Cal Cunningham for North Carolina Senate - 2nd draft

The last 20 years North Carolina has had the churning experience of letting go of the old and finding itself again underneath; returning again to the place where it started, the Democratic Party. Something happened when urbane Harvard-educated lawyer and entrepreneur Mark Warner teaming up with the rustic Scotch-Irish warrior Jim Webb from the deep hills of western Virginia. This was a new and auspicious Democratic paradigm; and advanced management and excellence model with Southern characteristics. It was Mudcat Saunder’s South; the old South, the new South, the same South coming into the republic and bringing with it heart and substance. It awakened in North Carolina when Kay Hagen clicked her ruby slippers and sent Elizabeth Dole back to Kansas in 2008. It advances again with Cal Cunningham’s run against Richard Burr for the Senate. Cunningham, a captain in the army reserves and an Iraq war veteran who won a Bronze Star for his efforts, brings authentic leadership to North Carolina. He has recently been endorced by General Wesley Clark.
"Cal would be the first veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to serve in the U.S. Senate. He would bring a veteran's unique perspective to policymaking in Washington,” said Clark.
When we were rearing our kids on our little farm in Tobaccoville, NC, the venerable Jesse Helms was our Senator. He came from the ‘50s and refused to let go. Like one of those old Japanese soldiers from World War II who refused to surrender and were still coming out of the jungle decades after the war had ended. But the South had already let go decades before and had joined the world, even led the world, while Jesse was still holding fast to the past. And in a monumental shift in sensibility, my Baptist, Democrat precinct which had voted Democrat for 120 years made a techtonic shift and 85% followed Jesse to the Republican party.
But Warner and Webb returned it. They, with General Clark and others, brought a new face to the Democrats and a new face to the South, “a Democratic Team with Management Values.” Wesley Clark brought a uniform sense of honor, dignity, intelligence and duty to the country and to the party. Like Hagan, Cunningham fits in this new model which forms an auspiciously rising paradigm and one which returns North Carolain back to its Democratic roots.
During 2008, Cal served as a military prosecutor in the Multi-National Corps-Iraq. During his tour, he was government counsel in the first court-martial of a contractor under military law since 1968. In addition to the Bronze Star Medal, he received the General Douglas MacArthur Award for his leadership.

In November 2000, Cal was elected to the North Carolina State Senate, representing Davidson, Rowan and Iredell Counties. In the Senate, Cal worked on privacy legislation, campaign reform, the patient's bill of rights, the clean smokestacks bill, class size reductions, and preservation of farmland. He served as Vice Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and on the Senate's education committees. He has since served on the Executive Committee of the North Carolina Democratic Party.

Cal Cunningham - draft

The last 20 years North Carolina and the South have had the churning experience of letting go of the old and finding itself again underneath; returning again to the place where it started, the Democratic Party. We saw the Democrats rise in a new spirit with urbane Harvard-educated lawyer and entrepreneur Mark Warner as governor of Virginia, teaming up then with rustic Scotch-Irish warrior Jim Webb from the deep hills of western Virginia. This was a new and auspicious Democratic paradigm when it arose; and advanced management and excellence model with Southern characteristics. It was Mudcat Saunder’s South; the old South, the new South, the same South coming into the republic and bringing with it heart and substance. It awakened in North Carolina when Kay Hagen clicked the ___ and sent Elizabeth Dole back to Kansas in 2008. It advances again with Cal Cunningham’s run against Richard Burr for the Senate. Cunningham, a captain in the army reserves and an Iraq war veteran who won a Bronze Star for his efforts, brings authentic leadership to North Carolina. He has recently been endorced by General Wesley Clark.
"Cal would be the first veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to serve in the U.S. Senate. He would bring a veteran's unique perspective to policymaking in Washington,” said Clark.
It has been a long journey. When we were rearing our kids on our little farm in Tobaccoville, NC, the venerable Jesse Helms was our Senator. He came from the ‘50s and refused to let go. But say what you like about him, he was a fighter for his own; a representative of the mind of the South but a defensive mind, like the last warrior on “Lost” island in opposition to the Others.
But it was a South which had already let go decades before and had joined the world, even led the world, while Jesse was still holding fast to the past.

Then in a monumental shift in sensibility, my Baptist, Democrat precinct which had voted that way for 120 years made a techtonic shift and 85% changed registration to Republican. The South was coming into American and it was good for the South and good for America. Historian Dan Carter even proposed that America was becoming “Southernized.

It hasn’t been the smoothest transition. From old school pig farmer Lauch Faircloth (?) overnight to John Edwards, a new kind of Democrat who spend more on his hair than most of us in Tobaccoville spent on our pick up trucks.

The delusional totalitarianism of Obama’s “Global Marshall Plan”

By Bernie Quigley

- At The Hill on 3/30/10

In the first Gulf War the popular Colin Powell was at the helm, but people were scared. We hadn’t been at war in a long time and John Kenneth Galbriath called the age a “culture of contentment.” At the college I worked at there were somber prayer meetings in the chapel and an astonishing number showed up. Many reflexively blamed Israel for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. One professor stopped by my house as I was watching the news. Iraq was lobbing bombs into Israel, quite possibly loaded with the famed WMDs. The Israelis were distributing gas masks. The professor, shaking a finger at the TV, said, “See, the Israelis are inciting violence by passing out gas masks.”

This would not be so much a case of anti-Semitism as one of simple ignorance and arrested development. But it is in its kernel the same complaint that General David Petraeus has brought against the Israelis creating Arab-Israeli tensions by their positions on Jerusalem and the settlements. Pat Buchanon makes the point that “ . . . each new seizure of Palestinian property, each new West Bank clash between Palestinians and Israeli troops inflames the Arab street.” As the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens points out, so does Lady Gaga.

I was surprised by the comments coming from Petraeus. Can you imagine the Russians saying such a thing? Possibly he is posturing for a VP matchup with Hillary in 2012. She gets her foreign policy advice from Tikkun, a magazine which hopes “ . . to heal, repair and transform the world. “ In 1996 Obama approached Tikkun and asked to speak at their national conference in Chicago “ . . . and he gave a rip-roaring pro-peace, pro-environment, pro-labor speech,” reports Michael Lerner in the magazine. Obama met with the author and assured him that “he felt fully aligned” with “ . . . our vision of a Global Marshall Plan” although he warned the author that “ . . . he thought it would be a hard sell ‘inside the Beltway.’” Let the healing begin.

We are today experiencing institutionalized denial regarding Israel. Ideas which fix in a generation and are thus expected to be “true” by the next generation. They almost never are. Netanyahu’s problems these past weeks in Washington are being caused by internal politics in Israel. Although it has gone fully unreported in the press, Netanyahu’s leadership is being challenged by folksy new elements that could take control away from him later in April. Netanyahu must look tough on the Americans to survive through to May. What is happening is that the benign center of equilibrium between right and left is changing in Israel. Israel is rising, virtually alone, to a new generation which could have enormous influence in the first decades of the new century. And the institutionalized denial of the American policy makers and publicists are trying to push it back to the past.

The constant reinforcement of outmoded paradigms, including these purely delusional, totalitarian visions of Obama and Hillary (and the State Department? And the Army?) have made the MSM’spolitical discourse a polite but absurd garden party conversation between David Brooks and Gail Collins, gleefully parroting and reinforcing generational irrelevancies. They create a conditioned reflex in the public, which brings shock and awe when history, time and original life force awakens again - the Tea Parties and the state sovereignty movement, Sarah Palin – even Twilight and Ron Paul - and now Israel.

McCain/Palin 2012 - copy final

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 3/28/10

John McCain might be to politics what Brett Favre is to football. Too old? Even at their ages they are head and shoulders above the others. Favre brings leadership, clarity and entry at least to post-season football to a team. I’d like to see him play again. Should McCain run in 2012? Why not? There have been leaders at the helm of cerebral jobs up to 85, improving with age. McCain is only 73. His political instincts are as quick today as ever. And at his Senate reelection rally with Sarah Palin over the weekend he was at perfect pitch.

And so was Sarah Palin. What’s different this time around is we’ve had a year of Barack Obama, who the media compared to Kennedy, Roosevelt, Lincoln and Jesus last time around, and he has brought the country financially almost to the point of no return, and quite possibly beyond it. And the MSM voices which brought him here by the most disgraceful slanders and abuses of Palin and her children, are reduced a year later to only an occasional racist and woman-hating rant from a NYTs columnist and one or two others. ABC’s Charles Gibson has been sent to the hinterland while rumors abound that since Katie Couric took over the anchor job, ratings have dropped so low at her network that it is about to be sold to the Doublemeat Palace franchise.

But as Perry Noonan and so few other s have pointed out, something else has happened in our country. Not everyone would respond to tyranny and abuse of power by falling to their knees as Team Obama anticipated. Millions in just the past year, since April 15 last, have learned that the state can defend them against false government and was intended to. This is an awakening process which has advanced several steps.

This past week 14 states have challenged the federal health care plan as unconstitutional. Suppose they lose their case. They probably will. But suppose they still feel they are right? What would be the right thing to do? What is to be done?
The state of Colorado brings a ballot initiative banning abortion in the state in November. If it is successful, a challenge to federal law in the Supreme Court will follow. They will probably lose. But this is different. Abortion is a larger moral issue than political corruption. It raises the stakes. What should Colorado do then? There is potential in this issue for casus belli, the moral trigger which could lead to separation.

We have been moving fast here this past year and will be moving faster next. It is fair to say, reading Paul Krugman’s, Frank Rich’s and Charles Blow’s NYTs columns this past week that both sides hate one another.

