Ron Paul: A Jeffersonian Awakening for America

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 10/17/07

“ . . . first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men.” - New England’s Celestial Bard, 1838

At the beginning, our continent took two paths and was led by two visions; the one, the expansive, globalist vision of Alexander Hamilton of the Empire State, who saw a strong and singular central (world) government enabling a world of capital and corporations. The second was a vision of unique states and regions and peoples, loosely connecting the one to the other, growing over time, rich in character and each with its own identity and personality. These would be peoples whole in their own communities; people close to the earth and close to their experience of God. This was the vision of Thomas Jefferson, the Virginian. The Jeffersonian vision was sent into exile in 1865. Ron Paul has brought it back.

Hamilton’s vision was at war with Jefferson’s from the start. And as power accumulated in the Empire State through the rise of corporations and the industrialization of the northern cities, the Hamilton vision dominated and found its Dark but Identical Twin: Marx was a countervailing movement reacting to Hamilton-based capitalism but likewise, a materialist plan featuring one world and one central power. From 1865 until now, both political parties should be seen as manifestations of one or the other of these two masks, sent to the world stage for and agin’ by surfing the rise of England’s and America’s economic arc in the world.

From as early as 1830, when the industrial revolution came to New England and New York, Jefferson had no role whatsoever. The industrialists had the power and Jefferson and the Virginians were considered tribal and regressive by both the Marxists and the Empire Staters. Today, for the first time in more than 150 years, Jefferson’s vision has awakened again in the world with the rise of Ron Paul.

There could not be a better man for the times than Ron Paul. He rises here in northern New England because we are one of the last vestiges of Jeffersonian independence in the northern parts, although all of our early great poets were Jeffersonian, including the Celestial Bard cited above. We lost our identity when Wall St. became the world vortex of capital, but this week the NYTs Magazine asks in an excellent and comprehensive article by Daniel Gross, is NY no longer the capital of capital?

In today’s burgeoning and increasingly integrated global financial markets, he writes, New York is clearly no longer the epicenter of world capital:

“Since the end of the cold war, vast pools of capital have been forming overseas, in the Swiss bank accounts of Russian oligarchs, in the Shanghai vaults of Chinese manufacturing magnates and in the coffers of funds controlled by governments in Singapore, Russia, Dubai, Qatar and Saudi Arabia that may amount to some $2.5 trillion, according to Stephen Jen, a Morgan Stanley economist.”

Having your own stock market today is akin to having some of those gigundus pointy buildings and sending guys (of every race, creed, sex and sexual orientation) to the moon to play golf. It shows NY it is no longer Big Boss on its own terms: If you don’t have the dough, you gotta go.

Could be that culture follows capital. Or capital follows culture. Can’t tell. I would say though that for whatever reason, New England does indeed seem to be rising again and coming out to NY’s shadow. It was horrible here growing up in a city of 150 empty cotton mills. I volunteered for Vietnam just to get away from it. It was so bad that in the restaurant I worked at as a college student some of the waiters also played for the Patriots. No duh! And the federalies had sent a major highway right through the heart of the city of Boston as they had through so many other major cities in the country, cutting them in half to show who was boss. But today New England is looking pretty good and so is Boston. They buried the highway. Our quarterback is almost beyond imagination. And the Red Sox have broken the Curse, and possibly broken the Yankees: Nobody loves you when you’re down and out.

But the masks persist. David Brooks, one of the High Priests who accompanies the Conquistadors, is starting to get stressed out. He writes in his column for the NYTs this week that the Republicans are losing the Hamiltonian grounds to the Democrats.

It is true. The fact is that Marx needs proles in big numbers to accumulate power. (Worth noting, China has 900 million potential workers who have not yet been brought into China’s Hamilton/Marx hybrid). By Bill Clinton’s day we had outsourced ours. Without proletariat, the Democrats had no voice, no pocket of oppression. So Bill Clinton tried the direct Hamiltonian path. That is when the Republicans began thinking of abandoning it.

The Republican Party has abandoned the Hamiltonian ground, writes Brooks, and has lost “intimate contact” with the “working class dreamer” (wow). And instead, this ground is being seized by Hillary Clinton. In fact, the Clintons, like the god Janus (and not unlike China), are trying to wear both masks, Hamilton and Marx.

One of the very great college teachers, Jack Deaver, used to tell us at U. Mass: “We look for a mask that fits until we find one that fits so well we can’t get it off.”

That’s the Democrats’ dilemma today, or rather the Clinton dilemma, because as of now, there is no Democratic Party, there is only the Clintons.

But Brooks is right when he says that the Republicans are beginning to yield the Hamiltonian ground. And it will one day, not far away, leave Brooks behind.

The Federalist Society takes James Madison, Jefferson’s colleague and right hand man, as its avatar. When it was noticed that the new Supreme Court Justice, John Roberts, was associated with The Federalist Society, old school Hamiltonian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., went apoplectic. He began writing letters to editors denouncing Jefferson and appearing on talk shows just before his death warning against the Jefferson position. And recently, Mitt Romney, who has spoken at The Federalist Society, also suggested Jefferson when he began using the phrase “one size fits all federalism” suggesting regional rather than federal solutions to social and political problems.

It was inevitable that the Jeffersonian paradigm would awaken after the South, Texas and the Southwest were brought into the mainstream Republican fold, as all Southern life is based on Jefferson.

As Frank Owsley, one of the great historians of the 20^th century put it:

“In the beginning of Washington’s administration two men defined the fundamental principles of the political philosophy of the two societies (North and South), Alexander Hamilton for the North and Jefferson for the South. The one was extreme centralization, the other was extreme decentralization; the one was nationalistic and the other provincial; the first was called Federalism, the other State Rights, but in truth the first should be been called Unitarianism and the second Federalism.” (“The Irrepressible Conflict” by Frank Owsley, 1930)

Today, Jefferson’s vision comes out of shadow and onto Main Street with Ron Paul. Paul, with Howard Dean, is one of two voices and new directions for the political parties and it is most interesting that Dean, a New Yorker, speaks to Vermont while Paul, a Texan, speaks to us here in New Hampshire. We are binary states. Indeed, we are very much alike, like twins, but the kind of identical twins who are vastly different. In fact, both states have burgeoning independence movements and they are the only states that do.

But Dr. Dean carries what might be called the “Deaver Curse” – the mask which can’t come off. It is a problem, it could be a crisis.

It is an issue that some of the greatest literary minds of our time have written about and one of them last week won the Noble Prize for Literature. Anti-communist writer Arthur Koestler wrote in the 1930s and 40s about Soviet agents going to their executions by Stalin’s hand still endorsing Stalin and his works. He asked the question how could a European, who considered himself and herself to be a humanitarian, become a Communist and enable and abet the executioner’s hand? And why would he still endorse the executioner even when he was the one being executed? Doris Lessing, who recently won the prize, asks a similar question.

In an essay in 1992 she points out that many writers and politicians, when they leave the Communist cloak behind, simply change the language and remain in the same condition.

“While we have seen the apparent death of Communism,” she writes, “ways of thinking that were either born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives. Not all of them are as immediately evident as a legacy of Communism as political correctness.”

