Dark Horse: Lew Lehrman for President

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/2/11

The New York Times lead political story this weekend says Republicans are pursuing a wider field for the 2012 race: “The wish list among Republicans is wide and varied. Sarah Palin, a former governor of Alaska, retains a devoted following. But activists also express a longing for others to step off the sidelines, including Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the chairman of the Budget Committee.”

How about Lewis Lehrman?

Lehrman is a smart-as-paint stalwart Reagan Republican and a man of honor to the nth degree. He achieved national political prominence in a 1982 campaign for Governor of New York, in which he ran a close race against Democrat Mario Cuomo.

And in a day when conservatives are divided between traditional Republicans and new directions, including Tea Party, “Constitutional conservatives” and libertarians like Ron Paul who wants to bring back the gold standard, Lehrman has feet in both camps. And much of that which the 40% of young conservatives today find attractive in libertarian Ron Paul can be found in Republican Lew Lehrman as well in a more comprehensive package.

Among the traditionalists, he is, as Wiki reports, a former member of the Board of Directors of the Project for the New American Century, as well as a Trustee to the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. But he was also a member of Reagan’s U.S. Gold Commission in 1981 with Congressman Ron Paul and coauthored the book, The Case for Gold, with Paul in 1982.

“Gold puts the money supply back in the hands of the people,” he told Fox’s Neil Cavuto, who called his debates with Cuomo “a Lincoln/Douglas moment.”

In 1983, when Lehrman founded Citizens for America he might have been a man ahead of his times, but time may have risen to meet his thinking today. He would be a sound choice for President in 2012 and is head and shoulders above some of those who have already entered the race. And a sound choice as well for Rick Perry’s vice president, or Chris Christie’s or Sarah Palin’s.

Donald Trump, Thaddeus McCotter and the GOP Establishment

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/29/11

A phrase recently appeared in the MSM: “anti-establishment conservatives.” Brings to mind that well-worn phrase of the Sixties, “counter culture.” But modeled for a new century and for new generations. Sarah Palin first busted out and today conservatism – from Rand Paul and Judge Andrew Napolitano to former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson and Donald Trump - bristles with creativity. It brings a change of paradigm to American politics and culture and suggests a forceful will and intelligence at work in its desire to become real. Commentator Michael Barone compared the change to that of the Sixties. There are now three elements: Democrats, Republicans and the new conservative counter culture which has no real name yet. By 2012 it could well become the new mainstream.

NY Daily News columnist S.E. Cupp has a name to add to the new people; guitar hero and Michigan Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, author of a new book, “Seize Freedom!: American Truths and Renewal in a Chaotic Age.” She says he could become the next President of the United States.

“At a time when so many Americans revile politicians for being part of the establishment, he sits unnervingly outside of it, at a matter-of-fact table with a matter-of-fact sign. So un-Trump,” she says.

In fact, McCotter might be seen as the anti-Trump.

McCotter is unflinchingly conservative, an unapologetic defender of American “exceptionalism” and the war on terror; he prizes good works over big promises, she writes. He was one of 59 Republicans who voted against House Speaker John Boehner’s last-minute budget deal with Democrats, making him a favorite among Tea Party voters.

He speaks better than perhaps anyone in Congress and thrills the crowd whether at the folkloric Tea Party rallies of heartland America or at Dartmouth student events.

Say what you like about Donald Trump and the usual bitter invective will come forth as it did with Sarah Palin. But when the Trump helicopter landed here in New Hampshire two days ago it was like the Beatles had landed. And it will be a tough act to follow.

Key to Trump is this phrase he used yesterday in Las Vegas, the most appropriate place to begin his campaign. From The New York Times: “Even as Mr. Trump upbraided the country’s leadership, he reserved his greatest scorn for a New York landmark. He told the crowd he was tired of returning from Asia, where the bridges make the George Washington Bridge look like a ‘toy.’”

It is perfect zen symbolism as Trump runs in opposition to the frumpy old GOP Establishment (Rove: “joke candidate”; Krauthammer: “provocateur and clown”). They want to refurbish old landmarks. Trump wants to build new bridges.