Sarah Palin can bridge these issues of states’ rights and federal jurisdiction, but she can’t help men who simply hate women (or the women who work for them). Possibly McCain can. He is an authentic American folk hero; our Gray Champion, and torture and abuse in POW camps could not dim his spirit nor temper his love of country. A year from now it should be looked at. There is no question in my mind and never has been that as McCain said in his speech over the weekend that Sarah Palin will be with us “ . . . for a long, long time.” But I hope he is not planning on going anywhere. He may be the only “authentic American hero” who can hold us together.

McCain/Palin 2012

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 3/28/10

John McCain might be to politics what Brett Favre is to football. Too old to play? Even at their ages they are head and shoulders above the others. Favre could bring leadership, clarity and entry at least to post-season football to a team. I’d like to see him play again. Should McCain run again in 2012? Why not? There have been women and men at the helm of cerebral jobs like his up to 85, improving with age. McCain is only 73. He doesn’t look old. His political instincts are as quick today as they ever were. He metabolizes experience to build himself better. And at his Senate reelection rally with Sarah Palin over the weekend he was at perfect pitch.

And so was Sarah Palin. What is different this time around is that we have had a year’s experience of Barack Obama, who the media compared to Kennedy, Roosevelt, Lincoln and Jesus last time around, and he has brought the country almost to its knees. Almost to the point of no return, and quite possibly beyond it. And the MSM voices which brought him here by the most disgraceful slanders and abuses of Governor Palin and her children, iare reduced a year later to only an occasional racist and woman-hating rant from a NYTs columnist and one or two others. ABC’s Charles Gibson has been sent to the hinterland. And Katie Couric’s network is about to be sold to the Mr. Chicken chain or to Mattress King.

But as Perry Noonan and so few other s have pointed out, something else has happened in our country. Not everyone would respond to tyranny and abuse of power by falling to their knees as Team Obama anticipated. Millions in just the past year, since April 15 last, have learned that the state can defend them against false government and was intended to. This is an awakening process which has advanced several steps. This past week 14 states have challenged the federal health care plan as unconstitutional. Suppose they lose their case. They probably will. But suppose they still feel they are right? What would be the right thing to do? What is to be done?

The state of Colorado brings a ballot initiative banning abortion in the state in November. If it is successful, a challenge to federal law in the Supreme Court will follow. They will probably lose. But this is different. Abortion is a larger moral issue than political corruption. It raises the stakes. What should Colorado do then? There is potential in this issue for casus belli, the moral trigger which could lead to separation.

We have been moving fast here this past year and this will be a fast year ahead. It is fair to say, reading Paul Krugman’s, Frank Rich’s and Charles Blow’s NYTs columns this past week that both sides hate each other.

Sarah Palin can bridge these issues of states’ rights and federal jurisdiction, but she can’t help men who simply hate women. Possibly McCain can. He is an authentic American folk hero; our Gray Champion, and torture and abuse in POW camps could not dim his spirit nor temper his love of country. A year from now it should be looked at. There is no question in my mind and never has been that as McCain said in his speech over the weekend that Sarah Palin will be with us “ . . . for a long, long time.” But I hope he is not planning on going anywhere. He may be the only “authentic American hero” who can hold us together.

“ . . . a dangerous place, actually”

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill, 3/26/10

Press observations the day after:

I filed for Social Security last month with the idea that it would be better to apply early, at 63, because there might not be anything left when I’m 65. Looks like I broke the bank. The New York Times reports today that this year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016. The bursting of the real estate bubble and the ensuing recession have hurt jobs, home prices and now Social Security, they report. Guess they forgot to factor in reality. Felt that one coming up here where people my age have been coming from the city in BMWs and Porsche Boxsters and building chicken coops.

And cashing in their T bills. A sudden drop-off in investor demand for U.S. Treasury notes is raising questions about whether interest rates will finally begin a march higher—a climb that would jack up the government's borrowing costs and spell trouble for the fragile housing market, the Wall Street Journal reports.

“For months, investors have focused their attention on the debt crisis in Europe, but there are signs the spotlight is turning to the ability of the U.S. to finance its own budget deficit,” writes the WSJ’s Tom Lauricella.

They haven’t been making much progress last year and this. Last year, Gloom, Boom and Doom’s Marc Faber said to buy one anyway to explain inflation to you children, because in 20 years they will be worth zero.

And now that beacon of penguin-class prosperity, the Massachusetts health care plan, the model for Obama’s, has got issues. Tim Cahill, the state treasurer of Massachusetts who is running for governor as an independent candidate, says the program is a fiscal train wreck. “The universal insurance coverage we adopted in 2006 was projected to cost taxpayers $88 million a year. However, since this program was adopted in 2006, our health-care costs have in total exceeded $4 billion,” he writes in the WSJ. Bad for Mitt Romney as well. As governor, he sponsored the plan and he is possibly the only guy smart, disciplined and skilled enough to extract us from it.

Ruth Marcus today in the Washington Post writes, “If I were a member of Congress, my floor speech before casting a yes vote would have boiled down to: ‘Gee, I hope this works.’”

You betcha, says Sarah Palin.

“So where are we?” asks the WSJ’s Peggy Noonan, who consistently understands things better than most. “In a dangerous place, actually.”

14 Free States and the horde

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 3/25/10

Politics and possibly life and probably everything are a struggle between power and anti-power; anti-power makes power stronger until it overrides it. Then it kills it. With the historic health care vote this week the forces of anti-power have overwhelmed and conquered the American impulse to power. That is a good thing as we won’t be nuking the Russians now. It is a bad thing because we won’t be doing anything else of consequence. It is a marker, like Waterloo to Napolean, like Lenin’s black train to Nicholas and Alexandra’s Russia. Change has come.

Life in America as we have known it since 1946 is finished. Something else will happen. What is interesting is that this yielding was to internal American forces and not to external threats. It is possible to envision America ahead to be not unlike England in the 1950s, broke and broken, with cheap rents in Liverpool and Manchester, and the men with the “right stuff” on the docks of Liverpool who conquered the world in ships 200 years before, idled and impotent but with full healthcare. And desperately seeking passage to America. They had no where to turn but to America. Possibly we have no where to turn now but to China, begging for mercy and sponsorship. Signals from Copenhagen suggest it will not be forthcoming. As with Victoria’s England and the Romanov’s Russia, neighbors and opponents begin sharpening their swords when they sense mortal weakness.

At a high school honors ceremony last week a student said that character is not just knowing what to do. Everyone knows that. Character is having the courage to do it. Out of the 30-some states that have initiated states rights legislation last year, 14 differentiate themselves by bringing a Constitutional challenge to the bill. They have found courage to challenge a bill that has been in the works, as President Obama said, for 100 years. It is the 100-year ride of the philosophy of the anti-hero he refers to; the agent and agency of the horde.

The horde has won. The horde always wins in time. Fouad Ajami writes eloquently on the philosophy of the horde and there are a number of books about American’s pending decline, like David Murrin’s Breaking the Code of History and William Strauss and Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning.

But these books and most books like this look at America as a unified economic and cultural matrix when in fact, the agricultural center of the country is a different America with different values than the urbanized, post-industrial America on the edges. The center, marked by the initiative of the 14 states, is alive and well with good values. It is the edges that are sick and dying.

The Constitutional challenge will likely not hold up. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison warned us that if the federal government became the sole and exclusive arbiter of its own powers, those powers would continue to grow, regardless of elections, courts, separation of powers or other much-vaunted checks and balances, says Michael Boldin, founder of the Tenth Amendment Center. But it too is a marker and has drawn new, original boundaries. This is no longer about Republican and Democrat. It is about regions. And the healthy center states must find a way now to protect themselves from the dying edges.

Incidentally, the new TV show “V” starts this month. That is what it is about: The benign takeover of America’s political life and soul by benevolents (alien lizards in Pelosi, Hoyer, Reid clothing), and a path to survive and defend against it.

Warriors and a wus

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 3/23/10

Warriors:

Mitt Romney - “President Obama has betrayed his oath to the nation — rather than bringing us together, ushering in a new kind of politics, and rising above raw partisanship, he has succumbed to the lowest denominator of incumbent power: justifying the means by extolling the ends.” – in National Review

Sarah Palin – Health care bill is “a clarion call to action” she wrote in her Facebook.. “In the weeks to come, we can expect [Congress] to try to change the subject, but we won't forget,"

John McCain – “This bill is terribly wrong for America and I call on you to join with me to challenge this bill in every way we can.”

Newt Gingrich - “This will not stand.”

. . . and a wus:

Scott Brown - Boston Globe: “As his fellow Republicans girded to oppose health care legislation in the Senate this week and readied a nationwide repeal effort, Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown said yesterday that he was not ready to join those efforts and was keeping his options open. By last night, Brown had clarified his position, promising to vote against the Democrats’ health care reconciliation package and pledging to support GOP repeal efforts. He said his earlier remarks were mischaracterized.”

The Two Americas: Greater New York and the 37 states

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 3/22/10

I’m just a simple Ray Wylie Hubbard liberal but I’ve lost track of how Nancy Pelosi got to run the country. Someone from such a rare, esoteric, even strange and narrow constituency and one generally at odds with the main run of the country. But there it is, that aging Mod Squad skipping to work; she with that mad amphetamine grin, hand in hand with Steny Hoyer and John Lewis, singing Kumbaya. We were screwed when the Democrats started calling for rock stars instead of responsible executives.

The vote is the first material step in the division of America from one nation to two. There are 37 states in the one group. They are bringing a states rights challenge to the bill, called for by Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, months ago and advanced by governors Mark Sanford of South Carolina and Buddy Otter of Idaho. The other nation is Greater New York and it has two parts, East and West.