Would that some of the “anti-war” types of the last five years had read them. Howard Dean and Ron Paul both opposed the war from the very start. But immediately after the decent interval had passed, Dean went direct to the head of the Democratic Party and folded in with the party, enlisting with the party which had endorsed the invasion of Iraq, the pre-emptive policy, the war on Islam “to take generations” and with Senator Clinton as front-runner, the completely and pathologically irresponsible policies which legitimize use of nuclear weapons in battle circumstances and the full endorsement of a pending invasion of Iran which could well bring us today to a full-scale war with Russia.

Dr. Paul has a different position. When asked by a Washington Post reporter last week if he would endorse another Republican who supported the invasion if he did not get the nomination, he said: “I cannot in good conscience vote for them.”

This is the way the world begins again; with one man willing to go alone, refusing the good models, even those which are sacred to the imagination of men, as Ralph Waldo Emerson advised us to do here in New England back in 1838.

NH Northern Counties Should Seek Statehood Status: Ron Paul is NH

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 10/14/07

Senator Clinton is way ahead in New Hampshire. The Marist College Institute for Public Opinion has her at 40%. Her closest rival is at 20 percent. If she wins the state, the northern counties of New Hampshire should begin to call for separate statehood status.

New Hampshire is Ron Paul. You see it everywhere – on oversized signs in Warren, Woodsville and Lisbon, in the local papers and at state fairs. He has taken the imagination of the Live Free or Die state and more than anyone in today’s Presidential race he represents the instincts, ethic and the mythic tradition of independence that brought people to like him up here as we once liked John McCain and others too rich for the blood of the mainstream federalist consensus.

New Hampshire is today the most Jeffersonian of states in a nation of mass-minded and manipulated corporate consumers which have forgotten what Jefferson awakened in the world. We wear independence on our license plates and when a foreign leader like the newly elected Nicolas Sarcozy, intent on changing France’s destiny, wants to show a flinty independence, his first symbolic act it to come to our cold lakes to bask. We even have a movie nowadays with Bruce Willis busting thing up under the anthem of our state motto.

But right now Ron Paul is New Hampshire.

It may seem odd that this same environment would want to send Hillary Clinton – who seems on closer inspection more a Mrs. Harry Truman than a Mrs. Clinton – the apogee of middle mind; middle age; middle management mid’lin – to the highest numbers in the polls.

It is simple demographics. The tax rate up here is an attraction to outsiders who are not particularly independent of spirit but simply want to avoid responsibility. That is, they want cradle to grave federal care same as in Massachusetts and pre-Sarcozy France, but want others to pay the bill. (A condition of the Mid’lin Class: neither master nor man and woman, but mid’lin – they want to live like the Eloi and the royals of 17^th century France, but still have the attitudes of the proletariat ancestors). These people are generally from the industrial top of Massachusetts and have just in recent times moved across the border.

The trouble is, they have brought Massachusetts with them.

New Hampshire still has the right stuff which gave it its reputation, but now it is invariably overwhelmed by the mass market corporate culture which has moved across to the bottom of the state.

If we could have a primary of just us in the northern New Hampshire counties – which is most of the state and mostly mountains - and exclude the few counties of the Massachusetts people in the flatland south – the Massachusetts “pseudo states” or economic colonies - we could once again express our native independence and Ron Paul would very well win the state.

We have seen this new condition of voting in recent elections and it was illustrated most vividly in ’04 at the frozen top of the state, Dixville Notch, which might be considered essence of New Hampshire, when Wes Clark won up to 80 percent of the vote. And as with Ron Paul today, large Wes Clark signs dotted the northern landscape (sometimes to the distress of the Massachusetts people who would if they could, zone their property to outlaw pick up trucks . . . they also feel the big political signs benighted their neighborhoods). But at the end of the day it was all John Kerry, same as in Massachusetts.

If Senator Clinton or one of those milquetoast others of both parties wins this state the northern counties above industrialized Manchester on the southern tip should seek independent state status – call that Free State status – to restore our independence of mind and influence. And while we are traveling there we might call for a state Constitution Convention to retool our old state Constitution. Consider the new with Jefferson in mind and Madison, and find a state Constitution to fit the times and temperament.

After we ditched the Massachusetts people in the south we might for example specify in our new state Constitution that before the U.S. President can send New Hampshire men and women to war against China, Russia, all of Islam and the other of its now so many enemies (I added these up using the CIA Factbook and it comes to at least 2.5 billion people against the 301 million in the U.S.; but then we have Blackwater), she would need permission from the New Hampshire Governor. And when President Hillary attempts to reestablish the draft to show her manlies, as she is certain to do under the advice of the Clinton Cajun Cartel which keeps her on her populist and nostalgico course, she would need our permission to press into service from our state.

If this came about the northern counties should be called New Hampshire. We would not be creating a new state, we would only be restoring that which we once were and finding again that which we have lost or had taken away from us. The southern counties could be called North Massachusetts. But Little Massachusetts would be better. We used to call small towns which resembled big towns “little” in old New England, and the littles always do best to follow Mother.

Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize in Literature

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 10/12/2007

Not since Harry Potter has literary critic Harold Bloom been sent so close to the edge, calling the award of the 2007 Noble Prize to Doris Lessing, “ . . . pure political correctness.” But the literature award to Doris Lessing is an important landmark.

Since war’s end, two books by literary figures have virtually changed the political landscape and the way we live today. The one is Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon published in 1940. Koestler was an early communist and supporter of Joseph Stalin. But his later writing revealed to the West the delusional world of Marx and the widespread slaughter of millions it brought on in Russia during the rein of Stalin. He cast much of the blame on himself and on the dilettante and appeasing leftist and liberal Western thinkers and writers of the 1930s and 1940s. Koestler lifted the curtain to reveal that Marx, the nihilist god of Europe’s illuminati, was a ‘god that failed.’ By the 1950s his writing began to turn the tide and a new moral conscience developed in the West largely out of his perspective. Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, published in 1962, is the second book. She herself was a communist in the 1950s and her rejection of the nihilist delusion advanced Koestler’s view. It brought a new generation out of shadow and on to a better path.

Contemporary social conscience and cultural studies may be as Bloom might claim; weakling, suburbanized and tenurized nihilism; insidious work akin to that of the coat carriers and fellow travelers who Koestler indicted. But Lessing does not in any way belong to that crowd. She is one of the very last lions of the old school: Writers like Koestler, Jack Reed, Andre Malraux, the committed journalists at McClure’s Magazine like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens and their colleagues of the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. They were original thinkers who shook the world and men and women of enormous courage, ability and character who were neither daunted by the odds nor afraid to die for what they believed. And very often they did.

The Canadian Century (a Sputnik Moment)

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network at 10/4/07

The Russians have planted their flag at the North Pole in recent days; in that singular place where the earth seems to align itself with the North Star. I seem to live not far away; in any case, as near to the North Pole as one can possibly live and still be an American. In the Border Lands in Wisconsin thereabouts, agrarian visionaries say there is nothing north of them but "a bunch of fences." I’ve been there: There are no fences. It is starting to get crowded up here in New Hampshire and last I was there, the traffic flow was even greater north from Chicago to the border line.

