France finds its soul. Greece too.

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/6/12

One hundred years ago France, the center of the world for the previous thousand years, suddenly experienced the darkest harbingers. The new big screen brought forth a golem, Yeats saw a rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem, the Irish poets were dreaming of rivers flowing with blood, but 1912 saw the most prescient and darkly foreboding specter. Marcel Duchamp had a shattered cryptic vision of a nude woman descending a circular staircase in 1912, as if France and all of Christendom was about to lose all form and descent beneath the waves into the collective unconsciousness.  It was a perfect zen observation of what was ahead for Europe; its feminine spirit shattered and descending into the maelstrom. The death of Europe would surely follow and surely it did. But today, France might be seen as ascending the stairs.

It makes no difference that the winning candidate is socialist. The vote yesterday in France as it was in Greece was a vote for decentralization. It marks the end of almost every abstraction that have afflicted France has suffered since 1912: The Nazi movement; Stalin and the Popular Front; the American post-war cultural dominance, the soft, hippie cultural totalitarianism known in our time as globalism, the paternalistic, Pétainistic Sarcozy realm, the austere, collectivist vision faux Europe that is the EU.

It marks the return of France to itself. It may also mark the return of France potentially to the center of actual Europe.

America needs a righteous ad hoc experimental congress of Ron Paul and Jeffersonian renegades.

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/3/12

Forget the speech at the Republican convention. Let Gingrich have it. Ron Paul now needs a greater, more responsive forum. The Ron Paul Revolution has awakened. The Hill reports yesterday that Ron Paul supporters are taking over state party organizations across the country — and that could spell trouble for Mitt Romney and other establishment Republicans come election time. (Note: yesterday in The Daily Caller Ann Coulter had an essay titled “Deport the Republican establishment.” She is the “Republican establishment.”)

“Paul backers have seized control of the Iowa Republican Party and gained influential roles in Nevada and a number of other states,” says The Hill. “While some are loyal Republicans who happen to hold more libertarian views, others are more strident Paul supporters who are less interested in helping Romney and other more mainstream Republicans get elected in November.”

Wouldn’t the next obvious step be a connecting network of these states, most of them from the heartland, interested and inclined toward Ron Paul and Jeffersonian ideas including states’ rights, Constitutional government and sound money; possibly a “super committee of governors” much like the great ambassador George Kennan advised in his last days.

But there has been so much interrelated thinking now in the past three years that there might even be considered an ad hoc experimental congress of some sort to bring together the related ideas and interested amateurs and professionals.

Participants besides the concerned governors might include “Freedom Watch” Judge Andrew Napolitano, Michael Boldin, founder of The Tenth Amendment Center who was scorned this week by the WSJ (a badge of  honor) for his leadership in state opposition to NDAA, Sarah Palin, the Pauls, Congressman Justin Amash of Michigan, the distinguished Delegate from Virginia Jim LeMunyon who has called for a new Constitutional Convention, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, the brilliant libertarian journalist Jack Hunter, libertarian Presidential candidate Gary Johnson, scholar Thomas Woods who writes on nullification, Joe Miller of Alaska, and my neighbors here in New Hampshire, state reps Paul Ingbretson and Dan Itse who first brought the state’s challenge to Obamacare citing Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions. And after going through all of her work this week on my children’s’ shelves I would definitely invite Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games.

 Mitt Romney/Bill McRaven 2012

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/2/12

Myth runs deeper than history because myth more deeply expresses where we come from and how we got here. It has its own form and parameters. Two features of mythical principles as they form history: History likes to start at round numbers and all historic periods end and begin again with a military commander (Washington, Grant, and Eisenhower). So it is the fate of those who come to power in the last days,  the 1990's, to be forgotten as were the 1890s and history will seem in time to have begun again around the year 2000. Because it did. Two thousand and one, exactly, and no millennium since the birth of the Christ has begun with such dramatic events. History started again on 9/11 with the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The Twin Towers in particular – our millennial portal - was the perfect symbol for the attack upon we the people. The perp, Osama bin Laden, will live in our mythic mind as long as Judas. Just as the soldier who gunned him down, Admiral William McRaven, will live in heroic honor.

There has been much dog-in-the-manger this week about who gets credit for the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Some of it from prisoners of partisanship. The Navy Seals should get credit, or George W. Bush should get credit. There has been no more difficult time in America since the 1860s. In hindsight there should be no occasion to place blame. Going from peace to war virtually overnight is a nearly impossible task. The George W. Bush administration and the Robert C. Gates initiatives brought entry and a long and difficult beginning.  But credit to the mythic ending goes to the commander in-chief Barack Obama. There is no ambiguity in this.

It was an astonishing piece of the work. But this action, which will rise in decades and centuries ahead as the beginning of our American world - the beginning of our American Millennium - needs a soldier attached to it to not be forgotten; he is the gatekeeper who allows us forward progress after the tragic and traumatic events of 9/11. That is Admiral McRaven.

While most of the news agencies showed the bad taste to invite to the White House correspondents’ dinner Hollywood types, agents of discontent and nervous distraction, the Washington Post had the inspired good sense to invite Admiral McRaven. Their columnist Kathleen Parker had the good luck to be at the table of this “unknown celebrity.” She writes: “Turns out this humble, polite man was Adm. William McRaven, leader of the Joint Special Operations Command that oversaw the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. In a recounting of the eight-month lead-up to the raid, Time magazine features McRaven as part of President Obama’s highly secret, and secretive, inner circle. He’s the guy to whom CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell was referring when he turned to then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in the early planning stages and said, ‘It’s time to call in the pros.’”

Admiral McRaven brought to America a rite of exit through which Americans were able to climb out of the wreckage and again go forth into the world “strong and of good courage” as it is written in the Book of Common Prayer. As Eisenhower did in 1946, as Grant did in 1865, and Washington did in 1776. He is our man and should be remembered when Romney picks his VP.