This quote from Alexis De Tocqueville posted by Eric Parks of Red State Eclectic might be considered representative of the 37: “It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights – the ‘right’ to education, the ‘right’ to health care, the ‘right’ to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery – hay and a barn for human cattle.” – Alexis De Tocqueville

Four things:

- What is historic about this vote is that the economic contention since 1865, Hamilton vs. Marx, has shifted now to contention between Hamilton and Jefferson. This is the way it was before 1865. It portends the end of Hamilton’s vision of globalization. Historian David Smiley, late of Wake Forest University and a legend in his time, pointed out in his lectures that when the United States went to the Hamilton position, the world followed. We could return now to Jefferson’s federalism, all of us. Futurist Gerald Celente of the Trends Research Institute is saying we will.

- While the New Yorkers advanced their arc in 1865 with Lincoln and Grant, the 37 states began theirs in 1981 when the South universally shifted from Democrat to Republican to vote for Ronald Reagan. The 37 states will now find their center. It will be Texas. Remember the Alamo. It is a Creation Myth.

- Poets have noticed that political temperament changes. As Emerson said at the beginning, we see ourselves ascending a stairs. But then we descend and it reflects in the character and abilities of the politician. That which began in New York with Lincoln and Grant with the Roosevelts in the middle, ends at the bottom of the stairs with Joe Biden, Pelosi and Barney Frank. This is the way the world ends, said T.S. Eliot, not with a bang, but with a whimper. But the representative art is great at the end, like Nurse Jackie (but dark, like Nurse Jackie).

- One of the big problems here with the Two Americas is economy. As in Europe, the hard working end up getting dragged by the laggards. Here the 37 states are mostly prosperous, rich in commodities and with a uniform work ethic. They are largely agrarian. Greater New York is a basket case, is bankrupt, and its historic work ethic was mocked to death. Now, what Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds calls the worst Congress in his lifetime (he is 50), is demanding that the prosperous Conquered States of last centuries support the dead beat Conqueror States. You can see how this would create problems.

The Two Americas: Greater New York and the 37 states

Eric Parks on Red State Eclectic

I’ve kind of lost track of how it has been possible that someone so naïve and unprepared for her work as Nancy Pelosi came to run this country. Someone from such a rare, esoteric, even strange and narrow constituency and one fully unrepresentative and generally at odds with the main run of the country. But there it is, skipping to work with that contemptuous amphedamene grin, holding hands with Steny Hoyerr and John Lewis, singing Kumbaya.

The votes, the whole drama led by Pelosi is the first material stepin the change. And the change is the division of America from one state to two. There are 37 states in the one group. They are bringing a states rights challenge to the bill. The other state is New York and it has two parts, East and West. West is where Pelosi lives.
This quote from Alexis De Tocqueville posted by Eric Parks of Red State Eclectic might be considered representative of the 37: It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights – the "right" to education, the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery – hay and a barn for human cattle. – Alexis De Tocquiville
Three things:
- All countries divide by temperrment which manifests in economics. What is historic about this vote is that The economic contention that has dominated the country and the world since 1865, Hamilton vs Marx, has shifted now to contention betweeen Hamilton and Jefferson. This is the way the country was before 1865. It portends the end of globalization. Historian David Smiley, late of Wake Forest Univerrsity, pointed out in his writing and lectures that when the United States went to to the globalist Hamilton view the entire world followed suit. Likewise it could return to Jefferrson’s federalism. Futurist Gerald Celente says it will.
- While the New Yorkers began their arc in 1865 with Lincoln and Grant, the 37 states began theirs in 1981 when the South universally shifted from Democrat to Republican to vote for Ronald Reagan. The 37 states will now find their center; their capital. It will be Texas. Remember the Alamo. It is a Creation Myth.
-
- Poets have noticed that political temperament changes as it follows the power arc. As Emerrson said at the beginning, we see ourselves ascending a stairs But then we descend and it reflects in the character and abilities in the politician. That which began in New York with Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant with the Roosevelts in the middle, end its descent with Joe Biden, Pelosi, Barney Frank. This is the way the world ends, said T.S. Eliot, not with a bang, but with a whimper. But the art is good at the end, like Nurse Jackie, which is terrific.

The Clintons and Israel

- by Bernie Quigley

- for The HIll on 3/19/10

Diplomatic relations with Israel in the 1990s should be comprehensively reviewed from top to bottom as it has become clear since that the President at the time was on the take. That his wife is now Secretary of State is simply ludicrous.

The Clinton leisure class era was every day in every way an age of appeasement. But it is not the casual million dollar bribes – one to get an Israeli businessman out of jail – that will bring Bill to historic infamy. Not the 50 gold watches. Not the white trash adolescent sexuality unabashedly pioneered by him, customary now among governors of all races and creeds, but the signing of the Oslo Agreements with Yasser Arafat on September 13, 1993.

The Empire State hates it when one of its distant provinces like China or Israel speaks up without permission and relations with Israel took a turn these last weeks with Joe Biden’s visit to Israel. The NYTs had a rapid response to the kerfuffle, floating a header above their op-ed page on March 19 with a picture of Arafat, a “classic op-ed” and the headline, “Israel’s best friend.” But not everybody’s; those on the receiving end of the intifada, like his Romanian communist handlers who supplied him with homosexual prostitutes, were disgusted with him. And it is astonishing that anyone today would be charmed and would see him as anything other than a terrorist. War changes people. It makes them less accommodating. Less cowardly. So did 9/11. And anyone who thinks the giddy treaties offered by Nantucket liberals in the silly season of Clinton/Arafat will hold up today is still lost in the Cloud Coocoo Land of Clinton world.

Best observation is this, by the Times’ Roger Cohen.: “I had lunch the other day with Ron Nachman, the mayor of Ariel, one of the largest West Bank settlements. He told me breezily that there ‘can be no Palestinian state,’ and that ‘Israel and Jordan should divide the land.’ I liked his frankness. It clarifies things.” Welcome to post-9/11. Welcome to the millennium.

In the mid 15th century, Prague Jewry had come to a crossroads. Times were getting good. Shipping in Amsterdam led Christian entrepreneurs to kehillah – Jewish benevolent societies – for financial advice and aid. But Prague’s great Rabbi Loeb had dreamed of a Golem. It could mean the light was going out of Europe. Jews began to leave Prague and later Stalingrad, then Cherry Hill, NJ and Brooklyn Hieghts, on the most astonishing inner journey in the human chronicles, known as “the return” and meeting unimaginable horrors along the way. They are almost there. They are five feet away from the center; the “center of the universe” – the Temple Mount. Anyone who thinks that getting yelled at now by Hillary will stop them is misguided.

The Clintons and Israel - draft

- add quote from Cohen

Diplomatic relations with Israel in the 1990s should be comprehensively reviewed from top to bottom as it has become clear since that the President at the time was on the take. That his wife is now Secretary of State completes the irony.

But it is not the casual million dollar bribes – one to get an Israeli businessman out of jail – that will bring Bill to historic infamy. Not the 50 gold watches. Not the white trash adolescent sexuality pioneered by him, customary now among governors of all races, but the signing of the Oslo Agreements with Yasher Arafat in 1993. He may still be the NYT's best friend, but most by now would consider this ally of Saddam in the Gulf War a terrorist.

Relations with Israel come back to center this week with Joe Biden’s visit to Israel. Must have been tough for a guy whose father was a “righteous” supporter of Israel as Obama seems not to like Israel but is kind of blue on its enemies.

In the mid 15th century, Prague had come to a crossroads. Rabbi Loeb dreamed that he had conjured a Golem. The light had gone out of Europe. Jewry The Jews that left Prague, Chile, Stalingrad, cherry Hill, NJ, on the most astonishing inner journey in human history, known as “the return” meeting untold horrors along the way, are almost there. They are five feet away from the center; the “center of the universe” – the Temple Mount. Anyone who thinks that getting yelled at now by Hillary will stop them is misguided.

What Israel understands in a year “gone to waste”

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 3/14/10

Israel understands that when America sends a high school hall monitor to do the job of a diplomat, there will be advantages. Was Secretary of State Clinton really shocked (again) at the announcement of new building in East Jerusalem, “accidentally” (strategically) announced during Joe Biden’s visit? Fool her twice. She and President Obama were played the very same way in Copenhagen by the Chinese. Most everyone who reads the journals (or my blog in the past three weeks) is aware that new political dynamics are awakening in Israel. Did the State Department forget to renew Secretary Clinton’s library card again?

American diplomacy is fatally flawed with Secretary Clinton at the helm. She is as she said she would be in her campaign, a cultural emissary for Global Clintonism. To paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt, “I am my husband’s scold.” The season has long passed.

Israel is a small country living on the knife’s edge, says Aaron David Miller in a Washington Post survey of experts this past Saturday. And any American who doesn’t understand this doesn’t get very far. Kissinger, Carter and James A Baker, Secretary of State in the George H.W. Bush administration, each “made clear that there was a cost to saying no to a superpower . . .”

But this administration has shown itself to be vulnerable in Copenhagen. Hillary was shocked and called the Israeli announcement “insulting.” As she and Obama were shocked at Copenhagen when the Chinese took the initiative in talks without even inviting them to the table. It strategically put the opponent (us) at a psychological disadvantage (the object of war, says Sun Tzu) and began to establish a new Chinese relationship in world authority and a new global paradigm.

Only Joe and Hillary would actually believe that the announcement of the settlements during Biden’s visit was completely accidental. Like the Chinese, the Israelis judge the strengths and weaknesses of the “superpower” – a phrase we don’t hear that much now – by its performance and personnel. Real Superpowers have real State Departments.