Donald Trump v. the “GOP Establishment”: Why Trump will win

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill to appear on Monday, 4/25/11

Last week Karl Rove, the official voice of what Sarah Palin calls the “GOP Establishment” took the bait. He called Donald Trump a “joke candidate.” Then at the end of the week Charles Krauthammer ran a lineup of what he considered to be the GOP potential for 2012. Krauthammer, who might be considered the GOP Establishment’s agent provocateur, said of Trump. “He’s not a candidate, he’s a spectacle . . . merely vulgar. A “provocateur and clown,” like the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Krauthammer proposed Mitt Romney as the GOP Establishment’s first (and only, really) choice. That’s terrible news for Romney, because in a Trump v. Romney race with Romney as the official representative of the Rove/Krauthammer/Bush/Cheney GOP Establishment, Trump wins.

Consider conservative influence which is not part of the GOP Establishment which has awakened say since Texas Governor Rick Perry wrote this in the Wall Street Journal on December 2, 2008: “As governors and citizens, we've grown increasingly concerned over the past weeks as Washington has thrown bailout after bailout at the national economy with little to show for it.” Since then we have seen Perry reelected with the GOP Establishment in full opposition, and we have seen Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, Ron Paul (pulling over 40% of young conservatives), and Mile Lee of Utah in the Senate and Libertarian Judge Andrew Napolitano and friends going nightly on Fox Business, and Fox News (without Beck), Joe Miller of Alaska taking the leadership of Western Representation PAC, 87 new Congress people, 17 new conservative governors, the Tea Party with its 3000 chapters, New Hampshire’s Free Staters (“ . . . opposing gun laws, legalize marijuana and Hillary is a bitch.”), The Tenth Amendment Center, state sovereignty movements in 37 states and did I mention Chuck Norris?

The GOP Establishment is Inside the Beltway. Trump is old school New York, but as new again and as innocent as John L. Sullivan half naked in the ring, taking on the world, alone. Some of these by no means would find Trump representative of their interests, but all have risen in opposition to the GOP Establishment.

The GOP Establishment peddles INFLUENCE. Trump understands POWER. And marketing. And packaging. And he sees what is quite obvious by now; an amorphous American movement looking for form and structure; a play like Pirandello’s looking for an actor; looking for a champion. And he understands that the old establishments both Democrat and Republican (Ford and Chevy? Meat and Potatoes?) are arid and calcified and lost in the wrong century. His combination of Bismarck and Phineas T. Barnum could well be the catalyst. It is not far from Ronald Reagan’s approach. Sending Rove and Krauthammer to apoplexy all in a weekend suggests he is on his way.

The GOP Establishment’s constant attempts to drag it back again to the Bushes suggests chronic fatigue. It is debilitating. And it is a roadmap to failure. History does not follow a straight line but moves periodically through tectonics shifts; Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt and Kennedy brought such changes overnight and so did Picasso and the Surrealist group, and The Beatles in the Sixties. It is nature’s way. We are at such a transition now.

Brad Watson, 2011, Mario Savio, 1964

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/20/11

And the Mario Savio “wake up America” award goes this year to Brad Watson, a reporter who had the audacity to ask Barack Obama why he was so unpopular in Texas? When the pharaoh unclipped his mike, he bruskly said to the reporter, “Let me finish my answers next time we do an interview, all right?”

The run up to the 2008 election may in hindsight be seen as journalism’s darkest hour in recent times. But there was something happening in the global psyche then, evident in the giving of a Nobel Peace Prize to a president who had only been in office eight days. Even the recipient felt it was absurd. But he didn’t give it back.
More than anything, the world - including the networks - wanted this man to be President and the price in journalism integrity was high: Donald Trump harvests now from the fawning incompetence by asking again the questions that should have been fully answered the first time.