Happiness is a warm gun: “Totalitarianism with a human face.”

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill 5/1/12

I was invited via an email from Cabela’s to trick out my AR. It took a minute to figure that they were talking about an automatic rifle. The picture looked like the M 16 I carried 40 years ago in military service but more upscale. I don't own an AR. I don't even have a gun. It is usually nice shirts and camping equipment I get from them. So it was a little surprising.

I like Cabela’s. When we lived in Michigan I'd take my kids to see their beautiful four story displays of bears, coyotes, foxes in hinterland settings. It seemed a representative part of glorious northern Michigan known as the UP. I tend to like guns as well. But the AR is not a hunting gun. It is a war weapon and a lot of people are buying them. In fact, guns today are said to be the only bright spot on the economy and Cabela’s stock is booming.

But why are so many Americans buying guns? It has been like this for several years now. Since Obama was elected president. The question should be asked in the same way Thomas Mann once asked, "Why are they disinfecting the streets of Venice?” Is something dark and unknown rising within us? Is it already here?

We enter seasons ahead unlike any we had seen in the passing century. New trends, ideas and people - the Tea Party, Ron Paul, Sarah Palin, for beginners - tend to bring shock, even apoplexy to the institutionalized and sanctioned establishment. But the institutionalized norms are rapidly passing. Even the movie “The Hunger Games” brings the predictable scorn and ironic responses on the neurasthenic left and by establishment trend setters like Vanity Fair and The New York Times. The rising times will not be like the receding times and these new trends mark the rising times. And so does this phenomenon of rapidly rising gun sales.

In the early part of the last century, the Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung developed "psychological types" - which Myers-Briggs and other personality tests today are based on - because the Germany national character was rapidly changing and he wanted to know why and what it meant. The great poets and visionaries, Maude Gunn, Yeats and Thomas Mann sensed it as well and dreamed of blood flowing in rivers. Our institutionalized entertainment, educational and information networks today lacks these canaries in the coal mine. Liberals outnumber conservatives 88 to three in college humanities classrooms and the pillars of public information, the three networks and the two major newspapers are overwhelmingly liberal, yet the population actually breaks about even, liberal and conservative. This is, to say the least, unresponsive; a dream of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” come true which might even be called, to paraphrase Susan Sontag, “totalitarianism with a human face” – a face so accurately caricatured today in Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games.”  So system shock will be greater with greater difficulty to adapt when new realities arise.

Mann wrote “Death in Venice” a hundred years ago this year. And our American world this year appears today to be sending signs of subtle and unconscious change - a veiled elephant is entering the room -  some of them transfiguring, some of them foreboding. Our world changes. The question is, to what?

Judge Andrew Napolitano, Sarah Palin and Rick Perry should form a new Federalist Party

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/29/12

Ron Paul has brought a sea change in American politics. Without Paul there is no Tea Party of substance. It is merely a populist howl without vision or direction and we have heard it all before. But Paul brought substance; states’ rights, Constitutional government and sound money. Ideas which hadn’t been broached in either party this past century. These ideas have been amplified by Texas Governor Rick Perry in his important book, "Fed Up!" Our Fight to Save America from Washington” and on Judge Andrew Napolitano's pioneering show "Freedom Watch.” The Judge is as he calls himself on occasion, the "Night watchman" - an angel devoutly guarding our freedom as we sleep. That his show actually ran on prime time every night of the week for the past couple of years is tribute to the changes occurring in America. But for the moment, those times have stalled.

Judge Napolitano's show was cancelled on about President's Day this year. I wasn't surprised. His President's Day show last year would shock the faint hearted. It was something like I had never seen on mainstay media, bravely, nobly, going back to our Constitutional beginnings and lifting up the rock to see what crawled underneath.  The jovial Judge still does commentary for Fox Business but the great ship has sailed. Governor Perry likewise is not exactly out of a job, but back to square one. His vision put forth in "Fed Up" is forward looking, mature and responsible and he occasionally discussed his views on the Judge’s show.  

We have seen in our recent times the beginning of a new movement. It began when 29 states followed the cue of New Hampshire State Rep. Dan Itse who claimed that Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions provided a correct rational that the states had the right not to participate in Obamacare. In my opinion, it makes no difference now what the Supreme Court decides on this issue. The important thing is that these states spontaneously and uniformly rose in opposition to the federal mandate. We have not seen states rise up ever in the modern period like that. It brings America a new beginning.

Pundit Michael Barone early on compared the Tea Party with the Sixties, meaning it was a multifaceted cultural moment. Only this time it was among conservatives. There is a basic anthropology to this and all grass roots movements. The Tea Party needs now to leave behind the immature and unformed (like Glenn Beck, but also Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey who merely tagged on to it) and rise up to a new stage with advanced and seasoned players like Napolitano and Perry. Bring in Sarah Palin as well; she knows how to pull a crowd.  They might start a new party to package and nurture this life force.

As Jefferson was the true federalist it might be called that; the Federalist Party.  It might be a better fit for a governor like Idaho’s Butch Otter, Kentucky’s Senator Rand Paul, Utah’s Senator Mike Lee; for Joe Miller if he decides to run for governor of Alaska and for Rick Perry if he decides to run again for president in 2016. 29 states have already stepped forward.