America has both hindered and advanced the progress of Israel and China these past 50 years. But in spite of what Bill and Hillary think of themselves, they are not existential necessities to Israel and China. And when they and the America they represent become obsolete, the world moves on. But a flaky State Department – and one with political patronage rather than a diplomat at the top – presents opportunities. The Israelis and the Chinese have three more years to take advantage.

As NY Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote this Sunday, what the Israelis did “. . . played right into a question a lot of people are asking about the Obama team: how tough are these guys?” Not tough.

Relations with China entered a breach at Copenhagen. I am convinced that we are seeing a similar breach with Israel. Israel today finds two basic American attitudes toward Israel: Tom Friedman’s and Pastor Hagee’s. Success in the war in Iraq may have made one of those positions historically irrelevant to Israel’s immediate needs and interests. Both the Chinese and the Israelis seem to have correctly sized up this administration in, as Senator Scott Brown said this weekend, an entire year that “has gone to waste.”

What Israel understands

by Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 3/15/10

What Israel understands: When they send a hall monitor to do the job of a diplomat, there will be advantages. Was Secretary of State Clinton really shocked (shocked, again) at the announcement of new building in East Jerusalem, “accidentally” (strategically) announced during the visit by Vice President Joe Biden? Fool her twice. She and President Obama were played the very same way in Copenhagen by the Chinese. Most everyone who reads the journals (or my blog in the past three weeks) knows new political dynamics are awakening in Israel. Did the State Department forget to renew Secretary Clinton’s library card again?

Israel is a small country living on the knife’s edge, says Aaron David Miller in a Washington Post survey of experts this past Saturday. (Are America and Israel drifting apart?) And any American who doesn’t understand this doesn’t get very far. Kissinger, Carter and James A Baker, Secretary of State in the George H.W. Bush administration, each “made clear that there was a cost to saying no to a superpower . . .”

But this is an administration that has shown itself vulnerable. Hillary was “shocked.” As Obama and the Secretary were shocked at Copenhagen when the Chinese took the initiative in talks without even inviting them to the table. It put the opponent (us) at a psychological disadvantage (the object of war, says Sun Tzu) and began to establish a new relationship in world authority and a new global paradigm.
Obama has already backed down from Israel last year when he called for “an unrealistic comprehensive freeze on settlement, including natural growth” (Miller). This is how you get to know your opponent’s strengths and weaknesses; his or her threshold of will and believability.

Only Joe and Hillary would actually believe that the announcement of the settlement during Biden’s visit was accidental.

Like the Chinese in Copenhagen, the Israelis have judged the strengths and weaknesses of the “superpower” – a phrase we don’t hear that much now – which is America and has learned to leverage its advantage. America has both hindered and helped their progress these past 50 years. But in spite of what Bill and Hillary think, they are not existentially necessities to the world. And when they become irrelevant, the world moves on. But a flaky State Department – and one with political patronage rather than a diplomat at the top – presents opportunities. The Israelis and the Chinese have three more years to take advantage.

“There is a generational shift underway, driving apart post-Zionist Israel and 21st-century America,” says Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute in the Post survey

Perhaps we are at another breach. The Clintons, cultural missionaries more than states persons, seem to be unaware of this. And Obama too is a cultural emissary as well and not a statesman. Both the Chinese and the Israelis seem now to have correctly sized up this administration.

Ready for Rudy?

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 3/11/10

Vice President Joe Biden went to Jerusalem to scold. He “condemned” the Israelis, saying the East Jerusalem housing plans "undermined the trust required for productive negotiations.” "Sometimes, only a friend can deliver the hardest truth,” he said.

Is Joe a friend of Israel?

Biden’s visit to Israel is part of the Obama Theater of diplomacy. Netanyahu is probably more concerned right now with the upcoming Likud Central Committee elections to take place on April 28th.

Biden may be a dork, as Karl Rove said, but his real problem is that he works for a pre- 9/11 President. I think we needed a rest, as we did after Vietnam with Jimmy Carter and as England did after World War II with Clement Atlee. But rest time is over. The time for smoozing is over.

War changes people’s temperament. We are a different people today than we were in the Clinton ‘90s, which John Kenneth Galbraith called a “culture of contentment,” and in the Carter ‘70s, which Christopher Lasch called a “culture of narcissism.” The election of a soldier in pacifist Massachusetts, Scott Brown, to fill “Ted Kennedy’s seat” should be testament to that.

The war in Iraq is over. We won. We won with ominous threats from Toby Keith and Rudy Giuliani backed up by American boots on the ground. We won with some unconstitutional acts – as Lincoln and Roosevelt did - and some egregious practices by the George W. Bush administration. It happens, as anyone who served in the Vietnam War or any other war will tell you. The time for recriminations is past. It is water under the bridge. Those who dwell on the dark side of it become poisoned by it.

And because of these things the United States has a brand new place in the world. But post-9/11, post Iraq war, relations cannot be established by a President who reaches back to the 1980s and 1990s for his agents and advisors. It is the politics of denial.

Only Sarah Palin has brought focus on Israel under the new circumstances, met of course with fear and trembling in the MSM. Rick Perry will in time as the Christian Zionists in Texas have been better friends to Israel and more dependable ones these war years than Biden, Clinton and Obama. Netanyahu said their vision preceded his own. There is an opening for Rudy Giuliani here as well and he should speak up now to the issues of national security, especially related to Iran and Israel. Because if a demure and reticent Massachusetts is ready for Brown, America might be ready for Giuliani.

Political temperament changes like the four seasons. Mitt Romney is right to call on an America without apology. But that is Rudy’s America to a t and always has been. The election of Brown and the awarding of a movie about an honest, competent and unapologetic warrior by Hollywood this month suggest the winds of change are at hand. It is dawning on America that this is not Vietnam and that this is a war that we have won. A Giuliani run with Keith’s unapologetic Courtesy of the red, white and blue, playing somewhere in the hinterland – as rousing an anthem as Rule Britannia – gave tremors to the timid in 2008, but could well be the coat that fits in 2012. And in contrast, it would make the messianic ardor of Obama, which shook the world in 2008, appear merely bookish in 2012.

Joe Goes to Jerusalem: What would Rudy Giuliani do? (W.W.G.D.)

by Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 3/11/10

Joe Biden went to Jerusalem to scold. He “condemned” the Israelis, saying the East Jerusalem housing plans "undermined the trust required for productive negotiations.” "Sometimes, only a friend can deliver the hardest truth,” he said.

Is Joe a friend of Israel? His boss seems not to like Israel at all and presumably Israelis. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apologized to Uncle Joe, saying that he did not know the announcement of the settlements would be made when he was visiting and he didn’t want to spoil his visit. That explanation might have held up in George W. Bush’s cabinet when they announced the new preemptive policy a day before German elections, or in the random diplomacy of Joe and Hillary. But in Israel, it is much as Dr. Freud said: “There is no such thing as an accident.”

Biden’s visit to Israel is part of the Obama Theater of diplomacy. Netanyahu is probably more concerned right now with the upcoming Likud Central Committee elections to take place on April 28th. The Israelis are just waiting politely for Biden and co. to go away. Probably they have been waiting for almost 40 years now when the conspicuous benevolence of peacetime diplomacy started with Jimmy Carter as part of a showcase of global American love fest. But Jews have old souls, like the Chinese, and in the center-most place, they understand that this too shall pass.

Biden may be a dork, as Karl Rove said, but his real problem is that he works for a pre- 9/11 President. I think we needed a rest, as we did after Vietnam with Jimmy Carter and as England did after World War II with Clement Atlee. But rest time is over. The time for smoozing is over. The war in Iraq is over. We won. We won with ominous threats from Toby Keith and Rudy Giuliani backed up by American boots on the ground. We won with unconstitutional acts and some egregious practices by the George W. Bush administration. It happens, as anyone who served in the Vietnam War or any other war will tell you. The time for recriminations is over. It is water under the bridge. Those who dwell on the dark side of it become poisoned by it.

And because of these things Israel has a brand new place in the world and so does the United States. But post-9/11, post Iraq war relations cannot be established by a President who reached back to the 1980s and 1990s for his agents and advisors. It is the politics of denial.

Only Sarah Palin has brought focus on Israel under the new circumstances, met of course with fear and trembling and that chicken soup of the liberal northeast, light irony. Rick Perry will in time as the Christian Zionists in Texas have been better friends to Israel and more dependable ones these past few years than Biden, Clinton and Obama. There is an opening for Rudy Giuliani here as well and he should speak up now to the issues of national security, especially on Iran and our friendship with Israel.

Because in Israel and in the United States, the 20th century is over. The past is past we are approaching very quickly now the beginning of things.

"When I’m 64 . . .": HIstory and Taylor Swift's Happy Dance

Cities in the east such as Newark and Baltimore now have drug-dealing as their principal commercial activity . . . Simon Heffer, Telegraph, UK

If all goes as planned I will turn 64 this year, which should be of interest for two reasons: First, approximately 40 million Americans – war babies – will turn 64 at the same time and another 40 million not long after. Second, as the ancient Roman and Chinese historians understood, all historic regimes start to go to pieces in the 60th year and end around the 64th year. And if the Eliot Wave currency theory holds true, which has the dollar ending its creative arc in the year 2011, that would likely include us.

This theme as been advanced recently by writers William Strauss and Neil Howe and in my opinion some of their observations were good, some not so good. Unfortunately, the clever William Strauss, has passed away (at age 60). But the cyclical nature of history has some formidable footings in writing of the last century. Historian Herbert J. Muller writes in The Uses of the Past that Arnold Toynbee discovered C.G. Jung and Oswald Spengler well into the middle of his world history and came to understand the cycles better. These mature insights are all still available.