The Brad Watson moment brings a well needed sea change to major media – meaning primarily the most pertinent to the zeitgeist, television – but the networks have quietly been in the works shifting their staffs already; removing the mid’lin and the odious, and returning to solid stock with Diane Sawyer at ABC, Scott Pelley at CBS and other ranking and top notch professionals.

But the Brad Watson moment shows how fragile and electric our moment is. His criticism was so mild it could barely be called criticism. The President’s reaction was lurid; sort of frightening.

Instead of the glittery and institutionalized awards given to journalists nowadays, which since the concept of embedded journalism have brought about reinforcement of already calcified establishment norms, there might be a new Mario Savio award. Mario Savio was a member of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement who jumped on the roof of a car and gave a speech that shook the world and it didn’t stop shaking for 15 years.

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part,” he said in 1964. “You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."

Now that is excellent populist polemic. William Strauss and Neil Howe, the generational historians, make the claim that history and generations turn virtually in a moment, in an afternoon, and nothing is the same again. Savio’s blistering, elegant prose dissent came at a moment when the world was overripe for change; it was a dam waiting to break so the river could flow again. Our times are different times; the issues today are different, but the conditions are not so different.

The Sarah Palin Manifesto

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/19/11

When Sarah Palin went to speak at the Republican convention two years back a hurricane came in and shut it down. But I suppose it was just a coincidence that hundreds of tornados swept across the South when she gave her Wisconsin speech last week. Something to watch, like the apocalypse. When I was raising my kids there in lower Appalachia, apocalypse was well on the minds of the local radio preacher shamans in the mountains and in the serpent-handling so-called “primitive “ churches in the hollows, and without question it shadowed the judgment of the born-again George W. Bush and what might have been called then the “GOP establishment.”

Sarah Palin used the phrase “GOP establishment” in her April 15 speech in Wisconsin, and incidentally, she has also redesigned her web site, SarahPac.com, to look more Presidential. What with all the excitement with The Donald and tornados where they have never gone before, it might have gone unnoticed. The MSM, which she has promised not to goad again, breathes a sigh of relief that the storm has passed and Donald Trump is more fun to play with anyway because he lives in New York and is no real threat. But her speech was more than a speech: It was a manifesto. A few phrases:

Hello, Madison, Wisconsin! You look good. I feel like I’m at home. This is beautiful. Madison, I am proud to get to be with you today. Madison, these are the frontlines in the battle for the future of our country. This is where the line has been drawn in the sand. And I am proud to stand with you today in solidarity.

Well, I am in Madison today because this is where real courage and real integrity can be found. Courage is your governor and your legislators standing strong in the face of death threats and thug tactics. Courage is you all standing strong with them! You saw the forces aligned against fiscal reform. You saw the obstruction and the destruction. You saw these violent rent-a-mobs trash your capital and vandalize businesses.

Now, there’s a lesson here for the Beltway politicos, something they need to understand; the lesson comes from here in Madison. So, our lesson is to the GOP establishment first. And yeah, I’ll take on the GOP establishment. What more can they say about us, you know?

So, to the GOP establishment: if you stand on the platform, if you stand by your pledges, we will stand with you. We will fight with you, GOP. We have your back. Together we will win because America will win!

We didn’t elect you just to re-arrange the deck chairs on a sinking Titanic. We didn’t elect you to just stand back and watch Obama re-distribute those deck chairs. What we need is for you to stand up, GOP, and fight. Maybe I should ask some of the Badger women’s hockey team—those champions—maybe I should ask them if we should be suggesting to GOP leaders they need to learn how to fight like a girl!

The words “courage” and “solidarity” occurred throughout and the speech in my impression seemed cleverly modeled on one by Lech Walesa given in the rise of the Polish anti-communist Solidarity movement in 1980, which took even leftist New York City by storm.

The MSM thinks now she will not run for President. What part of “going rogue” don’t they understand?

Donald Trump for President?