New Elizas are crossing that fateful psychological river and heading North to freedom; they are coming here daily to the northern edge of New Hampshire even from North Carolina and Texas and beyond. My own neighbors are looking even further north.

And for this reason only: It is getting hot up here and the culture is starting to flip from Denial to Panic. For the first time in my history I have talked this summer to tobacco farmers in North Carolina who complained about the heat. As part of the unspoken lore and tradition – that which makes us who we are – Southern people generally do not complain about the heat. Same here. We never complain about the cold. But it is not that cold anymore and last winter we didn’t have November ice till late January.

The Canadian Century is upon us and all roads lead to the thawing tundra: I’m beginning to wonder if I may yet buy real estate at the North Pole.

But the warming problem interfaces with another: In Ottawa last Christmas with family, attempting unsuccessfully to skate on the Rideau Canal because the ice was melting, an environmentalist asked if we would sign a petition to "stop global warming." Jokingly I said: "Global warming; bad for Texas, good for Canada."

In years past I have sent my daughter to the school bus through a passage in the snow well over her head at 10 degrees below zero for a month on end. Now, it is hard to feel bad when you feel good. Here in northern New Hampshire we had a bumper apple crop don't cha know. And in Greenland they are now growing wheat. And when the hockey season started last night I was still working in my yard in beautiful 80 degree weather.

Most Americans don't really understand how beautiful and vast and open Canada is and how pleasant a trip to Tim Hortons can be in the morning and how genuinely nice Canadians are: Canada is the Undiscovered Country of the North American mind. But the hordes are now looking north from Hoboken, from Tobaccoville, from Paris, Texas. And so are entrepreneurs and government agencies looking for advantage in minerals under the ice and the Northwest Passage.

We have two minds: the Buddha mind and the Doing mind. The later which dominates and finds pleasure in "positive" (meaning doing things) action; it is the enemy of Buddha Mind: It is Norman Vincent Peale; the religion of optimism; the religion of doing things to feel good. Hard to get around.

The Russians planting of the flag at the North Pole is a Sputnik moment but underwater. Its purpose is to territorialize our northern regions and turn our gaze north as surely as if it was a war dog peeing on the frozen tundra property line to warn off Canadian coyotes. (Just as the U.S. intends to territorialize [by which we mean to dominate psychologically - see Sun Tzu] Russia by planting missiles on his borders.)

It begins the drive to new action and passion in the new century. It begins a new era of growing things and creating things and killing things and thinking things up and making them on a vital and brand new, snow white and pristine Canadian canvas: It begins the Canadian Century.

Note to Arnold Schwarzenegger: Free the Farmer; Free the Food Chain

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network, 9/28/07

Bringing it up to the Governor of California as he is of the rare and endangered species of politician with the ability to see and to act on what he sees: The Governator needs to hook up with the world-famous Berkeley restaurateur Alice Waters of Chez Panisse and bring her ideas and vision of "regional produce" and farming to a greater North American understanding. Regionalization of food and indeed all services cuts down travel and is therefore good for the environment. Regionalization also helps foster "local identity" linking food and farmer with people - lobsters should identify Maine people (and no one else), gumbo with New Orleans people (and no one else), barbecue with North Carolina people, etc., etc.

‘Twas ever thus: Nature brings people this way over the ages, linking them to earth, air, fire and water and making them part of it. Avoid the globalized nobodyman direction of Hamiltonian’s Federalized Man: Globalized Man is Homogenized Man – like the bland and watery thing we get today which used to be called milk: you can only get the good stuff locally. Link woman and man instead to her place on earth and environment as Jefferson intended. Governator may look to Slow Foods as well and the The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy to return animals to the farmyard where they once had a place. Homegrown avatars Neil Young, Willie Nelson and miscreant others of Farm Aid might advance this suggestion.

Mitt Romney begins to understand regionalization as a practical management tool and has practiced it in New England. It is also a national security issue: Diversity of local foods adapted to natural circumstances protects against failure of globalized agribusiness from an air-borne and unstable monetary system as well as natural threats to the global food system (each corn ear is a twin). The existing agribusiness system is as simple-minded as that practiced by the Soviets in the ‘50s and just as vulnerable to sudden irrelevance. A new regional attitude might possibly even protect against really crazy and random ideas like biofuel – which is catching on like a wild fire in the rain forest and as Jane Goodall says, is very likely to destroy the rain forest. Already, northern New England looks lost in a corn maze.

“Community tier" economy for products other than food also protects region and nation from global economic meltdown - it adds a new layer to economy free from the vicissitudes and vagaries of globalization: One could even sell California "regional" bonds or New England bonds (as a hedge against hedge funds and the dollar’s descend into the maelstrom, no?). Mitt Romney uses the phrase "one size fits all federalism.” Federalism in Hamilton’s universalist vision makes for a bland people if not to say a bunch of lemmings and Leviathan's hordes; all dress different, all think and be alike, and inside, nobody’s home.

Note to Arnold Schwarzenegger: Regionalize the Food Supply


The Goverator needs to hook up with the world famous Alice Waters of Chez Panisse and bring her ideas and vision of "regional produce" and farming to a greater North American market - regionalization of food and all services cuts down travel and is therefore good for the environment; regionalization also helps forster "local identity" - lobsters should identify Maine people, jumbo with New Orleans, etc., etc. - nature brings people this way over the ages. Mitt Romney understands regionalization as a practical management tool and has practised it in New England. It is also a national security issue: diversity of local foods adapted to natural circumstances protects against failure of globalized agribusiness and threats to the global food system; "community tier" economy also protects economy from global meltdown - it adds a new layer to economy free from the vissisitudes and vagaries of globalization: one could even sell California "regional" bonds or New England bonds. Mitt Romney uses the phrase "one size fits all federalism" - makes for a bland people if not to say a bunch of lemmings and Leviathan's hordes.

The Clinton Cult

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network – 9/21/2007

We face today three admitted failures – two virtually on a catastrophic level – and yet we constantly seek out the narrow-minded and myopic political avatars who brought us these failures in the first place: Alan Greenspan, the one, who tells us that he was in error in flooding the market with cheap loans in 2001, causing five years later the greatest number of mortgage defaults since the Great Depression and bank runs like London hasn’t seen since the 19^th century.

Yet he says it with such quiet wisdom in his voice that it somehow seems like our fault for being so stupid and listening to him. (I feel as if I should punish myself somehow, even though I didn’t listen to him).

Then there is Robert Kagan who correctly tells us this morning in the NYTs of the end-of-the-world scenario we face ahead with China, India and Russia teaming up against us while we are lost in a Medievalist fog in Iraq. He even tells us that he supported that Iraq war: Indeed, the Iraq war was Gateway to the Second American Century; craziest of all ideas cooked up by Kagan and his buds to ward off the Yellow Peril and settle us into a lobbyist’s delusion of a Christian America and an Israeli-centric nation. Again, when he says it, it somehow seems like my own fault and I feel so stupid about it but I don’t know what to do. And then there is Hillary, standing in place to seek revenge all these past years, as she wheels out the same program on health care that she brought to us and we rejected 14 years ago.