Take the last American cycle which began at Appomattox in 1865. Then count forward 60 years to 1925 when The Great Gatsby was published followed quickly by The Sun also Rises. Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald filled young hearts with disillusioned desire, sending them to the Jardin des Tuileries to catch pigeons for breakfast and do absinth into the night at Les Deux Magots. Four years later – the 64th year, the economy crashed.

Look at Victoria who went to the throne on June 20, 1837, and left January 22, 1901, 64 years. At her Diamond Jubilee in 1897, actually 60 years, the smell of blood was in the water as the Germans arrived to celebrate with bigger ships, better steel, more proletariat, the better to make the war machines to follow. Robert Graves chronicled growing up around the end of things with this good title: Good-bye to All That.

Or the Russians, who did so poorly last week at the Olympics. But they are better off, as they’ve gone back to Jesus. In 1917 twelve days that shook the world began the U.S.S.R. Plus 60 comes to 1977 and the Miracle on Ice would be just around the corner, when the CCCP hockey team fell to a handful of American school boys in 1980. Russia’s Soviet Empire lasted a little longer, 1922 to 1991, 69 years, but the last few of that was mush.

Our own post-war world began in 1946 and hit 60 in 2006. Then came the first whack to the economy, but by no means the end of things. Too early for that. Our period is at 64 now, like the 40 million my age. So it should be interesting.

Good news is that Mao’s China turned 60 this year. They’ll start falling apart soon and Japan already is, so forget the Pacific Century. But I’m looking forward to the next part because things don’t really end, they just change and in my observation in the long sequence of cycles they tend to alternate, moving outward and then back inward. Like the Russians are doing. And anyway, the next is always better than the last, at least for the young,now doing the Taylor Swift happy dance, who will transcend the end and get back to the beginning.

Zen and Hurt Locker’s Sgt. James

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 3/8/10

As it is described in Winston L. King’s classic, Zen and the Way of the Sword: Arming the Samurai Psyche, Zen is the art of doing things in the unconscious. Doing without thinking. Internalizing knowing to as close as can be got to the core of one’s being by practice, by doing the work again and again until the outer self virtually falls away. A good example was at the end of the Olympic hockey game when Canadian captain Sidney Crosby scored the winning goal in overtime: “I just hit it quick,” he said. “I didn’t even see the net.” In the original Star Wars movie, the beginner Jedi/Samurai is taught to fight blindfolded, so as to not even see the net, a page borrowed from Eugen Herrigel’s Zen and the Art of Archery. This is Sgt James, taking off the safety suit with eyes and mind for the ordinance only and with total disregard to his own safety. He is Master Chief. He is Zen Man. Worth understanding when viewing The Hurt Locker.

There is discussion about this by veterans and soldiers as some aspects of the movie – the uniforms and the informality of the marines, for example – are not true to the reality on the ground in Iraq. But this is a work of art by director Kathryn Bigelow, not a piece of reportage, and should be seen that way.

And what is enriching about this picture is that it does present Zen man at war without idealism, without patriotic indulgence, without interpretation, without propaganda, without bullshit. Sgt. James is the internalized warrior at the center of conflict. In Iraq, he is “the man at the center.” Like World War II era Sgt. Rock of comic book lore 50 years ago, he is in Zen terms the “common stone.” If he is not present in the conflict the conflict will not be won.

Ordinary men and women ride with him and become brave because he is there driving the humvee into fire. “I don’t even think about it,” he says. He brings transcendence to the others to do the common duty which must be done, but which most are not naturally prepared to do raised in a normal, happy environment. When I was in military 40 years ago I remember encounters with soldiers like Sgt. James. They seemed usually as common as I was or even less, and most, like James, were lifers of low rank and status. But when danger approached they became transformed and we became transformed as well just by staying in the jeep and riding to it with them.

That Bigelow’s film won so many awards in Hollywood is good karma. It means we have won or are winning the war on Iraq. Because in Zen the truth is always beneath and you can’t superimpose it from the outside. If you win the war you get Sgt. Rock and Sgt. James. If you lose you get a crippled, drug addicted, deranged or otherwise broken man (“betrayed by his own country”), as in so many novels and movies about Vietnam.

Because war is a young Masai throwing a spear at a lion. The spear either kills the lion and that determines a positive, fruitful and fertile future for the tribe or it doesn’t. And this failure or success pervades everything; how we dress, how we behave with our families and friends, the psycho music they pipe into supermarkets and how we will vote in 2010, 2012 and for decades thereafter.

U.S. v. Canada” “The greatest game in history”

by Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 3/1/10

Since 2002, the Winter Olympics have been becoming more interesting for two reasons. First, the high point of the games is getting to be the two hockey games at the end, the women’s and the men’s matches. Second, that healthy competition is increasingly looked forward to as a match between Canada and the Unites States. Real rivalries tell us who we are. In 1980, in the so-called Miracle on Ice, the game between the United States and the Soviet Union claimed our identity as cold warriors and as European outlanders with an ancient legacy of contention. But that century and millennium is past and a new century is upon us. And if sports help tell our story, Canada today is our growing friend and competitor. As it should be with two new world countries very much alike.

Hockey changed in the women’s hockey match in 2002 when the Canadian women’s team beat the Americans and the same followed the next night in men’s hockey. For anyone who had been watching closely, Canada also changed. Canada gained a new confidence in relationships with Americans and in global affairs. The games this week which featured the victorious Canadian women partying on the ice smoking cigars and cavorting on the Zamboni, was typically uncharacteristic of Canadians, but it was all in good fun and showed a Canada grown confident in its new national character.

We Americans have something to gain with greater friendship with Canada. If the American dollar begins to yield we may think of a common currency. And certainly we should share in a common defense on our shores to the north where we are both vulnerable. But Canadians also have strong hearts and even temperament, like that displayed by the grace and good-natured acceptance of the gold by team captain Sidney Crosby yesterday.

NBC analyst and hockey legend Jeremy Roenick called yesterday’s game the “most important game in history.” But maybe the 2002 women’s match was more important. When Hayley Wickenheiser led the Canadian woman’s hockey team to gold victory in the 2002 winter Olympics, head coach Danièle Sauvageau, who had brought the women passion, leadership and instinct, gathered the team around her after the victory for a final word on the virtues that would carry the women and their families through the difficult times in their lives. Huddled in a circle, she said three words to them: Responsibility, Determination and Courage. This speaks to Canada and it speaks to Americans. We couldn’t have better friends on the ice or off.

Doug Hoffman’s New York and David Paterson’s

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 3/1/10

A Wall Street Journal essay this weekend calls Albany’s possibly the most corrupt legislature on earth. That would include Poland’s, Russia’s, Belarus’s, Brazil’s, Argentina’s, Mymar’s and Philadelphia’s. But Doug Hoffman’s New York is a vastly different place than David Paterson’s or Andrew Cuomo’s.

When you get to Doug Hoffman country everything changes. All the bags and baggage of Europeanized New York left behind from the 19th and 20th centuries – the corruption of Albany, the industrial revolution, patronage, class warfare, family connection; the pseudo-monarchist, personality cultism like that which accompanies Cuomo (married to a Kennedy, son of a charismatic governor – wouldn’t have a prayer otherwise) – suddenly disappears. It leaves entrails randomly strewn across the desolate Canadian border but it stops when you get past Malone.

And there the future opens. Not at the bizarre and oppressive wind farms beyond Moira, which reminded my son of the alien tripods in Stephen Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, but a little further on in the rhythmic clip clop, clip clop, of Amish horse buggies.

History turned on the NY 23 race last year when Conservative Party’s Doug Hoffman brought a third party challenge to Dierdre Scozzafava. Hopefully there are four or five books or graduate theses in works that chronicle that critical moment because everything since – Virginia, Scott Brown, Tea Parties, Sarah Palin and Rick Perry’s critical primary just ahead in Texas – hinges on that moment.

American politics has three aspects now – traditional left, traditional right and populist conservative - whereas before NY 23 it had only two. Roosevelt Democrats, relevant when the industrial cities of eastern New York were flourishing and full of European immigrants a hundred years ago, are less and less finding purpose, function or useful adaption in a new century of farmers and small businesses.

Jim Rogers, the legendary commodities guru, has all year been telling Bloomberg’s Bernard Lo and anyone else who would listen to take up farming. Trade in the Maserati for a John Deere, because the future of wealth is in agriculture.

Which is good for Doug Hoffman’s New York because when you get to where you first start to hear the canter of Amish horses it is worth noting that from there on continuing west, once you get around Chicago, America is a farm for as far as the land is flat, about 2,000 miles.

NY 23 is an appropriate place for new politics to start in the new century. Like California, like America, NY is a state divided between red and blue and those cultural divisions now have specific regional contours. From Potsdam and Canton west, NY feels more like the Midwestern agricultural states in the Lakes region, while the eastern region seems a broken, industrial residue of New York City in the previous century.

It has occurred to the productive inland farmers in California’s rich valleys that they are being asked to support the deeply in debt beautiful people in LA and San Francisco. Thus, it is not actually the feds that are bailing out the cities, but the productive inland farm folk. They are calling for a Constitutional Convention to address this and other issues. The NY Times reports that some valley farmers are also calling for regional autonomy. CA is actually two states with distinctively different cultures they say. Inland CA should be its own state. So far as I know, it has not been proposed in New York by public figures, but it is an idea whose time is arriving in CA. If successful in this very large sister state, big New York is a natural candidate as well.