How Newt Gingrich destroyed Rick Perry’s political career By Bernie Quigley For The Hill on 4/27/12 I'll be glad to see Gingrich go. He has never done anything to advance our American condition accept to inspire bile and national hostility and divisiveness. He sees all disagreement as war. His life in politics has been a shadow of Civil War regional hostility advanced to other strategies. To paraphrase Clausewitz: To Gingrich, politics is war by other means. He has brought a mini-dark age to conservatism. When Gingrich first brought his childish shut down stunt to Congress it brought new relevance to militias. Advancing Alabama Governor George Wallace’s initiative, Gingrich helped turn aspects of Christian religion into a hostile political movement (an abomination to the Christ). He has turned the Tea Party into a boorish hoot which has lost all perspective. But worst of all, he destroyed the political career of Texas Governor Rick Perry. The Gingrich war on everything was a naïve political fashion founded in the heady disco days of leisure suits and white patent leather belts and shoes. Today Mike Huckabee, a nicer and better man who should know better, announces in an email that the “abortion wars” are heating up. Part of Gingrich’s “culture wars” no doubt, or the “war on women.” Not surprisingly, these men have never been to war. Those with substantive contention like Ron Paul have a better way of expressing themselves. But unless Mitt Romney, who does know better, picks Rick Perry as vice president, Gingrich’s final legacy will be that he destroyed the political career of Rick Perry. Perry has some culpability in this. It almost seems that although he has no natural inclination to red neck posturing in religion or politics, he feels he should be acting that way to get on with the Gingrich geist. But following his career in a longer vein, which unfortunately the public outside of Texas was unable to do; it is clear that he is a more complex and mature individual and has no such instincts. But act he did. There were two new thinkers in the race: Paul and Gingrich. Paul’s ideas are original. Gingrich’s ideas are second-rate academia refried and anything he comes up with himself is ridiculous, like a colony (army base?) on the moon for the 51st state. But at one serendipitous moment it appeared to him that he would take the Republican nomination. Then an association with Perry made it seem quite possible and very likely that he would choose Rick Perry as his VP. Romney, on the other hand was paling around with Ron Paul; a family man, a man of honor, a better match. Gingrich should spend the rest of his life on a dog and pony show with Hillary Clinton, his dark doppelganger, like a Timothy Leary/G. Gordon Liddy fete on those Hunger Games- like talk shows where politics meet circus. Next to Romney, Perry was the only other one on stage deserving the post of President. But Perry’s poor judgment of association with Gingrich may have taken it from him. Recently, Perry gave a commentary at the 127th press event at white-tie Gridiron dinner and to the surprise of almost everyone he “stole the show.” It was a telling moment. Maybe for the first time the MSM learned that Perry was not a side kick, playing a folksy Pecos Bill to Newt Gingrich, but his own man and a good man. But now it may be too late.

The Return of France By Bernie Quigley For The Hill on 4/26/12 If the socialist candidate wins the election in France next week as the Washington Post’s David Ignatius says he is likely to do, it will shift the paradigm of Europe. It will change everything. Specifically, it could shift leadership in Europe from Germany to France. Or more likely, it could begin a power contention between France and Germany; a struggle for the soul of Europe. Because now that France has challenged austerity it brings respect, acceptance and leadership to the countries which have in the recent brief history complained. That would be Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland which France can begin to assert European leadership to. France brings status and a legitimate program of opposition to these countries by the repudiation of Sarko and the election of Socialist leader Francois Hollande, not only to France but to these other countries. While Germany would retain leadership of others. Until now, a few of us Euro deniers referred to the EU as Greater Germany. Now two realms emerge: Greater Germany and Greater France. What happens next in France will be more important than the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 which might be considered the end of the last century. What happens next week in France might be considered the beginning of the next century. It will redefine Europe again not as one globalist cloud, a side venue of what Scott Nearing, my one-time neighbor here in the hills, called the Power Principle, and create a binary Euro-state between France and Germany. It is one that always seemed to be there underneath – a Euro yin and yang - even before Napoleon and Bismarck. There is a kind of creepy symmetry to it, given the history of our times, given the history of Europe; the history of all things which tend to divide in two. One school of thought among historians has it that history is all about China and when the noise ends and the dust settles China returns and rises again. There is another on our side of the world that it is all about France. That is maybe why Ernest Hemingway, machine gun in hand, felt the necessity to liberate the Ritz bar in Paris on August 25, 1944. Because Hemingway and America could not live with Germans in charge. If Europe divides again (and it will) between France and Germany, America will have to decide again, in time, who will we go forward with and who will we leave behind.

How France will advance in Europe By Bernie Quigley For The Hill on 4/23/12 The ongoing leadership race in France is of vital importance to the EU and to individual European countries because there are basically two vital questions Europeans have to ask today: The first is how will other European nations and France in particular get along together and with Germany in particular? And how will they and France in particular get along with the Muslim and other immigrant people they have brought in to do the work? The second question is more important and that is what this race is about. Sarcozy represents to France and the world the mental trailings of imperial days adapted to the globalization of post-war economy; Euro-style circa 2007. Most representative of his rise was the memorable trip he took here to New Hampshire when George W. Bush was invading Iraq to show how tough a guy he was. There was even a movie that year titled “Life Free or Die Hard,” reflecting my state’s motto (“Live Free or Die”), which was pegged on a Bruce Willis movie in 2007. This kind of faux imperialism wouldn’t hold for long in France. Sarko’s wife left him for Paris the next day. The rest of France will leave him in two weeks. France will never for long get along with Germany and there is no reason why it should. Today, their rise and fall together will follow the ebb and flow of the current economic arc. But even as imperialists (in Indonesia and Quebec) France occasionally got along with indigenous people when the other imperialists, England and Germany in particular, did not. The question is the same now, only an internal one for these countries as the chickens have come home to roost. France is likely to get along better than the others. This race could begin a crash of the pseudo-Europe which is the EU and advance France alone into the next century. France is not as one reporter called it this morning a “Christian-rooted society.” This is Bush-era embedded politics and propaganda as well, absurdly dividing all the world into Christian and Muslim countries. Not since Napoleon. It is still perhaps deeply rooted in the feminine earth-based, earth-mother realm on which the great cathedrals like the one at Chartres were inspired. One thing it will never do: Adopt Christianity as a political style and vehicle as sectors of America have done in the George W. Bush era. It would be considered profane because it is. I had occasion to visit the vast church on the Ile de La Cite for almost a hundred early mornings in the days when Chinese Maoists were commonly seen walking the streets of Paris in their long government- issue overcoats. There might have been a small Mass going on in one of the eves, but in the main church which marks a thousand years for France there was only one very, very ancient woman in widow’s black lighting candles. And one Buddhist monk.