This is no longer reflex and knee-jerk partisanship. The Sword of Discrimination has fallen back into the Lake: It is political cultism; it is idolatry.

Greenspan’s thoughts this week are welcome – particularly his observations on history’s cooking time – after the DOT com crash in the late 90s it was in error, he said, to drop the rates and flood the world with easy cash, some five years later causing mortgage defaults and a few half million or so (so far) of the country’s most vulnerable driven back to the streets – opps!

But warfare is even more fluid a spirit than economy: reading Barbara Tuchman’s observations of the Anarchists early awakening in Europe – a random and irrational dynamite bashing of the rich and royal in the 1880’s which grew into a shadow that would darken the world until 1985, and bring us, as we reach the edge of the new millennium; two vast tracks still working through a process; Mao’s China and Stalin’s Russia.

Tuchman’s discussion of the early Anarchists echoes the terrorist bombings throughout the Islamic world awakened today by George the Little and his own band of miscreants.

Islam has lost its tribal connections in Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East; the sea in which its spirit carried for 1,000 years. Like China and Russia 150 years back, the Islamic places have today lost their natural glue – had it taken from them in fact – and Islam is no longer a Life Force but now only an Idea; as Marx was an Idea and Stalin and Mao were Ideas. In this context it is a Hegelian substitute for natural culture and natural nations. It is now an Idea in opposition to another Idea, namely, Us.

All of Islam could well consolidate now into a vast global federation fed only by a singular purpose as the Marxist Revolution of Buchanan, Trotsky, Lenin and Mao did. The gates have already been opened and the rite of entry is has already been passed through: A year now we may find it impossible for Israel to keep safe (and I was told of this turning by an Israeli psychiatrist almost 15 years ago) and Russia well engaged in the burgeoning maelstrom still rising in the Middle East.

Yet the Democrats simply turn away: I think the Hillary campaign is about to turn into a full-tilt clown show. The Move-on ads against General Petraeus this last week are identified with her and the adolescence of the Clinton Cult which is primarily a Leftover-from-the-Sixties operation. In the Senate these last few days Senator Clinton was one of the 25 to officially oppose collegial respect for General Patraeus.

These Dems have entered the realm of Revenge Demon, which finds Hillary so fitly. This condition – which would seem primarily a condition of poor taste and begs the question. “Who raised you?” - will have a skyrocketing effect on Giuliani, whose foreign policy vision verges on the half-mad. We’re seeing here a Faux Sixties – complete with quotes on the mall from Malcolm X and make believe Black Panthers in the heartland raising the clenched fist of the Anarchists adapted to fit an Age of Leisure and a primarily suburban crowd. But that which evokes from intuition and principle in the natural order and process of politics history in the first generation devolves to feeling and sensibility in the next: Joseph Stalin, who knew something himself about political cultism, said it very succinctly: “Second time around it’s a joke.” As it did with McGovern, it will bring a full meltdown of the Democratic Party in 2008 from which they will not recover until they run the brilliant and decent Mark Warner for President in 2012. And if he or Joe Sestak (PA) or John Lynch (NH) or Kathleen Sebelius (Kansas) do not run they will not recover at all.

Senator Clinton’s comments this week on health care show the Revenge Demon – a Buffy the Vampire Slayer - anti-archetype, for fans of the occult - to be close to her nature. The chance of Hillary restoring the Democrats to power is about as likely as Yoko Ono reuniting The Beatles.

She says, the Americans "won't be fooled again” (a quote from The Who at Woodstock if you happen to be under 60 years old) by the insurance companies who went after her last time. Her internal understanding is that she is Leviathon and the Will of the People is her Will which was only thwarted by the Insidious Capitalist – and when the Insidious Capitalist is sent into remission She will be at one in Equilibrium with the People; the Manifestation of The People . . . and this has been long and unfairly kept from her.

Back when, most people like myself were however surprised when she suddenly and out of nowhere first popped up; Bill Clinton's hitch-hiker chick out from behind the bush - the sudden, new Secret Dominatrix of the new Administration. Not only did her program fail miserably, but it gave hubby’s new Admin a rough start which lasted two years and after that the Dems lost both the House and the Senate to the Republicans. Again, for the under 60-set, it was sort of like when The Beatles produced that neat White Album; it was kind of cool and different but random and uneven – because Ms. Ono was in fact - out of nowhere - actually participating in the production.

Indeed, Americans will not be fooled again. She is building up a head of steam now and that will make it worse for the Dems.

We are at one of nature's in-between, the biggest one since Yalta, and waiting, waiting, for the next big thing to happen. Even TV doesn't know what to do. In such times, they repackage and repeat (like Freud's neurotic who does not learn and remember but repeats compulsively, the same patterns over again): And - psychiatrists alert - there is a new Frazier show out this fall, named something else but pitching the same shtick; a charming but benign Clinton-era situation comedy repeated and repackaged . . . Hollywood too is waiting, waiting, like Lucky and Pozzo, for the world to start again.

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 rather than renewal to all but the idolaters; the Shining House on the Hill has been passed by and the age has descended into shadow.

Note to Democrats: Let go.

Draft Sam Nunn

(draft: "The Canadian Century")

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network, 9/4/2007

By now the fire was rising above the heap of dry wood, the flames were enveloping his legs, and in another minute they spread all over the tree . . . But are there any fires or any tortures or indeed any force in the whole world that can prevail against Russian force?

- Tarus Bulba, 1835, Nikolai Gogol

Anatomy of war behind, war ahead: War often builds on the same pattern – it is an abstract contention of the head at odds with the heart looking for a purpose and agents. When economy shifts radically, as it did in the 1830s and 1840s when American head and heart prepared for war together and again in 1929 in a different war, opportunity for the one or the other to take the advantage manifests in the matrix. It is worth noting as mortgage defaults are higher today than at any time since the Great Depression and the world economy is going through seismic shifts, primarily because of the rapid rise of China in world economy, the decline of the dollar, the rise of the ruble and the sudden ascent of Russia as an oil-rich nation.

Sun Tzu said in a line made famous in the movie Wall Street that the war is over before it begins: The fight, when it comes, is only the result of forces and efforts which have been working unnoticed or willfully overlooked in political delusion or hubris over long periods. Over decades perhaps and possibly interlinked to the beginning of human history itself. Countervailing and struggling possibly even to the Creation. It comes maybe - as Walt Whitman said in the greatest ever observation on American karma - from our “unsatisfied Soul” seeking passage to the sun and moon and all the stars and Sirius and Jupiter.

Churchill said England’s issues with Germany started with the Boer Wars in Africa, a war motivated by England to free the African slaves of the Voortrekkers in the 1830s. The rise of Evangelical Imperialism and a righteous purpose gripped the early Victorians. Having slaved from the beginning and having filled the world with slaves, freeing the slave world it helped create then became the motivating moral imperative throughout its world empire and in the United States as well. And again, economy was key: By the 1830s England’s economy was radically shifting to manufacturing and she no longer needed slaves.