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/18/11

This is from The Wall Street Journal’s “Journal Community” which I take it is a blog. What I think is interesting/relevant/thoughtful about this brief commentary, “Donald Trump for President” is the way in which it compares Donald Trump with Ronald Reagan:

“Donald Trump has thrown his hat, so to speak, into the 2012 Presidential Race ring; and he remains, still, without one hair out of place. But is he serious or this he playing US? I think The Donald is very serious, and I definitely do not think he should be taken lightly. In the context of the current political and entertainment atmosphere that now permeates the country, Trump actually makes a lot of sense as a candidate; even more so, and this is a big IMO, than Reagan did when he ran. Donald Trump is a multidimensional businessman / newly minted entertainment mogul, who has a very strong personality, is very pro USA, and once he unleashes himself into a project becomes a bare knuckles formidable opponent. And for these reasons he appeals, at least currently, to the Tea Party movement, whose roots lie in the hope that we can get this country back to its roots.”

The writer talks about the “context of the current political and entertainment atmosphere that now permeates the country.” Trump makes sense, even more so “ . . . Than Reagan did when he ran.” This correctly understands Reagan’s popularity: He was not a popular President “in spite of” the fact that he made movies like “Bedtime for Bonzo” but BECAUSE he made such movies. He was the heartbeat of post-war, populist America, and Donald Trump may be as well as a purely populist figure. If we wanted it to be different we should not have passed the 17th Amendment in 1913.

That liberal America has become entranced by figures like Bill Clinton who was a Rhodes Scholar or by Barack Obama who was editor of the Harvard Law Review is a symptom of decline. It is what used to be called “lace curtain.” Let the Canadians elect a liberal PM because he taught at Harvard. America is yet the robin-egg blue ’52 Cadillac convertible, chopped and channeled, rolled and pleated, with lakers and moon disks that Neal Cassady drove the Dharma Bums across America in or that Hank Williams died in the back seat of seeking Jesus. And it is the better place to be.

NOTE: Donald Trump surges ahead this afternoon:

"PPP released a poll today that shows in a hypothetical national runoff, Trump would win 26 percent of the vote, trouncing runners-up Mike Huckabee, who would garner 17 percent, Mitt Romney, who would pull in 15 percent, Newt Gingrich, who got 11 percent, and Sarah Palin, who brought in 8 percent, and Ron Paul’s 5 percent. Minnesotans Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty, who are expected to be influential candidates in the 2012 if not also favorites, took only 4 percent in the PPP poll."

- Karoun Demirjian, The Las Vegas Sun

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011/apr/15/poll-shows-donald-trump-lead-among-gop-candidates/

Donald Trump was right

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/15/11

Trump told NY1 on 11/11/2008: "McCain, really, that was almost an impossible situation. Bush has been so bad, maybe the worst president in the history of this country. He has been so incompetent, so bad, so evil that I don't think any Republican could have won."

Trump was right. Go back and look to the first appraisals by General Wesley K. Clark and Senator Jim Webb of Virginia on the invasion of Iraq, both of whom Trump might look to as outside-the-box running mates.

The Republicans poison themselves today by trying to accommodate the life and times of George W. Bush; by trying to vindicate Bush. It is a psychological trap: It cannot be done by a free people if they are to remain free. Bush/Cheney will recede in infamy. They will bring their supporters down with them but they will not bring America down with them.

And he may in time be vindicated about President Obama:

"I think he has a chance to go down as a great president. Now, if he's not a great president, this country is in serious trouble," said Trump.

No consensus. But Obama’s failing is that he did not know what to do as President as he had never had a real job before. Had he hired William Daley and Elizabeth Warren (and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was all but begging for a job) in prominent supporting roles at the beginning it might have gone better. But as President he does push to the sidelines all other liberal Presidents in the post-war period, including Jack Kennedy and family and especially the Clintons, who bear some of the contempt appointed to Bush/Cheney in foreign policy.

But most important is that Obama fulfills and ends a period of history that began in 1831 with three specific objectives: 1) prevent the Southern states from secession 2) free the slaves 3) equality of life and opportunity between blacks and whites. What is important about Obama is that he completes a vast historic America epic: He completes us, and he does so with some grace.