The Pulitzer Committee does the right thing

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/19/12 (illustration from Exotic India)

Like Ilsa and Rick in Casablanca, the English Department will always have Paris, even when the rest of the world has moved on. Said here, it is fairly astonishing that committees of businessmen like the committee for the Eisenhower memorial will go every time for the Frank Gehry design; images of things blowing up, sinking and falling down. But for the rest of us, history turned on that blissful and heroic moment in Casablanca when Victor Laszio walked into Rick’s Café Americain – in center of the world in 1943 – faced the darkness head on and demanded that the band play the Marseillaise. The contemporary world formed at that moment and the future awakened. But they didn’t get the message in the English department and it s darker sister, the art department. Now this week the Pulitzer committee refused to issue a fiction prize and as the judges go public to complain, I couldn’t help but notice that one of them cited the tradition by identifying Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” and Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” published respectively in 1926 and 1925. The Pulitzer Committee here in the new millennium did the right thing. Because as much as the Democratic Party lags back to the 1920s and 1930s, so do the art and English department. And theirs are formulations of the end of the world; an end of a world that has long passed and begun again in America.

These books rank high in Quigley’s contemporary anthropology of the millennial turning because “Mein Kampf” was also published in these same years; Vol. 1 in 1925 and Vol. 2 in 1926. So you can see why they were getting depressed, and if you were clever, like Churchill and Roosevelt, you would know by then what was rising just ahead. But the English and art department never got to the singing of the Marseillaise part. To paraphrase The Divine Miss M who once said, “When its three am in Los Angeles, it is still 1938 in London.”: It’s still 1926 in the English Department.

Said here that the Gehry designs all appear to resemble one painting by Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), painted in 1912. It became an item in Andre Breton’ Surrealist Movement; or better, the Dada Movement, as it moved into the Surrealist Movement. Duchamp has since been declared the greatest artist of the last century by academics. But he was a marginal player in the Surrealist Movement. And though few are interested, the Surrealist Movement, like the singing of the Marseillaise, was a moment of “transfiguration”; the moment when the old body was cast off for the awaken in that new age of birth and death so prominently symbolized in that famous “dance of creation” image of Shiva dancing in a circle of fire.

They did not make the transition because unlike Monsieur Rick and Captain Renault, they remained afraid of the fire. But the tragedy is that they have institutionalized themselves in odd corners of the university which most people never pay any attention too.

The National Association of Scholar’s report in “A Crisis of Competence” (April, 2012), that University of California campuses offer both qualitative and quantitative data that demonstrate an astonishing leftward tilt in the academics of the University of California system, most notably in the humanities and the social sciences. The Pulitzer committee does well to step aside, less they be considered conspirators.

Rand Paul/Joe Miller 2016

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/17/12

Could be that the Mitt Romney tenure could be a quiet, stabilizing time and scaffolding for the arrival of new ideas in 2016. We are there already. The Republicans’ long primary season bristles with new thinking – Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich - that has formed a true binary forking of the ways, leaving the old Democrats vs. Republicans binary behind, a historic anachronism from a bygone era. Everything ends, Then it begins again. What we have been seeing all since Woodrow Wilson is Keynes v. Marx, what we will see ahead is Keynes vs. Hayek. What we have been seeing since the creation is Hamiltonian centralization. What we will see ahead is the rise of Jeffersonian decentralization springing spontaneously and organically from the heartland.

Romney seems a good guy for that; a transitional figure, personally stable and true. And he loves America so much he is actually starting to physically resemble Billy Graham. He is interested in some of the old school but with interest rising as well with the new. Interested in everything and a good manager. Maybe he will bring in Texas Governor Rick Perry to bridge the gap (“states' rights, states' rights, states rights' . . .”) but Perry like Newt Gingrich is old school as well: They want states rights and responsibilities but still seek the external conquest. So does Romney. It is a reflex built now into the DNA these past 236 years.

Maybe we will see all new people by 2016; call it Republicans v Jeffersonian conservatives, leaving the Democrats to dangle. Today Rand Paul hobbles the old school by demanding $2 billion in foreign aid to Egypt be stripped. 2016 starts already.

And finally the young generation begins to speak its mind, like “Hunger Games” actor Jennifer Lawrence who was heavily criticized this week by PETA for teaching her brother to skin a squirrel in the excellent movie Winter’s Bone. That is, teaching her brother how to save his life and family honor by feeding himself.

“Screw PETA,” she replied. Formidable. Perfectly well spoken.

Rand Paul/Joe Miller 2016: Vote for grownups.

Ron Paul’s position on Jerusalem

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/17/12

It is easy to (falsely) accuse Ron Paul of anti-Semitism because of his daily rants on the floor of Congress about the war on Iraq being fostered by Jewish lobbyists in America. Widespread suggestions make the connection and the so-called neocon movement clearly advanced the project. Paul opposes foreign aid to everyone in general and to Israel in particular. But Israel is not a product of the initiatives or the imagination of American or Israeli Jewish lobbyists and to assume it is as is widespread today in American academia and globalist pop culture is itself anti-Semitic and virulently nihilistic. And these positions have tragically been fostered and nurtured by the American state department under Secretary Clinton and President Barack Obama. But you won't find that in Ron Paul. Rising political forces in Israel like Moshe Feiglin's "Jewish leadership" faction have long called to a breaking free from American aid to Israel much as Paul does.

Business Insider recently interviewed Dr. Paul claiming he “shocks campaign staff with new position on Israel.” When Paul was asked whether he would sign an Executive Order to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a major policy objective for Israeli hardliners and many leaders in the Christian Right, he said, "The real issue here is not what America wants, but what does Israel want. If Israel wants their capital to be Jerusalem, then the United States should honor that. How would we like it if some other nation said 'We decided to recognize New York City as your capital instead, so we will build our embassy there?'"