CPAC – not good news for Mitt Romney . . . not bad news for Scott Brown

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 2/22/10

There are two measures of current conservative taste and popularity. The CPAC poll indicates professional opinion and should measure abilities of the candidates as they are judged by professionals. The second is the NASCAR track, the Baptist church and the popularity of the candidates in the heartland for whatever reason. Mitt Romney, who won the last three CPAC polls, lost by a good margin this year to Ron Paul, the conservative libertarian who offers Austrian economics. This is bad news for Mitt Romney.

As a technician, none could be better than Romney, but a politician requires some level of appeal to the heartland, where Romney hasn’t done as well, say, as Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. A recent Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll showed Palin in the lead at 16% while Romney came in second with 11%.

To be elected in 2012, Romney would need full pull of the professionals at CPAC to counter weakness in the heartland and he doesn’t have it. Paul is now the rising favorite of the young conservatives at CPAC .

I see Paul as a sincere and vital figure that will parallel and stabilize a new approach to government – a “wise grandfather” figure to a new generation. But he will not be President. He and his son Rand Paul will carry a supportive theme alongside much as his friend Ralph Nader did in 40 years of liberalism. In that regard he may be a harbinger of American things to come. I believe he is.

And an endorsement of Ron Paul can be seen as an endorsement of his son Rand, the Tea Party favorite running for Senate in Kentucky. Can also be seen as a major plus for the national candidates who have supported Rand’s positions. Sarah Palin, who wisely stayed away from the CPAC gathering, has endorsed Rand Paul, although she opposes some of his positions on foreign policy, especially regarding Israel. Mike Huckabee told CNN the conference as increasingly irrelevant to the conservative movement and accused its organizers of conducting a "pay for play" event. The 2008 GOP presidential candidate said the "truly grassroots" energy on the right lies in the Tea Party movement.

The CPAC results bring three to the top: Ron Paul and Romney with Sarah Palin in third at 7%. It is not surprising that Palin did not do well among the technicians and the Beltway people at CPAC. Her popularity, like Ron Paul’s, is grassroots and from the heartland, and if it was a bad day for Romney and a good day for Paul, it cannot be said to have been that bad a day for Sarah Palin.

And a good day for Scott Brown. Although he wasn’t included in the tallies, questions have come up about him running for President in 2012, but concerns expressed about his interfering with Romney, to whom he is beholden for vital support. But if Romney, champion of the Republican Establishment and the older generation, determines the season has passed by this time next year, Brown would have no ethical barriers to entry and could even have Romney’s support.

Arrested for praying: Sarah Palin, Iran and the Temple Mount of Jerusalem – the “temple that doesn't exist”

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 2/22/10

The main sticking point remained the Temple Mount, known to Arabs as Haram al-Sharif. Mr. Arafat has been saying since the Camp David talks, when the question of sovereignty over the site was raised, that the Temple does not exist, a senior administration official said. – Sept. 8, 2000, news article in the New York Times on the Middle East, (“Summit in New York”) when the White House had begun to sense that “. . . a solution is slipping away.”

Say what you like about the invasion of Iraq and I have said the worst, but whether it was about oil (Cheney, Greenspan) or Israel (Kristol, Krauthammer) it cannot be denied that Israel is in a better place on the ground today than it was in 1979 when the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran.

Because whatever our American ambitions – oil, influence – it is clear that to some large degree due to Christian conservative influence in the heartland, Americans are willing to act collectively on Israel’s perimeter and near frontier. And an attack on Iran today to remove its nuclear threat to Israel would be sustainable politically here now if Americans went alone or with Israel.

Obama might do this – Sarko says he is a weakling – but it seems counter-intuitive that he will. As a personal matter of character I have no doubt that he can do it if he determines it to be the morally correct and historically inevitable path.

“Say he decided to declare war on Iran or decided to really come out and do whatever he could to support Israel, which I would like him to do . . . if he decided to tough it up . . . I think people would perhaps shift their thinking a little bit and think maybe he’s a little tougher than he seems today,” Sarah Palin said this month to Chris Mathews.

Obama should do this because it is right and needs to be done and if he doesn’t, Mitt Romney (who said he would check with his lawyers first) will do it in 2012 as his first act as President. Or Palin.

When this action is successfully completed, discussion can begin about the centermost place and purpose of Israel, where Jews from everywhere in the world – after attempts in the heart of Europe (Germany, Vichy, Poland, Russia) to extinguish them failed – were allowed in post-war to return on an inner journey to their cosmic beginnings, but unbelievably were forbidden by the same agencies to pray when they got to the vortex, the Temple Mount. “Every religious looking Jew who ascends the Temple Mount is accompanied by a Moslem wakf attendant and an Israeli policeman, who together, scrutinize his/her lips. A Jew who is suspected of praying is detained or immediately arrested.” Moshe Feiglin, of the Manhigut Yehudit [Jewish Leadership] faction in the Likud party, reports.

This is where the discussion will begin again or perhaps where real discussion will begin for the first time, at the “temple that doesn't exist,” from which the entirety of the Western world awakened these past 2,000 years.

Scott Brown’s Hail Mary Pass to the White House

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 2/19/10

If there is a celestial guiding spirit behind Scott Brown, it could be that legendary Bostonian, Dropkick Doug Flutie, who might be considered the father of the Hail Mary pass, as he once threw the ball so far at just the right time that it is considered one of the greatest moments in college football and in American sports history. Flutie supported and campaigned for Brown in his recent election. As The Hill reports that Scott Brown is being considered for President, it would seem right now like a Hail Mary pass.

But not impossible. And not necessarily a bad idea. I say that after viewing a few of the speeches at the CPAC conference. I am glad to see the solidarity and glad to see the Grand Old Party absorbing the Jeffersonian messages of the Tea Party people. But in all kindness, what a bunch of squares.

Politics is the structuralization of more general cultural themes. As time passes, those ideas become calcified. As Michigan Representative Thaddeus McCotter said yesterday, Republicans should look to conform to the world, not look to conform the world to its own ideology. And in that regard, there is something happening here in the world today, and it wasn’t quite happening at CPAC. What is happening is more confluent with the rise and arrival of Scott Brown.

What is awakening can be seen in Scott Brown, Sarah Palin, Bob McDonnell, the new Governor of Virginia and in particular, Rick Perry, Governor of Texas. They bring a new spirit, a new flame. And Cheney and the H.W. Bush crowd would like to extinguish it before the Democrats get their chance, and claim it for themselves. That is why they are lining up the family in opposition to Perry in his primary race in Texas, and since their candidate seems in futile pursuit, it seems only a symbolic action intended to line up the rest of the party.

But I’d like to hear Scott Brown unplugged. Our world is rapidly going post-global. Right now the major political influences as I see them here are the H.R. Bush/Dick Cheney people who are primarily interested in oil in the Middle East. Then the Clinton generation, globalist utopian romantics seeing Bill as World Avatar and Israel as one of his kingdoms, India another, and Obama a secondary footnote.

We need a new approach and new people should bring it. Brown is beholden to Romney, but in the end history may cast him in the leading role. And he may have to take the advice of another New England guide, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and go alone because: “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages.” Or the old suits at CPAC whose historic time has passed, looking to market a second act.

Nikki Haley: The new face of the South (Rick Perry/Nikki Haley 2012)

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 2/18/10

Think I’ll pack it in and buy a pickup . . . take it down to LA. Neil Young

The Democrats are experiencing “big truck envy.” Somebody call Dr. Freud. It’s all about trucks now. Big ones. The entire political culture has turned on one symbol: Scott Brown’s pickup truck. Now the rumor that John Cougar Mellencamp might be thinking of running for Senate likewise comes down to trucks. For those who have been living under a rock for the past few years, Mellencamp is a pitch man for Chevy trucks and has probably logged more TV time in post-season football than Brett Favre.

We are undergoing a Jacksonian awakening. The heartland is rising up as it did in the 1830s and the lace curtain of Boston and Richmond are freaking out, as they did in the Colonial period. Now they are beginning to adapt, as they did then, by turning country. But this all started with a Democrat, the gun tottin’, tobacco-chewing Scotch-Irish Virginia war hero, Jim Webb, who went to the Senate in 2007. John McCain noticed and in a stroke of political genius unparallel in our time, borrowed karma and brought in Sarah Palin and her Big Dog, Big Truck husband Todd.

The sudden appearance of Real People in prominent position shocked the nation and the eloi retreated. Now they are coming out, getting off the porch to run with the big dogs, striving to be good ole boys themselves, barely more than a year after their fateful strategy of “whistling past Dixie” almost destroyed the Democratic party. Suggested reading: Noel Perrin’s “First Person Rural” will teach city folk what to look for in a used truck and how run a chain saw without cutting your leg off.

But red neck is only a base camp, like the one that came together this month in Nashville. The future of American politics lies with the elegant and the swift. Anyone looking for the new face should look to that most capable political operative, Jenny Sanford. She has already brought one candidate to the Governor’s office in South Carolina. Now she has brought her endorsement to another, Tea Party favorite, Nikki Haley, to replace her husband as governor.

"I think South Carolinians are ready for that," Sanford told a local South Carolina TV news outlet. "I don't know if our political system is ready for it, because it really is kind of a good ole boy club still."

“South Carolina and our nation are at a crossroads,” Haley says on her website. “The bailouts and stimulus packages are continuing to hurt job growth, weaken the value of our dollars, and increase debt for our children. I proudly stand in contrast – as the ONLY candidate for South Carolina governor who believed then, and still believes now, that taking the stimulus bailout was wrong for South Carolina.”

Like Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana, Haley in the daughter of Indian immigrants. She might be considered the face of the new politics in the Tea Party Movement and the new face of the South. And as Governor of South Carolina she would be in perfect position to be Texas Governor Rick Perry’s running mate in 2012.
And RE Jenny Sanford. Never underestimate the fury of a woman scorned. Especially if she happens to be a vastly competent political operative as Jenny Sanford is said to be.