And that is why 2012 and 2014 are most important. A new era awakens, portal to the century, portal potentially to the millennium.

Is interesting this week that Ayn Rand’s Libertarian icon John Galt comes to the big screen. Is Donald Trump John Galt? Rand’s characters are forms and archetypes, but Trump still has that real life New York common man swagger in his walk; it is that which makes one a New Yorker. It can be 50 Cent’s New York, but it can also be Toby Keith’s. He hasn’t lost that quality – which the Clintons as New Yorkers never understood and certainly never had – to the big bucks and his big, gaudy buildings.

Oh and it says that Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich – the endless apprentice - and Mississippi’s Haley Barbour are coming up to see us here in New Hampshire. And they are interesting to us now why?

“The irrepressible conflict”

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/14/11

It is said with some fright here on the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, that we face the same divisions again in red state and blue state. Demagogues like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow used the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War as an occasion to paint advocates of state sovereignty and the principle of nullification as racist “neo-confederates” says a commentary from the Tenth Amendment Center. It is much the same as that which came out of New Haven and New York in the time preceding the invasions of the Old South, Texas and the Mormon lands.

Indeed we do face the same division and we always will because it is the nature of the human condition to divide between red and blue, head and heart. Tai chi, it is called – the division of the yin and the yang, from which come all other things. Rome and Constantinople divided in their first beginnings as empires then as religious groups along the same contours and the division echoed all the way to the age of the Cold War. These are birth and growth pains which in the end resolve again to what might be considered as the state of “wu chi” – unmanifest karma; the world before birth and after death – Europe after 1917 - waiting to be born again, or not.

Wu chi; A state perfectly described by these phrases: “Imagine there’s no heaven . . . no country . . . no religion too.” A time in between; a time of waiting.

But it is our world today which begins and rises in head and heart and it is our world just beginning.

Technically, our binary nature began at Jay Treaty in 1794 when Washington teamed up with the New Yorker Alexander Hamilton in opposition to Virginia’s Jefferson and Madison. It never got right from there. As early as 1797 Jefferson anticipated northern invasion. And from then on it was always a question of temperament as it is today. As historian Frank Owsley wrote in his classic essay, “The Irrepressible Conflict”:

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

The difference then was that New York was red; fierce because it had almost overnight become powerful and rich through rapid industirialization. Today it is blue, broke and if Maddow’s prose is any indication, dispirited and nihilistic; a poor posture as the northeast turns today to the healthy agrarian heartland it so despises for a bailout.

Quigley at Nullify Now! New Hampshire's conference

I was delighted to be asked to speak at the New Hampshire stop of The Tenth Amendment Center's "Nullify Now!" tour recently, sharing a platform with Thomas Woods, Michael Boldin and in other regions former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson and the bright young writer Jack Hunter. Here are my comments:

FINAL - 1/19/11Speech: The New Age of Jefferson. Every State a Free State

To put it simply, the most astonishing thing that has happened these past two years is that the states have suddenly realized that they do not have to do what the federal government tells them to do.

The idea seemed incomprehensible when it was first presented up here in northern New England five years ago.

But today, if the Supreme Court upholds a lower judge’s ruling which allows gay marriage after the state has clearly indicated its collective will in opposition in a recent referendum, it will bring an existential situation to California. Five years ago it might have gone unnoticed. Today such a ruling would prove to Californians that their plight via Washington is no better than that of Tibet, dominated by alien and arbitrary rule by foreigners in Beijing thousands of miles away.

37 states at first initiated challenges to ObamaCare and the Obama bailouts when the Tea Party arose as movement. These states will not accept a Supreme Court ruling in opposition to their view. A Supreme Court ruling on the states’ challenge could potentially open to a legitimate revolutionary situation in America.

And it all started here in the free state of New Hampshire.

At the beginning of every movement is a wild bunch. Rowdy workers on the docks in Boston, John Brown and his half-mad family. When historians trace back to the roots of the Tea Party awakening, they will get to a wild bunch in New Hampshire called the “Free Staters.”

