoric we have been hearing on the campaign trail and the tried-and-failed strategies of both parties hoping to repeat the past.

Bloomberg is an ace in the hole. The government cannot go another eight years with random, unresponsive and irresponsible management. Bloomberg, Whitman, Nunn and Schwarzenegger have the vitality and élan to reawaken us and to awaken the new generation which will bring us with character and fidelity into the new millennium.

Bill Clinton is Boss Tweed: Recount the Votes in New Hampshire

for The Free Market News Network on 1/12/08

Kid, to run a crew like that you have to be completely rotten, Ben Wade, 3:10 to Yuma

Although it is obvious that the machine-counted votes in the heavily-populated industrial regions of the state will yield results different than those of more independent-minded voters here in northern NH where they are counted by hand, Dennis Kucinich’s call for a recount in New Hampshire should nevertheless be heeded.

We are seeing the same corrupt practices growing again today in the Democratic Party here in the Northeast that we saw in Boston in the '30s and '40s and in New York's ethnic neighborhoods during the Tammany Hall scandal. And we are seeing the same machine politicians.

Hollywood producer David Geffen has suggested that the Clintons are some of the most corrupt politicians ever to enter American politics.

“Everybody in politics lies, but they [the Clintons] do it with such ease, it’s troubling,” he told Maureen Dowd of the NYTs.

Geffen clearly states what most Democrats have conveniently repressed: The Clintons are crooks. Possibly the worst in the modern history of the Democratic Party. In an interview with Dowd, Geffen cited a pardon granted to Marc Rich after he gave Bill Clinton a million dollars as a sampling of Clinton corruption which would even impress Boss Tweed.

Senator Clinton’s ride has been appalling from beginning to end; from her questionable winnings in real estate in Arkansas to her endorsement of China’s “reaching out” to religious groups in a trip to China as First Lady while China was literally sweeping Taoists off the streets by the thousands never to be seen again and imprisoning and executing Tibetans by the tens of thousands. Her Senate ride has been entirely scripted and her record on Iraq is indefensible.

The Democrats have been crippled by Clinton Personality Cult. Whether it is Bill tapping the undergraduates in the Oval Office or his undergraduate staff pulling the keys off the computers or Hillary stealing White House trinkets and historical artifacts on the way out the door as First Lady, for almost two decades now the Clintons have constantly put the Democrats in the position of defending the indefensible.

Now may be the time to review. When Bill left office in 2001, The New York Times asked prominent Democrats their opinions:

Robert B. Reich, Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, said: “The seemingly interminable Clinton scandals are not the Democrats biggest problem, and merely distancing themselves from Bill Clinton (and Hillary Rodman Clinton) won’t restore the party’s soul. The Democratic establishment in Washington is no longer connected to the grass roots. The national party is nothing but a fund-raising machine.”

Author Kevin Phillips said: “Ralph Nader was right about the Democratic Party losing its soul to big donors and corporate money.”

Warren Beatty, actor and political activist said: “The Democratic Party has abdicated much of its soul to raise the money necessary to be elected . . . the party must, above all, face the fact of its own culpability in the odor of the legalized bribery that constitutes the way we finance our campaigns.”

Bill’s disgraceful slander and character assassination of Barack Obama just prior to the New Hampshire primary last week, his New Hampshire and national operatives race-baiting and insinuating drug issues and Islamic sympathies, and Senator Clinton’s sleazy new site “Hillary is 44,” virtually a Swift Boat operation set up specifically to attack Obama, bring a new sense of élan to an old political game played best perhaps in my old neighborhood, South Boston.

Bill Clinton is Boss Tweed but his loyal following is not this time a recent immigrant group fighting for turf and survival, but his own dedicated personality cult of people his own age, which George Will correctly identifies with geezer musicians like Led Zeppelin pitifully trying to stage a comeback.

Roll up a jumbo, Bill. But don’t inhale.

It is always Personality Cult which sends the electorate to a wife, daughter or secondary family member. It won't hold. Like Peter the Great's Catherine, John’s Yoko, Mao's Madame Mao and Bill's Hillary, the afterglow gives a sense of loss in an age rapidly deteriorating to all but the adoring idolaters. The Shining House on the Hill is in hindsight and the age has descended into shadow.

Note to Democrats: Let go.