China, Iran, and a “Jerusalem Quaternity”

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 2/17/10

China has gone too far, says Celestine Bohlen, a columnist for Bloomberg. Even Russia is fed up and talking tough sanctions, with the United States, France, Britain and Germany. But there’s one problem: China. This would be a good time for China to prove it’s ready to assume a leadership role in global affairs, she says. Something “its partners” have been asking it to do for five years or more.

Partners? Did they not notice the Mao suit Hu Jintao was wearing recently at the 60th year celebration of the birth of the People Republic of China? Assuming leadership is exactly what China is doing in not cooperating with the West in regards to Iran. Assuming leadership is exactly what it was doing when it began to formulate new world relationships with South Africa, India, Brazil and Japan pending at the recent group hug at Copenhagen. Building relationships quite possibly in opposition to our own traditions and our own interests.

But that Russia would team with France, Germany, UK and the United States would be monumentally auspicious if it could bring in a few friendly faces from the Islamic world as well and I don’t see why it couldn’t. From our point of view and from Jerusalem’s point of view. Because for the first time in my lifetime (and in the last 2,000 years as I have understood them) we are seeing what might be called a “Jerusalem Quaternity” – the four external cultural pillars which grew from the ancient tradition and the common psychological ancestor of Abraham and Aaron these past 2,000 years; the Catholic, the Orthodox, the Protestant and the Muslim – hanging together as if in a mandala on the far frontiers of Israel to practical, united purpose.

This quaternity of related cultures has a 2,000 year history and recedes to a biblical dimension. It consists of almost endless relationships of harmony and conflict swirling together, which in the east defines a marriage. How long have we in the West considered China a partner? Maybe 20 years. An equal partner? Never.

It’s all been good. It was good for Americans to invest in China from the Clinton era and will continue to be good. It was very good for Maoist China to adapt to some capitalist strategies under Deng Xiaoping. It brought 130 million Chinese out of poverty and created for China a new management class. But it is time for new buzz words. Time for us to rethink who we are and who we are not, just as China is doing. Time to think again about how we can prosper and be healthy in the years ahead.

Israel, Moshe Feiglin and the two American mainstreams

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 2/15/09

As it is with Sarah Palin and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, writing about Israel always brings strong responses. Possibly each brings something direct from the “collective unconscious” – a term Jung and Toynbee used – creating a “disturbance in the Force” – Obi-Wan’s term - which changes the way we see things and practice our lives. They portend real and fundamental change, not novelty or distraction. And in real life change is always unwanted as it renders our life-long experience and conditioned reflexes in love and work to be suddenly irrelevant.

One writer expressed the point that Israel is about to undergo fundamental change with the election of Moshe Feiglin and his Jewish Leadership faction within Likud which he says are on the verge of taking control of Likud at the upcoming Central Committee election. This will be the next to last step in moving Israel toward a Jewish State and independence from America. Feiglin would become the first religious/Zionist Prime Minister of Israel.

But what I want to know is about the “independence from America” part. Whose America? The current, transient New York City zeitgeist of dark wing late-night comics like David Letterman and Tina Fey, NYT’s lifestyle columnists such as Frank Rich and Manhattan’s reining avatar, that great, aging emperor penguin Bill Clinton? Or the America of Nobel laureate and survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Elie Wiesel, Texas Governor Rick Perry and Pastor John Hagee of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas? Because of attitudes in America today toward Israel these are the two mainstreams.

Attitudes of support for Israel vary on a spectrum from planting trees on a kibbutz to make mother happy to invasion, so as to aid and abet the coming Armageddon. Probably most are in between, like Thomas Friedman’s, the New York Times columnist, who supported the invasion of Iraq to the point where he suggested American boots on the ground in Israel and throwing France off the UN Security Council to amend the invasion. Then he changed his mind not long after and started talking about India.

Pastor Hagee’s America is a different place and it is an alienating and unacknowledged place for the Letterman/Fey/Rich/Clinton (plus the missus) spectrum. Hagee sees war to Armageddon. Passing through the cable TV channels recently I saw both Elie Wiesel and Rick Perry sitting on his couch at different times.

As journalist Max Blumenthal writes (on 10/29/09): “On October 25, while an overflow crowd of 1,500 poured into the first convention of the progressive-leaning Israel-oriented lobbying organization J Street, Elie Wiesel, addressed a crowd of 6,000 Christian Zionists at Pastor John Hagee’s ‘Night To Honor Israel.’ According to the San Antonio Express News, while Wiesel sat by his side, Hagee trashed President Barack Obama, baselessly accusing him of ‘being tougher on Israel than on Russia, Iran, China and North Korea.’”

Classic regional antipathy here. Hagee believes non-Christians go to hell. Not unlike the Slayer, of Los Angeles’ Hellmouth neighborhood, who saw an archetypal Southern preacher as an agency of The First, the primal source of all evil. Tit for tat.

Change coming to Israel parallels new political changes coming to America. Possibly relating to the rise of the new initiatives and attitudes developing in the Tea Party Movement and to Scott Brown and Sarah Palin. I see Perry as a figure of rising importance here as he openly supports Hagee. A new Israel could find a new America by 2012.

Sarah Palin, Iran, Al Qaeda and Israel

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 2/12/10

In the end, coming to terms with Iran and coming to terms with Al Qaeda is the same thing. It requires a uniform, unqualified, resolute American political temperament which we do not now have and as yet have never had. Because we Americans – American Jew and gentile alike - haven’t yet fully come to terms with Israel. And success with Iran and Al Qaeda will require a resolute and unqualified American – not European, not the UN, not the world – life or death commitment to Israel. Put simply, success in the Middle East requires full commitment by all Americans to the defense of Israel at all costs (lives, fortune, fate). Possibly the only person who can unite Americans in this way is Sarah Palin.

Since the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 and the taking of Americans hostages shortly after, it has been impossible to imagine this kind of political cohesion in the liberal northeast. But the election of a soldier to the Senate in Massachusetts potentially brings us back into alignment with our older traditions.
We have fought in the Middle East since Desert Storm as we fought in World War I, the Mexican War and Vietnam. All of those ambitions ended in derision and divided America. The war/wars in the Middle East must not end like this. They must follow through to a clear victory for the United States and Israel.

Last week, William Kristol, publisher of the conservative Weekly Standard and one of the first supporters of Sarah Palin, expressed disappointed when she endorsed libertarian Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul, for Senate in Kentucky. But Sarah Palin also gave money to the leading mainstream conservative Lindsey Graham, the Senator from South Carolina. Paulite libertarians fiercely oppose American foreign policy on Israel and any outside intervention. Graham fiercely supported the war on Iraq. But Palin, like many others today, possibly supports some of the libertarian economic and cultural policies of Paul and the Austrian economists but also supports the strong and independent foreign policy of Graham and John McCain. Both these principles today are running together, particularly in the Tea Party Movement.

The Tea Party Movement is heartland based, where the vast majority of American soldiers and officers are from. There is no conflict in holding these two positions. It is forming a new context; a new political paradigm. One which Palin shares some aspects of and advances.

Kristol is still thinking in a context created when New York liberals and conservatives divided among themselves back in New York in the 1950s, when thinking between left and right in America found champions such as Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and Alfred Kazin on the left vs. Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter on the right. Decter, Podhoretz and Co. embraced the Christian heartland and brought it into mainstream conservative politics. Mailer hunkered down in opposition in Provincetown and sent his money to Ted Kennedy.

The key discussion today in America will no longer be between the Irving Kristols and the Gore Vidals. It will be between Tea Party conservatives in the red states and traditional conservatives like Kristol. This is the meaning of Scott Brown in Massachusetts. It brings us in New England into the mainstream trends forming in the American heartland. It makes it possible here for the first time since Jack Kennedy to begin to think concretely about specific foreign policy issues at their core, and the fate of Israel is the core of turmoil in the Middle East.

Move the UN to Nunavut

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 2/10/10

Last March I proposed here that the G 20 meet in Ottawa as “ . . . holding the G-20 meeting in London cripples the negotiations from the start. Such an important meeting, to be more than a geriatric ruling class façade, should recognize the rising economic powers in the world.” Ottawa, Victoria’s elegant legacy, is center of the world as the world awakens to us in our century, the rising east, the receding west, the southern Americas and the Great White North. This past week, Canada’s clever Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, went one better and gathered the G-7 at Nunavut, Canada’s northernmost frontier on the edge of the Arctic. They might think of moving the UN there as well.

It would be tough for lobbyists to set up permanent shop as they do in New York and Washington. And there would be none of those issues about a leisure class political establishment basking and bonding as they do at Davos and Nantucket, with side journeys to Paris and Switzerland on taxpayer’s cash. And unlike the tawdry scene at Copenhagen, they might get some real work done. I’ve been on the high road as far north as Hearst, a delightful French-speaking jewel in the middle of Ontario not far from the forest center of Canada, where roads stop and 13-year olds play hockey almost as well as Sid the Kid in high school auditoriums where smoke blows out of a moose head’s nose mounted on the wall whenever a player scores. An excellent place for a new UN as well.

Others have proposed that the UN move from New York, Rudy Giuliani among them one Canadian paper reports, and Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela.

“Since the establishment of diplomatic relations, the United States has been accustomed to being the superior partner in Sino-US relations,” Gau Qihui, a commentator on China Daily writes. But a change in Chinese attitudes is occurring as the Sino-US relationship evolves into a more equal one, says Qihui. China's role in the world's affairs is growing politically and economically. China has grown to be a dominant element in almost all crucial international issues, including climate change, global recovery and Iranian nuclear capability.