They moved here a few years back and live on the edge of the forest, not more than a handful at first but expecting thousands to follow, intending to start the republic fresh again. And in a way they did. I came to their attention with an article in around 2003 titled “A States’ Rights Defense against Dick Cheney” premised on Thomas Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions, making the claim that New Hampshire and Vermont need not participate in the war on Iraq without the permission of our state governors.

They had moved up here drawn to our state motto, I think – Live Free or Die. But it was no big ideological thing, more a free-spirited awakening. I received an email from one blithe spirit who said that she was basically about – quote - “ . . . opposing gun laws, legalizing marijuana and Hillary is a bitch.”

What we had in common was Thomas Jefferson’s premise that natural states formed of their own initiative. He acknowledged that in the Constitution by declaring that the states had the natural right and the ability to defend themselves against an abusive, arrogant, immoral or delirious federal government.

In the last two years this idea has taken off. I think now it cannot be held back. It will bring us a new breed of politician and a new political generation. It is already doing so.

This thinking first began to move in February, 2009, when Dan Itse, a New Hampshire state representative who is here today, read commentary related to Jefferson and the Kentucky Resolutions and proposed a 10th amendment defense against the Obama administration’s deficit spending; spending so extensive that it would tax future generations. Back in Boston my Irish relatives long ago brought the dead out to vote, but taxing the unborn was an enlightened new strategy.

It advanced again on April 15, 2009, when the Tea Party revolts started across the country. When Texas governor Rick Perry appeared at the Alamo it brought greater legitimacy to this movement. The legendary libertarian Judge Andrew Napolitano was there. Perry’s friend, Uncle Ted Nugent, brought his own inimitable style. Sarah Palin helped bring this movement nationally when she led support to governors starting in the NY 23 race, bridging the Tea Partiers and the mainstream.
And it all started up here in the woods of New Hampshire with the Free Staters. Never underestimate the power of a handful of rural red necks, duty-bound, born-again to the Constitution and hell-bent on a free vision of starting the world again.

On first reports that a group of young Libertarians was looking for a place to make a fresh start, nor'easterners responded with a Yankee sense of concerned indifference and phlegmatic detachment. It was a good place to come - cheap living shrouded in beautiful mountains with six months of snow and silence; in the spring, bear and moose wandering into your back yard and in autumn, coyotes on the edge of the woods chanting like a church choir in the night.

A few Libertarians with new ideas didn't seem like much of a threat. In New England, we understood about federalism as it had come to evolve since the Civil War. We understood what it meant and what it would bring.

New England understands federalism because we lost our very Jeffersonian original spirit to federalism in the build-up to the Civil War. Just as the South would yield to the New Yorkers - they of the "Empire State" - so too would New England submit. Our great poets and speakers, Emerson, Thoreau, Mary Moody Emerson and Bronson Alcott who brought us natural religion were our best. But in my opinion, they were also our last.

This is a consequence of federalism. New England went willfully under the banner of federalism to great effect, and now there are consequences. From 1865 onward, complaint of the nature of the federal compact had come only from the South. But now, for the first time since the Civil War, the federalist principle was being challenged by northern people and that was a consequence of the war on Iraq.

The war on Iraq began to explain federalism up here to people who had taken it for granted for 140 years. Federalism meant that if Washington, D.C. declares war on some other country for whatever purpose, the states have no say in the matter. Nor do the states have a say in any other matter.

The Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq, in full cooperation with an appeasing and weakling Congress of Easter Peeps and a cowardly and accommodating Supreme Court, bought torture, stripped Americans of their most basic Constitutional rights under the Patriot’s Act, repealed habeas corpus and unleashed other un-American and unconstitutional strategies. Men of honor lied outright at the United Nations and the press went along fully embedded in the cause. It was in my opinion inspired by “the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man,” – John Locke’s phrase to describe the very essence of tyranny.