When moral purpose is set the spirit flares and a dissident individual or a minority oppressed by the opposition must be found to team up with. Then organically, that interior minority or individual falls into the alliance with the side which opposes its master. But that individual may be an abstraction as well, like Eliza, the heroine of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who, possibly more than any real-life individual, brought the modern world into existence.

Bush in 2005 wanted to ally his cause with every dissident group he could find on the planet, in effect seeking a global struggle to “democracy” by direct military invasion and intervention not conceived of in scope since the dark sun of Joseph Stalin rose in Europe’s twilight. Party touchstones, like Peggy Noonan, fled in utter confusion and from there he lost his thoughtful middle and had only the edges to hold on to: Those out there where the buses don’t run like Religious Right columnist Cal Thomas, who proposed within weeks after the tragic day that we use nuclear weapons in the war against terror in retaliation to 9/11.

War changes a country’s collective personality and psychology: The Mexican War prepared the South psychologically to fight in a greater war shortly after, and World War I awakened a barbaric sensibility in Germany – a primal spirit of the earth god Woden depth psychologists have called it – that would shock the world as it had never been shocked before 25 years later.

The Iraq war has changed America as well. Several of the Democratic candidates today running for President, desiring to show that they have the manlies of Khrushchev or Stalin, this past month virtually swaggered and bragged about their willingness to use “First Strike” in the war against terror, adopting Thomas’s position and the Religious Right position of five years ago.

This (“never take any of your tools off the table”) is a standard Best Practices consideration of middle management conference-goers today, adopted by Presidential candidates who Mitt Romney said correctly, “have never managed even a corner store.” One claims experience in this end-of-the-world-nuclear-winter scenario because one of her relatives was President and she watched for eight years. Not unlike the way one of the family, possibly one sweetly but sadly Touched by the Lord, would learn to milk cows up here in New Hampshire. To his credit, Barack Obama said he would not use nuclear weapons in the fight against terror under any circumstances.

Eliza was a fictional American slave who escaped to freedom in Canada carrying her baby under her arm. Her liberation was a world liberation and we were her baby. Jefferson was barely cold in the ground when liberation of the slaves became the moral imperative of Victoria’s Evangelical Imperialists and the Industrial North in the United States. He expected invasion of the agrarian South as early as 1797 and it was possibly only his physical presence on the earth as the Great Man of the Enlightenment that prevented it from happening. Jefferson died in 1826. William Lloyd Garrison established the anti-slavery journal Liberation in 1831. High purpose bonded with the great new wealth of the industrialized states and sealed the deal.

But that which begins in abstraction ends in abstraction. Recently, Vermont’s state archivist, Gregory Sanford, in opposition to mischief makers (of which I am one) who seek Vermont secession has written that it is a myth that Vermont fought in the Civil War to end slavery: “Jeffrey Marshall, the head of Special Collections at UVM, has read thousands of Civil War letters from hundreds of Vermonters,” he writes. “He reports that only a ‘handful’ of the Vermont soldiers cited slavery as the reason they were fighting; they instead directed their ire at the secessionists, who they characterized as treasonous.” Yet from 1865 to the present, every Yankee child (including myself) has been taught that slavery was the cause and reason for northern aggression in the Civil War.

Bowdoin College’s Joshua Chamberlain is long forgotten and has been replaced up here as generational avatar by Bart Simpson. And the purpose and idea of federalism, for which Chamberlain and his small band from the North Country fought with stone and knife at Little Round Top in a battle that sealed the turning and direction of American and world history has vanished into the thin ether of Aquarius. In the papers this weekend both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama propose that gay marriage be an issue departed to “states sovereignty”: States Rights; the driving and motivating spirit of Nathan Bedford Forest; the fleeting rebel cry that Chamberlain and all but a handful of Vermont warriors fought against to create a northern vision of an American federation and to create the modern world.

Not to pick on that particular college, one of New England’s venerables. The general tendency up here since I went to college in the 1960s and 70s has been to equate soldiers of any side with fascism in the undergraduate mind and that idea still drifts through the hills here in the cold and the night and the fog. The student guide who disparaged Yankee soldiers and touted the opportunity to do an independent study on Bart Simpson was only reflecting the trends of the broader region. When Harvard opted to drop ROTC in a pique of anti-war piety some years back, most Northeast colleges followed on cue.

But the chemistry of this history is about as complicated as baking a cake: The net result 25 years later is an army officer corp bereft of Yanks and made up almost exclusively of Southern and Midwestern officers, a very good many of them taken up by the fanciful Southern political direction (now waning rapidly) of Jerry Falwell and its millennialist fever, complete with visions of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ focused on Iraq. It was virtually an act of secession by these northern schools from the definitive federalist vision of duty, responsibility and dharma incarnate as Lincoln demanded it and as Chamberlain got shot with five bullets for, but without the character, courage and conviction to actually secede.

Historian Tom Gossett, late of Wake Forest University, in his learned and excellent text on race relations in the South shows the importance of the Negro in the Mind of the North in the mid-1800s; in the mind of Victoria, in the mind of the world: When Eliza crossed the frozen river breaking up and jumping from floe to floe with babe in arms, we crossed the river with her, cradled in her arms, as was the Christ Child in the early pictures of the Divine Mother at Bethlehem. The image of Eliza and her Deathless Child appeared throughout the world, writes Gossett, on cigar wrappers in tsarist Russia and on signs and dramatizations everywhere which permeated the popular culture as the world first began to emerge as one world. And from that crossing there would be no turning back: The Russian tsars would free their serfs. China, Italy, all, would head to the federalized state in opposition to the independent nation-state. (Till now, when Vermont seeks sovereignty.)

The march to the federalized state envisioned by Hamilton – the marriage of corporation and central government (and Marx, Hamilton’s Dark Twin) could not be stopped. The abstraction had found its cause and its avatar; war, mayhem and the sacking of Atlanta, the carnage and the flow of blood – up to 40,000 killed in a day in conflict previously unimagined - and the wholesale slaughter of civilians in democratic warfare in which, in the “Sherman Doctrine,” all would share in blood and loss, were vast panoramic footnotes to that one essential crossing, in which Eliza freed the slaves and the world fled across the mythic river following the North Star; then as today and in every day since the day of Loki, Woden, Thor and the Green Man, the marker which marks The Center of the World.

The Russians have planted their flag there in recent days; there at the North Pole; that singular place where the earth seems to align itself with the North Star. I seem to live not far away; in any case, as near to the North Pole as one can possibly live and still be an American. In the Border Lands in Wisconsin thereabouts, agrarian visionaries say there is nothing north of them but “a bunch of fences.” I’ve been there. There are no fences.

It is starting to get crowded up here. New Elizas are coming here daily to the northern edge of New Hampshire even from as far away as North Carolina and beyond, and my own neighbors are looking even further north. And for this reason only: It is getting hot up here. For the first time in my history I have talked this summer to tobacco farmers in North Carolina who complained about the heat. As part of the unspoken lore and tradition – that which makes us who we are – Southern people generally do not complain about the heat. Same here. We never complain about the cold. But it is not that cold anymore and last winter we didn’t have November ice till late January. The Canadian Century is upon us and all roads lead to the thawing tundra: I’m beginning to wonder if I may yet buy real estate at the North Pole.