Qihui has a point. India, South Africa, Brazil and most of the other developing countries indicated at Copenhagen that they are conforming to these new global dynamics. New York City was a terrible place for the UN to begin with. Placing a capital at the seat of power dictates down, conjuring a subtle empire. As London and Paris were in a previous century, New York City is a pocket of influence and is susceptible to looking out for its own.

Like many others, I am not sure what the UN does anymore that is worth doing. Possibly the Mormons, joining forces with Islamic Relief USA, and other groups like Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health with a lending hand from Bill Clinton are doing a better job in Haiti. Likewise the well-organized and generous Canadians. The time of change is at hand and it is apparent everywhere. Maybe it is time to start again from the beginning and to start from scratch.

Sarah Palin at Opryland

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 1/7/10

My first impression in watching Sarah Palin’s Opryland speech on C Span was that this was like Bob Dylan in Newport in 1963 or ‘64, raw and unpretentious, unformed and unscripted, informal and from the heart, but the beginning of something purely original and of vast and natural willfulness which was just now awakened and would not be held back.

It was Ronald Reagan’s 99th birthday and she spoke again and again of Reagan. She spoke of Barry Goldwater as well, that home-grown political avatar of western self-reliance. No mention of Bush.

She began her speech with reference to Scott Brown with the comic aside: “If there’s hope for Massachusetts, there’s hope everywhere.” She spoke of the Christmas bomber and the tragedy deflected by a “Christmas miracle.” The Christmas terrorist attempt and the Scott Brown election clearly framed her speech and were prelude to it.

At one point she mentioned people throughout the world seeing “Alaska” as a beacon of hope. I think she meant to say “America” as a beacon of hope, but it was a nice synchronicity. As the free spirit that called Jack London to the wild in 1903 still beacons. Her slightly erratic style in public speaking is a “personality type” (as in Myers-Briggs) thing. She has inner, comprehensive abilities; “right brain” – which gives her larger cultural perspective than most politicians. Perfect speech, the trade of slick politics, indicates a narrow, fixed, matrix perspective. It is why common folk sense the life force in her and why politicos and handlers hate her.
In the scheme I use to understand long-term politics, there is always one character which appears in the middle of a post-war period that will re-emerge and awaken the next century. The popularity of Teddy Roosevelt was prelude to the outwardly expanding American century which followed decades later. In our post-war period that person in the middle would have been either John F. Kennedy of Ronald Reagan. In hindsight of one year of the Obama Presidency, the Jack Kennedy period seems to have successfully completed the three goals of Lincoln and Grant. Those goals were prevention of the secession of the South, freeing the slaves and equality between white and black. The Kennedy period and the Obama Presidency fulfilled the last of those three which were unattainable to Lincoln and Grant. It completes that historic period. History moves on.

The Reagan period began to open up America to see and experience itself internally and Goldwater was avatar to that movement as well. We can see an age receding with the Obama Presidency and one beginning its ascent with Palin as its folk hero trickster which will begin now to find future history or historical destiny ahead.

As Dylan called back to Woody Gunthrie at his first Newport appearances, Palin thus called back to Reagan as her historic ancestor. In this regard, Reagan Presidency should be considered as the opening of the western states as an original and determining political force in American destiny and Palin’s talk to the plain folk in Nashville on Saturday night suggested that nascent movement to be finding its true beginnings. As the Super bowl between New Orleans and Indianapolis suggests, America’s “center” is moving west.

The Year of State Sovereignty?

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 2/4/10

At a press conference last October Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was asked: “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?”

She replied with that wild-eyed self-assurance that drew more shrill and extreme as we got to Christmas: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

She shook her head and moved on. Her aide, Nadeam Elshami, said that questioning the Speaker about whether the Constitution authorizes Congress to mandate that individuals buy health care was not “a serious question.”

This week the Virginia Senate passed a bill prohibiting a requirement for Virginians to purchase health-care insurance. With a Republican State House and Governor, this bill will likely make it into law.

In an effort led by Texas Governor Rick Perry who is up for reelection on March 2, more than 2/3rd’s of the States have introduced measures to stop individual mandates on health care. Many State Attorney Generals threaten law suits if current federal reform proposals are passed into law. The Heritage Foundation reports that state legislators across the country are considering various bills that would allow their state to opt out of key provisions of Obamacare or provide state voters a chance at the ballot box to reject nationalized health care in their state.

“Regardless of legislative components of the Virginia action yesterday, Conservatives should cheer the resurgence of federalism and what it means for reigning in the rapidly increasing federal government. With most states starting their legislative sessions, this may be just the beginning of what could be the ‘Year for State Sovereignty,’” says Dani Doane, director of government relations at The Heritage Foundation.

Will John Kerry walk on the wild side? America needs a “Council of Twelve”

by Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 2/3/10

Senator John Kerry is calling for states to amend the Constitution. It would be dramatic but he said it is necessary to restore restrictions on corporate influence in politics. Possibly this idea is not exactly catching fire because Kerry, one of the world’s super rich, doesn’t need corporate money while most of his Senate colleagues do. But if he wants to amend the Constitution and not just a sound bite in attempt to overshadow his new colleague Scott Brown, why doesn’t he show the courage to call for a constitutional convention? California is holding one and Rudy Giuliani has proposed that New York hold one as well. That way he could gather supporters in from all the states on a variety of issues that need discussion.

Issues such as:

- Should gay marriage be a states’ rights issue as Barney Frank and Scott Brown have suggested?

- Should abortion be a states’ rights issue as William F. Buckley, Jr. once suggested?

- Should the 10th Amendment be the First Amendment as Jefferson might suggest?

- Do we really need a federal reserve bank? Ron Paul has suggested we get rid of it.

- Should we go back to a gold standard?

- Is California really one state or two states or more?

That last one is a little tricky. It bears on some thinking by George Kennan, America’s greatest ambassador since Franklin, in his later years. He got attached to the idea of a Council of Elders, an idea actually first thought up by four creative undergraduates at Wake Forest University which somehow migrated to Kennan probably via the Gorbachev Foundation. This would be a group much like the Canadian Senate was once intended to be. A collection of people from varied walks – artists, doctors, monks, hockey players, trappers, business people, voyageurs, etc. – who expressed the whole of Canadian consciousness and not just the narrow political and legal spectrum. They would not make law but would advise the law making body. This might be considered a “Council of Twelve” like so many religious and social groups since ancient time which have found holistic balance in twelve representatives.
In one of his last books, “Round the Cragged Hill,” in which he said he “ . . . attempted to take the higher gorund” Kennan wrote: “I have often diverted myself, and puzzled my friends, by wondering how it would be if our country, while retaining certain of the rudiments of a federal government, were to be decentralized into something like a dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment. I could conceive of something like nine of these republics—let us say, New England; the Middle Atlantic states; the Middle West; the Northwest (from Wisconsin to the Northwest, and down the Pacific coast to central California); the Southwest (including southern California and Hawaii); Texas (by itself); the Old South; Florida (perhaps including Puerto Rico); and Alaska; plus three great self-governing urban regions, those of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—a total of twelve constituent entities. To these entities I would accord a larger part of the present federal powers than one might suspect—large enough, in fact, to make most people gasp.”

This vision could find form in a “Council of Twelve” regional brokerages or agencies between states and the federal government. It would solve Mitt Romney’s problems with “one size fits all” federalism. It would bring equibrium between small states and big states. It would change the way we think of ourselves as Americans, bringing us “down to earth” by giving us back our sense of place and region, while keeping us united continentally as Americans. But it would require a few giant steps and maybe even a constitutional convention.

“Lost”: The return of an American masterpiece

By Bernie Quigley

- For The Hill on 2/2/10

The best writing is in TV these days said Glenn Close when she went to work on FX’s “Damages.” It has been so now for quite a while. Nothing surpasses “The Sopranos” in writing and dramatic imagination, and “House” regularly surpasses Hollywood movies. The star system, the technology, the exploding cars and cities, are yielded to the more complex art of the acting troop, in which the star is the story told and not the muscular or snarling actor. Greater subtlety can evolve as the telling develops over time.

But in our time of imagination perhaps nothing compares to “Lost” which begins its final chapter tonight. Like the revolutionary Russian writers of the mid-1800s, it is filled with hidden references, intentionally planted beneath the story line to slip beneath the censors, the sponsors and the culturally sensitive. In season two, for example, it is suggested that the seemingly malevolent Ben is actually the Christ worn through and half mad in his final days of reign. He is marked by the chest wound and John Locke – his replacement in the rising Age of Aquarius – gives him a book to read while he is being imprisoned and tortured. The book is “The Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoyevsky’s great classic in which the Christ returns and is imprisoned and tortured by the Grand Inquisitor.

The early Russian revolutionaries claimed that stylish writing was a bourgeois affectation – the original folk tale was as good as the elegant opera populaire which expanded its market. Likewise “Lost” which mixes soap opera with subtle composition and recalls the great Saturday afternoon matinee serials like “The Daredevils of the Red Circle” pays homage to originality in both high and low in a masterful mix. George A. Romero’s living dead share the stage with Thomas Mann and Lao Tzu with Tarzan.

Like those Russians mentioned and the French writers of an earlier century who wrote for serial publication, “Lost” traces our age like a river rising and receding. When historians look back to us they will look to “Lost.” Some of the references are arcane – Ben turns the style in a “timeless” place so the Age of Pisces can yield to the Age of Aquarius. But one reference is clear. The plane that crashed and brought the voyagers to the island belonged to Oceanic Airlines, a reference to George Orwell’s “Oceania” the global realm suggesting us and our English-speaking cousins in “1984.”

Will the Lost islanders physically and psychologically survive the crash? Will we?