From the Business Insider essay: “Ironically, Paul and Newt Gingrich are now the only presidential candidates who have said that they are in favor of recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the U.S. Embassy there. President Barack Obama has postponed moving the Embassy. Romney ‘would like to see the U.S. Embassy eventually moved to Jerusalem,’ campaign spokesman Andrea Saul said in a statement emailed to Business Insider.”

The New York Sun commented on this report:

“These columns are far more interventionist — more neo-Conservative — than Congressman Paul. But we don’t mind saying that we are enjoying seeing him sketch a more libertarian doctrine. We learned a long time ago, over lunch and dinners with the congressman, that it’s not accurate to set him down as a bigot. His views, however hard to square at first blush with many of our most cherished foreign policy planks, are animated by principles that as often as not lead to policies that confound not us but our adversaries. And that are needed in the presidential campaign that is moving toward the main event.”

Eichmann in Jerusalem: Fire Secretary Clinton

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/15/12

Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion. – Haj Amin al-Husseini. The Mufti of Jerusalem

It might be seen in hindsight that in Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush was in fact bringing a final end to WW II, as Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party was an organism directly related to the Nazi movement, mentored by the Third Reich and modeled on its terror tactics. It hindsight it seemed odd that H.W., honored veteran of that conflict, didn't end it there but left it standing, leaving the dirty deed to the next generation.

Likewise below, at Temple Mount, where the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was first mentored by Adolf Eichmann. As Saddam and George W. Bush were second generation agents to their political parties and purpose, so was the Grand Mufti’s nephew, Yasser Arafat, left to finish the work hatched literally in Hitler’s ovens by his uncle who was based in Berlin from 1942 to 1944. “Allah in heaven, Hitler on earth,” was the popular Arab phrase at the time.

The Clintons come in here as second generation agents as well. Documentation from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials indicates that the Nazi Germany SS helped finance al-Husseini’s efforts in the 1936-39 revolt in Palestine. Adolf Eichmann actually visited Palestine and met with al-Husseini at that time and subsequently maintained regular contact with him later in Berlin. That that which was begun by Nazi collaborator Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and advanced by Eichmann was finally secured by an American President as the Oslo Accords in 1993 is stunning. That his wife is President Obama’s Secretary of State today is an abomination.

“These accords turned the leader of a terrorist gang, Yasser Arafat, into a supposed cultured leader worthy of joining the society of nations,” said Uzi Landau, Israel’s Minister of National Infrastructure, who recently has called for Israel to cancel the Oslo Accords.

Mitt Romney: A new generation, a new political era awakens

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/13/12

For the first time in 19 years I have today felt a rising sense of possibility as my kids go forward into the new century. They will for a decade yet still need to traverse the inherent nihilism of the ubiquitous driving music of the insidious and subliminal pop culture, like that which they forced on the enemy in Grenada but now play regularly in grocery stores, and for those with still in college the English and Politics department where nihilist ideology and the historic legacy of Marxism fill the teachers’ lounge 88 to 3 (National Association of Scholar’s report, “A Crisis of Competence”), trailing since I was in school when you could not take a math course without reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X or a French lit course without reading The Thief’s Journal or Saint Genet.

Some become strong because early on kids from these generations learned like Katniss not to trust their parents and to trust only themselves. Parents? Seven years ago here in the public schools of rural New Hampshire where I live, the teacher asked how many kids have dinner every night at a table with their parents. Two hands.

The change is a subtle one and comes in the final rise of Mitt Romney to dominance of the political field. The century can begin here now and the end of the end - anthem of the popular apocalyptic vision these past 10 years - will finally end. The new century is finally upon us. And I distinctly felt the climate change and the political season change yesterday afternoon when I saw a photograph posted on the cover of The Hill: Ann Romney was on the left, in red, and Hillary Rosen on the right, in black.

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley was right. Ann Romney will be his "golden bullet."

Tibetan Prayer Flags, the Krebs factor: Why economy will fail . . .

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/10/12

Several prognosticators - Jim Rogers, Marc Faber, Jim Grant, Harry Dent - get it right when the Overlords say, “Nobody could have guessed stocks would drop.” Said here in September, 2008, I use Tibetan prayer flags: Dragon, Wind Horse, Snow Lion, earth, water, fire, air, sky. They represent the life cycle of the individual, the age, the universe; fire of youth, green of mature adulthood, golden years of a well-invested life returning to shadow. We have seen our seasons. We have entered shadow.

I write here frequently about the Strauss & Howe cycle and have customized it: There is no such thing really as a civilization, there are only “post-war periods.” Each lasts approximately 65 years and goes on break for 20 years. We are at year 65. Two elements I use: The Krebs factor and the Elliot Wave. The first refers to Maynard G. Krebbs, the sidekick of Dobie Gillis. Dobie Gillis was the personification of the rising American dream; bright, blond, good looking and most likely to succeed. Maynard G. Krebs, his bongo playing beatnik side kick. In psychological terms, Krebs is Gillis’s dark persona.

This show ran from 1959 to 1963; the early days of post-war starry optimism. Now look at the very popular and very funny show which ran in late autumn of our cycle: Two and a Half Men, featuring Charlie Harper as drinking, partying, jingle writer who takes life as it comes. His well-meaning, early-to-rise brother, Alan, can’t get a break and lives on Charlie’s couch. The show ran from 2003 to present and now it ends. Ashton Kutcher hopes to revive it, but it is over.

Charlie Harper is Maynard G. Krebs in transposition. The side kick has become since 1959 the dominant archetype. Alan - Dobie Gillis; the representative of the power principle of the rising age - has transposed at the end of the age to a quivering mass. Through time and circumstances, the shadow has taken charge. The age has fulfilled itself and finished. What’s next? Sleep.