During the make-believe cold of the Cold War, the great Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung warned that as power grew in the post-war West and the “American tempo” rose in the world, we should be careful not to “project our shadow.” By which he meant that our enemy is us and as we build our own strength, it strengthens and builds our enemy as our Dark Twin, the Soviet Union, with the same strength as our own. Worth noting that when we suddenly and out of nowhere declared ourselves to be a “Christian nation” in the late ‘70s under the influence of the most po’ly guided and least-learned free-church political shamans up there from the hills near my old home in Tobaccoville, NC, (a political awakening quite similar to Victoria’s Evangelical Imperialism), likewise, Radical Islam – out of nowhere – suddenly became our enemy; an equal and opposite counterforce to our burgeoning religiosity.

Our Shadow had shifted. But that element seems to be drifting now and even my hunting buddies, it is reported, are putting down their rifles and the whole culture appears to be dwindling. Perhaps we are devolving to reason and good sense and returning from Outer Space. But it could be bad too: If we shift back our focus we will only return again to our old and greater economic enemy; Russia again perhaps, this time in league with China. We cannot beat it. As Pogo said, the enemy is us. And then we may long for this little, ancient (almost childish in incarnation), but time-honored war with Islam. But perhaps it is that we are just falling apart and that is part of nature.

The Russians will not go away. The Russians never go away: It is part of the Western heart as Particle is part of Wave. Contention between the East and West is the oldest in Christendom, pervading relations between Eastern and Catholic Christendom as early as 1100s and dividing the Roman Empire to its dual centers of Rome and Constantinople 700 years before. It is our nature to see ourselves in who we are not but somehow still are; as Constantine looked across the river at Rome, as Eisenhower looked across the river at Moscow.

This division amplified in the Cold War and it flares again: When the Russians planted their flag at the North Pole it was at the end of a series of war games uniting China and Russia. On the same day they sent their bombers, armed with nuclear weapons back to the sky after almost two decades of quiet brooding.

There was perhaps only one moment when this division could have been healed; when a mandala could have been placed between the heart and head to find union between the two rather than contention; to open passage to which the One could find its Long Lost Pure White Twin.

That moment was in the late 1990s when the Clinton Administration, intent on convincing the world and itself that in spite of the effeminate and narcissistic effects of the President and his agents, they were not anima polluted (for what there is a much better street expression), and could be as warriorish in the tradition as any who threatened Russia: In 1997 the Clinton administration led 90 Senators to expand NATO and bring a new line of nuclear weapons into parishes of the Eastern Orthodox Church on Russia’s border.

But these people, some of them Rhodes Scholars and educated in the most formidable of traditions – Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, Oxford – indeed the entire State Department, the Foreign Service and all the well-funded think tanks and all of those men with the high brows and resonant baritone voices who come to Jim Lehrer’s News Hour, turned in the end only to one of two quite common voices – Robert Kagan, the anti-hippie of his generation, who had a gratifying vision of a Shining City in which China and the Yellow Peril did not even exist, and Newt Gingrich, a small-time professor from a heartland college who had traveled South like Simon Legree with a vicious grudge against the Northeast Establishment.

Early on; long before, Clinton said he didn’t know what to do. Standing next to Elie Wiesel at a news conference during the Bosnian tragedy, he publicly announced, “ . . . I don’t know what to do” (nor did the Leader of the Free World know what to do in Rwanda, but in the fashion of the day he later apologized . . . a modest response and one which in less ethereal times would seem pathologically detached, given that over a million died; mostly women and children and by the knife). Shortly after he was seen carrying one of Kagan’s books around the White House. Then he knew what to do.

And when the Soviet Union fell, he followed the playbook of Kagan and Gingrich and expanded NATO, although Susan Eisenhower, George Kennan and some of the best minds of the time (but old minds) called it a mistake “of historical proportions.” Even my old and venerable Senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms, of late befriended by the Dalai Lama (but still no friend to the Russkie), had to ask: “Is a border dispute involving one or several of the new NATO members so vital a national security threat to the U.S. that we are willing to risk American lives?”

But it was the End of History, don’t cha know. The Russkie had fallen, and in one of the most pretentious pronouncements ever uttered by a think tank as the Age of Incompetence began to take on its head of steam, it was even called the END OF TIME itself!

But of course, it wasn’t. It was that our ideological Dark Twin was now weakened. Certainly it was morally weakened and condemned by its own, especially Gorbachev and our living Tolstoy incarnate, Solzhenitsyn.

In truth, the 90 Senators who voted for NATO expansion saw Russia as returning to peasant stock pulling on its forelock, while America soared to Jupiter, Sirius and beyond.

That was the singular possibility. We could then have found our Lost Twin and embraced him. But the Democrats, under the aegis of the Clintons She and He and Al Gore who vigorously supported this policy, had ceases to listen to Kennan, Eisenhower and the Old School in any matters. They refused to listen to Kennon – our most esteemed diplomat since Franklin - on foreign affairs and drove him to actually support Vermont secession at the very end of his life. And they refused to listen to John Kenneth Galbraith on economic matters, who came to consider them leisure class; a Culture of Contentment. Instead – and in hindsight this will be considered their great, narcissistic flaw – they listened to voices only of their own generation and their own age. Even if they were ascending radical Republican voices like Gingrich’s, or neo-conservative voices like Kagan’s.

Today Gorbachev no longer condemns Russia. He supports Putin’s efforts as necessities in keeping Russia together. Solzhenitsyn has returned to Russia and recently, he thanked Putin who visited his home to give him a national award.

Today, Russia is not broken and it is not a peasant pulling on its forelocks. It is one of the richest countries on earth. The ruble is booming, while the dollar is on the verge of collapse. Europe is entirely and exclusively dependent on oil-rich Russia for natural gas. Russia has reinvested its new oil wealth in its army while our army is spent on Medieval warfare of malevolent origin drawn from millennialist, eschatological visions of Armageddon and the Coming of the Son.

And two weeks ago Russia planted its flag at the North Pole

The planting of the flag was a Sputnik moment but underwater. Its purpose was to territorialize our northern regions and surely as if it was a war dog peeing the frozen tundra property line to warn off Canadian coyotes.

We moved NATO into Russia’s realm because we saw Russia as weak and we took advantage. No other reason. Now we are weak and the main reason is this: We have been without adult supervision in this country going on 16 years now.

Our first crisis in America today is a Crisis of Competence and it starts at the Oval Office. It is a management thing; both parties need to understand. And of all the way many people who have until recently announced that they want to be President, on a management-basis alone, only three are actually qualified to do the job if we are to advance as a mature and positive nation in the world. They are Mike Bloomberg, Mark Warner and Mitt Romney.

We have reached the turning point and the moment of high crisis – a crisis in competence in management but also in outlook. We can no longer go forward as a federation as Hamilton envisioned it and as Lincoln enforced that vision with another eight years of adolescent, undergraduate or incompetent management. Ron Paul brings a new spirit of endeavor and awakening paradigms to the contest. But if any of the others is actually elected at this point we face today the possibly the actual collapse of federalism in the United States as we and the world have come to understand it since Eliza crossed the river in 1852.