An easier way to look at this is the Elliot Wave. The Eliot Wave measures the life cycle of a dominant currency. But in greater reality, the currency is simply the symbol of the culture and the Elliot Wave arcs the creative rise and retreat of the culture. Elliot Wave measures the dollar, the dominant coin of the post-war life cycle, ending its run in 2011. It started in 1971 so you can see how it takes a head of steam and a formidable generation (Gillis=Power Principle) to get things going in the Fifties, then retreats in the end to blissful decadence (Charlie Harper=Krebs Factor).

Common coin tells the story of the age. Incidentally, that icon of the post-war cycle, All my Children, ran exactly parallel to the rise and retreating arc of the Elliot Wave.

Rogers, Faber and even historian Niall Ferguson have commented that when economy collapses as it will now (2013-2015, says Harry Dent) there will be violence. There need not be, but there is. In the East there is a philosophy of sustainable and rising power, Confucianism, and there is also a philosophy of retreating power, Taoism. In the west we have only a philosophy of rising power (Keynes, Marx, Hamilton). Our venue of retreat is always crash and burn and Charlie Harper. So danger is more likely.

Jim Webb for governor of Appalachia

For The Hill on 4/10/12

Jim Webb, novelist, warrior and senator, leaves the Senate this year. Man of honor, man of contrasts. He is a man as comfortable in the red neck hollers as he is among South Asia’s Buddhist sangas. We have not seen his likes since Davy Crockett graced the halls of Congress. But he shouldn’t go too far as he is still a good fit for the times. Liberals tend to dislike Wall Street. Conservatives dislike Washington. Jim dislikes both. I’ve been hoping he would run for Governor of Virginia. Then Governor of Appalachia might be a better fit.

We face a seismic shift ahead. It is already upon us. It is a shift from Hamilton’s model of centralization to an age of Jefferson and sovereign regions. I’d suggested here that Martha Coakley run for Governor of Massachusetts, but she might better see herself as the first regional Governor of New England. (Although Elizabeth Warren is a lot more fun.) Without doubt, Jim Webb, born fighting native son of Appalachia, would be the natural first regional Governor of Appalachia.

Mine was a fin de siècle generation. But today the young ‘uns look to begin again. And they look to Ree Dolly with a catatonic mother and a father killed in the meth trade on the hills of Appalachia. It is a heroic vision as Ree, at 17, has two children to care for; byproducts of failed adulthood surrounding. Ree is a singular warrior retrieving honor from a train wreck of dying, utopian visions that have plagued us more than a century. Suzanne Collins writes of honor as well in her Gregor novels. She has morphed Ree to become Katniss in The Hunger Games.

An interesting book out recently, Our Patchwork Nation: The Surprising Truth about the “real” America co-authored by Dante Chinni of the Jefferson Institute, has the subtitle: “The 12 community types that make up our nation.” With some synchronicity, Collins’ dystopian vision also has 12 Districts. Appalachia, like Gaul, is the bravest of the 12, and Appalachia saves the world.

With Chinni’s book and the popularity of The Hunger Games, the vision of 12 “Americas” gains a purchase. This idea likely entered public thinking in Ambassador George Kennan’s autobiography, Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy, published in 1993.

Kennan also pitched a Council of Elders, to play the role a Senate once played and still does in Canada; that of advisory to a law-making body rather than a second law making body. There is no sense to having two law making bodies and no advisory. I've been pitching this regularly as a council of 12 governors – a “supercommittee” of governors might be less pretentious - chosen among themselves and with one leader.

What is suggested in Kennan is a series of 12 regional governors of 12 regional circles (collection of states with common sensibilities, like Appalachia) to which some federal law can retreat and some state law can advance. This would fit the contours of America as we have changed from three cities and a forest in 1776 to distinct regions with their own sensibilities, spirits, ancestors, mountains, rivers, flora and fauna today. The utopianism which plagues our innocence disappears in a decentralized Jeffersonian perspective. We find ourselves here, grounded, with a sense of place.

As Tolstoy saw it, it is possible to meet the world’s changes without conflict. A regional council can begin to accommodate this in our times. Jefferson’s perspective advances decentralization and decentralization awakens today like a hurricane. It will carry the century.

New buzz words: “States rights and sound money” – potential for Rand Paul or Rick Perry as Mitt Romney’s VP

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/7/12

Anyone working around Washington, D.C. 30 years back will recall the phrase "leadership and excellence." Buzz words and a rising anthem for a new generation of men in yellow power ties. Until Bill and Ted started greeting people, “Be excellent to one another!" The phrase became so tiresome that James A. Baker, who worked at the White House, rigged the computers so that they would balk when anyone used the word "excellent." Then overnight it flipped. Women's garments with shoulder pads replaced the yellow ties and power lunches and when Bill Clinton entered the White House the "leadership and excellence" generation was replaced by the "diversity and globalization” generation. Good bye to all that and to Al Gore too and Lady Gaga. The storied Fourth Generation has arrived with The Hunger Games. We are going to need some new buzz words. How about "States rights and sound money”?

Tom Brokow, Al Gore and many others have written about a book titled "The Fourth Turning" which explains the cycles of history through generations. Economist Harry Dent does this as well and makes accurate projections on economy using demographics, but the Strauss & Howe people use archetypes. Tricky stuff, archetypes, "which used to be called gods," said C.G. Jung, who brought the idea to practice. In a word, generations alternate: If one generation adores Dwight Eisenhower, the next will turn to The Beatles. And at the end of 65 years it will all fall apart (between 2013 and 2015 says Dent). Then a hero, like Katniss, and a heroic generation will arise like a Phoenix out of destruction and awaken the world again.