As a prominent Vermont politician said recently, Vermont’s attempt to secede is just a “silly Vermont thing.” Indeed, but for some unaccountable reason the myriad of Vermont silly things today manage to find their way into the broader conversation. Already, people who are not silly, like the Governor of California and his allies in major northeastern states, are taking notice and for the first time since 1865, have defied and ignored the federal government and resurrected the idea of states rights on environmental issues and other issues.

We have seen a complete failure of federalism in Iraq and in the Katrina region. This cannot be blamed on President Bush alone but on a systematic spiral of incompetence in management over the last 20 years. The first observation, as zen asks us to look at the thing itself without illusion, is that we have come to the end of things with the feds, and states on their own, like California and New York (and even Vermont) are able to do much better by themselves.

When historians look back at this fin de siecle to see what happened here, they will see a turning of events stemming primarily from a crisis of competence in governance. Both parties are cursed by it and it plagues especially the rank and file. It manifests in elected Democratic mayors of cities like Atlanta hiring Mitt Romney’s company, Bain & Co. to do the work for them. And in the appointment of Howard Dean as Democratic party chief; Dean, a Presidential candidate in ’04 who would ordinarily be considered a perfect failure and a marginal player as he lost ever primary and shifted the tone of the race to the Magic Mountain escapist politics of Vermont. He reanimated early visions of the Democrats as a silly party in a race which might otherwise have well gone to John Kerry had he remained in Vermont.

This systemic incompetence started to become apparent when Clinton uttered the phrase, “I don’t know what to do,” regarding Bosnia in 1993. It continues this week, as Bush, asked why the Iraqi Army was disbanded two months after the invasion, predictably advancing chaos in the region to catastrophic levels and costing thousands of lives and endless broken spirits in families and neighborhoods, used this phrase: “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said ‘This is the policy, what happened? . . . Again, Hadley’s got notes on all this stuff.”

The chaos and incompetence afflicts both parties. But on the Republican side, the adults have stepped in. The well-needed Baker-Hamilton report was simply an action by the well-regarded Bush family-fixer, James A. Baker, to stem a disaster wrought by a son randomly cast into the Presidency and fully unprepared for his responsibilities.

Unity 08, with prominent Libertarian, Democrat and Republican features, has proposed these past two years that it is time for a new approach and possibly a third-party candidate and just recently, Sam Nunn, the highly respected former Democratic Senator from Georgia, has announced that he has held talks with both Unity 08 and with New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg about running for President as a third-party candidate.

Recently, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Nunn, who retired from the Senate more than ten years ago, “ . . . has watched what's happened to the country, and he's more than a bit ticked — at the "fiasco" in Iraq, a federal budget spinning out of control, the lack of an honest energy policy, and a presidential contest that, he says, seems designed to thwart serious discussion of the looming crises.”

"It's a possibility, not a probability," Nunn told the Atlanta paper. "My own thinking is, it may be a time for the country to say, 'Timeout. The two-party system has served us well, historically, but it's not serving us now.'"

But a lawyer friend of Nunn in Perry, Georgia, says it is in fact more a probability than a possibility.

Nunn said he's not likely to make up his mind until next year, probably after the early rush of presidential primaries have produced de facto nominees for both parties. He said the decision will depend largely on what he hears from the current candidates. The only certainty, he said, is that he won't be anybody's candidate for vice president.

In the Journal-Constitution interview, Nunn admitted he is also tempted by the fact that a presidential run would offer him a world stage to press for a revolutionary shift in U.S. defense and foreign policy.

Reading the blog on Unity 08, Nunn is liked by its participants. More than any living American politician, he has brought sense and sanity to a world hell-bent on mutually-insured-destruction. Just this week he traveled to Russia with Senator Richard Lugar to mark the 15th anniversary of the start of the Nunn-Lugar program, which is intended to help rid Russia of fissile materials left over from the Cold War.

Ultimately, he told the Journal-Constitution, if there's to be any chance of persuading smaller countries to give up nuclear weapons technology — and keep it out of the hands of increasingly sophisticated terrorists — world powers will have to put themselves on a gradual, verifiable path toward total nuclear disarmament. That includes the United States.

Political debate has been captured by the extreme wings of both parties, he said, ignoring solutions that can only be found in the middle.

"I do not see tough calls willing to be made by the body politic," he said.

Nunn is a conservative and a hawk on defense. He is also CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a private charitable organization originally bankrolled by Ted Turner. Like colleagues Kissinger and George Schultz who he recently consulted with in private talks in Moscow with President Vladimir Putin on how to improve U.S.-Russian relations, he brings to the table a maturity that the Democrats have not shown in recent years and which is non-existent in the current line-up of Presidential candidates, several of whom were part of the Clinton’s Cajun Cartel.

Unity 08 calls for a new approach and in a recent NPR interview, CEO Robert Bingham called for candidates to name the teams they would bring to Washington with them.

I was delighted to read that Senator Nunn had talked to Mike Bloomberg about an independent run for the Presidency in ’08. I also think that he should take Unity 08’s cue and not only name the Cabinet or advisors he would bring to Washington, but as James A. Baker did, bring forth a group – a Founder’s Committee - for this auspicious new political direction, a group which might include Unity 08’s Angus King and Bill Weld, creative former Governors who brought Independent and Libertarian influences to their duty. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who uses the phrase “post partisan” might also be considered and Mark Warner, former Governor of Virginia, who pioneered ideas of post-partisanship by working most effectively across the isle in politically polarized Virginia.

And Mike Bloomberg is not the only billionaire who is considering third party politics. Warren Buffett shows strong interest in Arnold Schwarzenegger entering in a third party movement. Ted Turner might consider this as well; perhaps these and other philanthropists would join forces in a new third party direction. Consider that a Founder's Committee or Board of Trustees of some kind with responsible citizens from different walks of life might appeal to a larger group than just one person like Bloomberg or Buffett.

It is time for the Democrats to Kick it Old School and do as Baker did with the Republicans. Bring back the adults: Draft Sam Nunn.

Hillary’s Mao Theater

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 7/23/07

When Chairman Mao was in his hey-day . . . that would be during the Cultural Revolution when every second student on American campus was carrying a copy of the Red Book, there was a thing they used to do called Mao Theater. (Mao was kind of the Paris Hilton of the early ‘70s before yippie turned to yuppie.) Mao Theater was public drama of overt propaganda to condition the audience to adopt Marxist values. Little plays would go on; morality plays of Marxist morals and ideas and things they wanted you to become, and they would be accompanied by agitational propaganda – direct political indoctrination to accompany the theatrical production, thus to get the peasants on the whole program.

In hindsight, you would find it hard to believe that any group of people could be so stupid as to be influenced by this kind of thing. And only a slave race; the hordes; the masses would enter into such an absurd and simple-minded flow of indoctrination.

But here we are again with the announcement that the new 24 series (is that still on?) will star a “woman President” this next season. They changed her hair a little so it doesn’t look exactly like Hillary’s. The last Mao Theater presentation of President Hillary, Commander In Chief starring Geena Davis, to condition the audience to her upcoming Presidential campaign, the Chief was almost a ringer.