The Fourth Generation has its Gray Champion. An elder who stands in the middle of the road and says, "No more." Felt I heard that voice when I was waiting to get my car repaired about five years ago and heard on Fox in the waiting room: "Upton Sinclair said that when America became a fascist country it would be calling itself Christian and wrapped in an American flag." Ron Paul speaking.

Say good bye to globalization. In short time it will be considered a sweet and artful form of totalitarianism. Say good bye to utopian capitalism and fiat currency. Say hello to states rights, personal industry and responsibility and sound money.

Generations turn in an afternoon. I saw the turning two weeks ago when The Hunger Games opened in theaters across the country. Interestingly, Mitt Romney saw it too.
Following this approach, the political cycle does not bode well for Obama; Carter he seems, just as the ludicrously named 99% echoes the blissfully inane “we are the world” movement of a past era.

There is little doubt in my mind that Romney will be president this time next year. And because he looks so square, he is chronically misunderstood by mainstream conservatives. He is creative and unconventional. He sees the telling details which others miss every time. Look for a VP pick unanticipated by the mainstream. Potentially, one to greet the important themes of the rising times: Possibly gold standard advocate Rand Paul or state sovereignty advocate Rick Perry. Romney first used the phrase “one size does not fit all” before it became a standard on the campaign trail. He likes Ron Paul and of Perry last year he said, “The rest of the country can learn a lot of lessons from Governor Perry. He’s a great governor.”

Good Friday: Russia gets there first

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/6/12

The front page of the New York Times this morning had a photo of Patriarch Krill I, of the Russian Orthodox Church, in a photo that had been doctored by the church’s web site because he in the original picture had been wearing an expensive gold watch. Since I do not go to church, I could not imagine the editorial judgment for what appears to be a classic preacher-with-his-hand-in-the-collection-basket story making the front-page of the New York Times. Bill Clinton has 50 gold watches and they tend not to notice. And why a story about a religious figures as far away as Russia? Because today is Good Friday. And this is their commentary.

Meanwhile, the headline on Drudge this afternoon is that Tim Tebow will deliver the Easter sermon on Sunday at the Celebration Church in Georgetown, Texas, and 30,000 are expected to attend.

This seems to e the difference today between North and South. The South goes to church. And if the NYTs is to be representative, it should be said that here in the northeast there is a subliminal loathing or contempt, but it is not clear if this loathing is toward the religious or for religion itself. Tibetan monks have a delightful place today right by my old office on 31st st and the dharma path seems almost identical to torah guidance of the followers of Dov Ber, but the globalist overview is largely anti-Semitic as well.

UK actress Emma Thompson headlines “Boycott Israel”. Author Jack Engelhard writes “It’s a much simpler cause and the declaration is simple enough, to boycott Israel not from Toronto and not from London, but rather to boycott all Jews from the face of the earth.”

Does Bono speak for Ireland when he illustrates is plan to break up Israel in the pages of the NYTs? No, he speaks for the Times and he speaks for the “world” in the abstract. As does Samantha Power when she speaks on behalf of the Obama administration. And when Lady Gaga marches in Rome to oppose the Roman Catholic Church’s moral law she without question does so as an agent of the American state department as the Secretary of State eased her path.

And does it come as a surprise that the German apologist Günter Grass, who hid his Waffen-SS past sees Israel as a threat to world peace asks Benjamin Netanyahu?

These are all globalists; people without place, or people who have left their place behind. Possibly it is that whenever there is a measure of the New Man, the Globalist, the ubermench, there will every time be accompanied a measure of anti-Semitism. The Globalist may be the last of the last millennium’s “New Men.” And in a few years we will be free of it.

The Russians were the first to embrace the “New Man” and today’s suburban Raskolnikovs seem pale by contrast. But it does seem helpful that they have found their roots again with Patriarch Krill as it binds them to place and to the ancestors. It is a way of going home and the Jews in Israel are doing so as well. Possibly they have got their first and the rest will likewise follow.

“If only Sarah Palin had run . . .”

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/2/12

They were like the three eyes in the sky watching over us as we entered Don Drapers world in the 1950s, the TV networks, CBS, NBC,ABC; the Three Visitors who would accompany our post-war journey to Vietnam, to the moon, everywhere, while Dave Garroway and J. Fred Muggs drolly conversed with the mothers of River City. Sometimes he would get bored and they would just stick the camera out the window to watch the beautiful people going to work in New York City. Today the networks mark a turning while Katie Couric, strangely absent from the Presidential talks this cycle, suddenly appears on one channel with Octomom (Octomom?) and Sarah Palin, strangely absent from the Presidential race this year appears on another.

Viewed from the sky the world is all one piece. But we are an earth-based species and it isn’t. Our world is endless, with generations rising and receding in harmony and countervention. And the Couric/Palin counterpoint is a critical turning in this metamorphosis.

It has been a mystery from the start. When I write here about Mitt Romney I get maybe five comments. Ron Paul more, maybe 15. Sarah Palin, a hundred or more. Palin, said here when she first took the mike from John McCain, in a phenomenon and a generational phenomenon, occurring when and we are at the changeover of history’s generations. This one happening to be marking the change of centuries. Timothy Stanley, a historian at Oxford University who blogs for Britian’s Daily Telegraph, asked Friday in an opinion for CNN, “If only Sarah Palin had run . . .”

“The Republican presidential primary hasn't exactly overflowed with talent. In December, it was a roll call of the undesirable Right: Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, Paul, Perry, Huntsman and Bachmann -- a list so long and bizarre that Count Dracula could have slipped in on the end and no one would have noticed. Except, as the citizens of Chicago will tell you, the dead always vote Democrat.

As Mitt Romney suffers defeat after defeat at the hands of Rick Santorum, whose chances of winning this thing aren't high, his negatives mount up, writes Stanley, but “It didn't have to be this way. If Sarah Palin had entered the contest, I'd hypothesize two alternative realities. One, she'd have the nomination sewn up by now. Two, she'd be running even in the polls with the president.”