Who will decide this next President? David Geffen? Stephen Spielberg? Oprah? Jack Bauer?

How about None of the Above.

Are Americans as stupid as the Hollywood dictators of culture propose we are? At times, yes. But not today.

The three leading Democrats today are now fighting to be the new McGovern. The Democrats will become the “anti-Vietnam War” party applied now to the war on Iraq. It is their fatal flow to solve the issue of Iraq by looking to their personal and generational past and to the war in Vietnam.

The flaw in this is that in its inner-most sense Iraq is not at all like Vietnam. Vietnam was a random error of judgment by Jack Kennedy who did not know what the hell he was doing for a good long while when he first became President. America could leave Vietnam at any time without major consequence. And did. It was not a time of war. It was a time of peace and war was anomalous.

But several of the Democrats, most prominently Hillary and her Cajun Cartel, still have at least one foot in that decade. They want the war to go away now like the Vietnam War just seemed to go away. Hillary will advance now because she seems so good at being “against the war” – like we somehow remember her doing it all her life, kind of.

That’s not going to happen either. These Democrats, who fully supported Bush/Cheney/Rove on this absurd and tragic misadventure have proven themselves for a second time to be incapable of management and leadership abilities. They were wrong then and they are wrong now.

As misguided as it was, the invasion of Iraq was a “patriotic war.” That is, it was a war to which people gave their trust and their hearts en masse. Virtually 100% of Americans supported Bush when he first sent troops to Afghanistan. Still 75% supported the invasion of Iraq, and the leaders and journalists who knew full well what mischief was behind the war-making decisions threw in as well.

The people now will not disavow themselves of their original faith and intentions. They are tired of the war, but it is a misreading of America’s mood to think that therefore they will abandon the principle which first sent the 100% of American sensibility to support the Afghanistan invasion.

The ’08 race will be a referendum of this: Will Americans renounce their first intentions and vote for Hillary? Or in spite of misguided leadership by the worst President in our history enforce in concept the original premise of the war on terror. And in that case, vote for Mitt Romney.

There is something inherently crippling about the Democrat’s way to power and it started here in New England during the war in Vietnam. But Massachusetts, where I grew up, is not the same place as it was then. We no longer like to lose and take pride in losing as we did for a long time after the death of JFK. There is still that McGovern tendency and it still seems to pervade the Democratic Party.

In ’04 I worked here in New Hampshire as a volunteer for General Wesley Clark because he had the right view of the invasion of Iraq and unlike most ranking Democrats, he had the character to come public with it.

At a house party in Concord one night at which General Clark was to appear, I was talking to one of the most well known of political organizers in New England who was nationally prominent in the campaign of George McGovern.

I was a little startled when she said with great enthusiasm in reference to General Clark’s presence in the race: “It’s just like George McGovern!”

I myself saw no trace of resemblance to McGovern or the McGovern campaign. George McGovern lost 49 states and that total failure is still a matter of pride among Democrats.

Maybe this is a political party that just can’t grow up and we will see the end of it after Jack Bauer rushes around in earnest pursuit this next season stopping terrorists out to git us again (starring Kiefer Southerland don’t cha know. Isn’t he a Canadian? And what kind of name is Kiefer anyway?)

Howard Dean is another who suffered a catastrophic loss and was considered such a party hero that the Democrats made him the head of the party.

This is something I don’t understand: Here in Vermont and New Hampshire we pass through trends. Forty years ago there was a big hippie thing. It lasted about ten years and then the hippies all moved out west to Marin County and Seattle. Then fifteen years ago when Dean started being Governor of Vermont, there was a big gay scene. It was immortalized in the last season of The Sopranos where Vinni has to leave New Jersey because the mob discovers he’s gay. So he comes to New Hampshire and discovers that half the town is gay including most of the fire fighters. Truth is, it is kind of boring up here and the gay scene moved back to Boston and New York about eight or ten years ago.

So how come when a trend passes up here in northern New England it catches on in the national party?

New England is a much different place than it was in the Sixties when it was indeed a swirling vortex of hippies, anti-war activists and Maoist suburbanites lost in a haze of political make-believe.

Today we have a truly astonishing quarterback with the eye of a falcon and Boston has a cool, new bridge and a tunnel which sometimes works and other times not so good. Since McGovern won the state in 1972 Massachusetts has seen one of the most innovative and popular Governors, the Libertarian Bill Weld, who today waits in the wings with Unity 08 to open a third party if one of the others fail. And from then till now, this state in which my father managed to not talk to any but French and Irish Catholics in all of his 90 years has had a well-organized and effective Mormon as Governor.

New England it no longer the land of McGovern or even the land of Jack Kennedy anymore. It is the land of Mitt Romney.

Somebody tell the Democrats.

Federalism Has Run Its Course

by Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network, 7/5/07

The Libby pardon brought first to mind Bill Clinton’s one million dollar bribe received from Libby associate Marc Rich in the last days of his office, when Clinton pardoned treasonists and felons alike, giving relief “like lollipops” as Romney said, to anyone who had the cash to pay. Seeing him now in Iowa running his wife’s dog and pony show is enough to gag a horse. It is clear now and was clear from the start that this would be another Bill scam.

My second though was – politics aside – that we have been 16 years now without adults at the head of government. And the crew we face in ’08 is none as good: Romney will drive to the heart of Islam and perhaps to Russia; Hillary, who simply refuses to answer question from the press, will do whatever the market surveys and her husband tell her to do. As Emerson said at the awakening of our Republic, “we see ourselves ascending a stairs.” We appear now to be descending the same set of stairs.

As I was driving home last night I'd been thinking that if Senator Clinton and Governor Romney get the nominations, I would not vote for the first time in my 60 years. This would be a matter of conscience and moral responsibility, but not of passivity, because I would then send my meager efforts elsewhere. There are no vacuums in human nature, and there are always new paths when old ones fail. Here in northern New England many feel the same. Vermont actually faces a secession vote in March and 38,000 Vermonters are said to support Vermont nationalism. (When the issue was vetted on Daily Kos, two-thirds responded in a national poll saying Vermont had the right to secede.)

I feel no hostility to the two big parties, but I feel no attachment either. It would be a personal acknowledgement, feeling or belief that federalism as we have understood it in New England since 1865 has run its course.

I would hope then for a third party or even a regional party, as regionalism may be our destiny if federalism fails. And what we are seeing in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina; in the Middle East as the big ships head in to bomb Iran; in the Congress of Peeps which holds the coats, accommodates and appeases even as habeas corpus is discarded with a shrug; and in the Oval Office where one of the two most underdeveloped Presidents in our history; the one a serial draft dodger who compares himself to Churchill (and another who compared himself to Elvis) is a failure of federalism.

Thus the stakes in this election are higher than they have ever been since 1865. It could well be that Jefferson’s vision of a “decentralized” country would be the practical and obvious model after the Hamiltonian vision of an all-powerful Centralized Government and “one size fits all federalism” had filled the West and run its course and groups and types of regional character and community tier economies have developed across the continent.

The West is filled. The regions and communities have developed their own souls and characteristics. Federalism has run its course.