Most important, Palin has the character and reputation necessary to break out of the Republican Party's demographic prison.

“The Republicans desperately need a candidate who can appeal to lower-income voters, who can rally men, who can gain women's votes, who can bring out conservatives in large numbers and who can appeal to a younger demographic.”
The GOP needs a Tea Party candidate, he says, either Sarah Palin or someone very like her.

“Alas, it's going to have to wait until 2016 to get its rogue.”

New age of Jefferson: How will the world respond to American decentralization?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/28/12

The optimists on Charlie Rose Wednesday night said likely the vote would likely preserve Obamacare. Turning back the way of life since FDR seemed unrealistic. The war of ideas between centralization and decentralization is supposed to have been settled at Cemetery Ridge. But this is not over. Senator Mike Lee of Utah said 5-4 turning back the Obama initiative.

Pundits say it is as important as Brown v. Board of Education. It is a good comparison in that yes, what the Court rules this week will change America. I felt the best perspective was in an editorial, Bracing for the Court in the New York Sun. They compare the challenge today to an appeal to the Supreme Court in 1935 by a family of kosher butchers, challenged the constitutionality of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which was the centerpiece of the New Deal. They appealed to the Supreme Court on much the same grounds as the states are now making their appeal on health care.

But consider the scope of the challenge to centralization then and that today. This is not a challenge from a family of kosher butchers in Brooklyn. The challenge to centralization today comes from 26 states. It goes beyond Brown v Board of Education and past Schechter Poultry v. U.S. It goes to our very beginnings.
America’s outward trajectory in the world depended on New York consolidation of power in the Roosevelt era and before in the Lincoln era. But it harks back to Alexander Hamilton. Centralization of capital and power was Hamilton’s vision. Thus the name, the “empire” state. But is New York still the Empire State? One would assume so reading The New Yorker or watching Charlie Rose, but the cash on which those assumptions were based for more than 200 years has dispersed. Capital runs today lickety split throughout the regions and throughout the world. In fact, there is clearly more now on the other side of the world than here. In fiscal and economic matters, decentralization has already happened.

In the stock market crash of September, 2008, legendary investor Jim Rogers said, “London and New York are finished.” Rogers has a historic view of economy and sees a cycle of farming rising to industrialization and then tailing off to an age of investment which occurred in New York in the Reagan/Clinton period. Then the age falls fallow. Things go back to farming and the heartland, rich in commodities, is a healthy place to start the world again.

And here we have completed that arc. The country is full. The states are beginning to think for themselves. That, I expect, the Justices understand, with a challenge presented to them today by 26 states.

In the beginning, wrote historian Frank Owsley, two men defined the fundamental principles of America, Hamilton and Jefferson. Hamilton was for extreme centralization, while Jefferson was for extreme decentralization.
When America moved to centralization in the 1850s the world followed. But today, decentralization is even a theme in massively popular pop cultural venues like The Hunger Games.

How will stocks and world markets respond to American decentralization? Hamilton’s vision has reigned since about the time Mozart was writing the Requiem. This is the turning we are at today. How will the world respond instead to Jefferson?

Mitt Romney, Jedi Master

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill o n 3/27/12

The ancient masters were subtle, mysterious, profound, responsive. – The Tao de Ching, #15

The Hunger Games is important because it marks a new generation, just as Bob Dylan marked a new generation when he appeared at a folk festival in my high school football field in the early Sixties. This book and movie is a definitive marker and will imprint a generation now in high school. If your kids are just a little older, even in college, they might not get it. But Mitt Romney gets it.

It is interesting that high school teachers love this book and college professors hate it. When I saw Star Wars in Boston when it first came out, next day I had lunch with two Harvard professors new in the English department. I was amazed at the underlying themes; a text book for Taoism (“the Force”) with lessons direct from classic Eastern texts like “Zen and the Art of Archery” all held together by the themes of mythologist Joseph Campbell. The Harvard professors were apoplectic. They were intent on creating the new generation of French nihilists who dominate culture and liberal politics to this day. This was an existential threat to them. They will be terrified when book two of The Hunger Games series appears: It is purely revolutionary.

That is the problem with generationality: Each rising generation of purpose identifies its own gen in opposition to the last. Sir James G. Frazer wrote that important generations symbolize this by chopping down a tree as Washington did, to show their break from the past. A better analogy: The Red Queen (Victoria, in Twilight) must be killed so the White Queen (Bella) can begin the world again. If The Hunger Games brings the storied fourth generation of the clever book The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe, this generation will be a tree chopper.

And only one major figure gets this: Mitt Romney. He intentionally took the day off from campaigning to go see the movie, The Hunger Games, with his grand kids.

"I enjoyed it,” he said. “I actually read the books too.”

From the book: “When I was younger, I scared my mother to death, the things I would blurt out about District 12, about the people who rule our country, Panem, from the far off city called the Capital. Eventually I understood this would only lead us to more trouble.”

Ages rise while others recede, like the tide. It is the way of all things. The new century will not resemble the last. It never does. But the old generations (Clinton/Bush) will try their mightiest to prevent the birth of the future. They always do.

I’ve been on the Strauss/Howe theme for 15 years and see three historic features of the rising century: Rise of the Anglosphere in cultural cohesion – potentially in the lifeline of William and Catherine to advance; the continuing cohesion and rise of Israel (as a sacred state) awakening in a world dying around it - the post-Netanyahu (post-Clinton/Bush) era rising with Moshe Feiglin; and third, the cultural and political rise of heartland America in opposition to the edges.

All public elements have been shopping The Hunger Games to propagandize and legitimize their own agendas, from hunting to world hunger. The movie speaks for itself. But the key to political futures is the “grandfather” (“ancient master”) who constellates with the rising generation. In Star Wars term, that would mark the Jedi master.

Only one rose instinctively to The Hunger Games: Mitt Romney.