I fully sympathized with the very human cry for vengeance after the tragic hurt of 9/11. But the sadness we felt - as great as any we had suffered in our history - was very soon thereafter manipulated by the federal government and there can be no greater betrayal of the human spirit as the manipulation of the human heart for political purposes. So at the beginning of the war on Iraq I proposed that we in the northernmost states of New England did not have to participate and under Thomas Jefferson's view of the Constitution we had the right not to participate as states.

My proposal received surprising support from the most liberal quarters in the North as it did from conservative Southerners. But most northern people I spoke to then had never before considered themselves to be citizens of a particular state and region and having particular rights as a citizen of that state. My explanation was that the state defines you - you are a citizen of a particular place on earth- a place with formidable mountains and great beauty and character and with its own way of earth, water, wind, crystal clear starry nights in winter and its own soul and traditions and its own personality.

While in federalism and its globalist visions, you are a customer; a buyer within an abstract economic policy. You are a figment of a globalist illusion. You are the faceless, uniform and undifferentiated expression of a global horde holding a little candle in a Pepsi commercial. In federalism you do not live in a place. You live in an economic zone.

We had very few supporters at the beginning of our first efforts, but one in particular, came to our support on his deathbed I am told and I have no reason to doubt it. George Kennan, America’s great post-war diplomat.

In one of his last books before he died (“Around the Craggy Hill”) the great ambassador brought forth his own vision of regionalization and it may be one suited to our day. He writes:

“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.”

Thank you.

Donald Trump/Bloomberg ’12 or Trump/ Carly Fiorina ’12 or Trump/Giuliani ‘12

Donald Trump tied for first place doesn’t come as a shock. My dental hygienist Noreen said yesterday she liked him and she is about the best indicator of real life v. the punditry. She likes Sarah Palin as well. What Trump and Palin have in common is that they are outside the box. (As author Thomas Woods says: “Not enough to think outside the box, smash it and burn it down.”) It indicates that there is more imagination and vital life force in America than there is in the sclerotic political parties. And Trump fits in my revised categories of presidential contenders in the second to top rank, right up there next to “governor of a big state” (Romney, Perry, Palin) as CEO of a major corporation, replacing this year “military commander” which is thrown out altogether. Way ahead of most of the others.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in a Trump building but they look at least as cool as Mormon temples. He might think of bringing in with him Mayor Mike Bloomberg of NY as VP or Carly Fiorina for an East/West thing. Fiorina would be my choice but with Bloomberg they could get a New York Party going. (And did somebody say Rudy Giuliani?) They might model an independent run on the great and venerable AIP, the Alaska Independence Party but for New York. Better yet, Trump/Bloomberg (or Trump/Giuliani or Trump/Fiorina) might revive Trump’s old friend Norman Mailer’s idea. Mailer and NY journalist Jimmy Breslin (“That bum is serious!” said Breslin) in 1969 ran for office to make New York City a separate state. Recently, just before his death, the great ambassador George Kennan made a similar suggestion about New York. In our climate today it could become a model for state sovereignty and Tenth Amendment political formulas. They could also revive the Mailer/Breslin campaign slogan, “No more bullshit!”

Maybe that is why people like Trump: No bullshit.

The new paradigm: “New 2012 GOP Face: Texan Rick Perry”

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/11/11

Keep going west, - Dennis Hopper, “The Last Movie”

Pictures go a long way in explaining; how would Hemingway have done without the masterful beard or James Joyce without the severe Irish angles and heavy shadowing in his face? George Orwell said we are all responsible for our own faces by the time we get to 50: Your picture becomes your icon. Which is why George W. Bush may have gotten off to such a rough start. Posed cutting brush in a brand new cowboy hat he brought to mind the “I’m a lumberjack” skit of Monty Python. Not a lumberjack, not a cowboy and not really a Texan.

It was a portrait of insincerity and the Republicans are still trying to work it through. The Bushes, try as they might, are plagued by this inauthenticity and don’t seem to fit or belong in Texas. H.W. had the same problem with the cowboy boots. Luckily, Jeb makes no claim to the West and so the traditionalists – the establishment; that is, the Eastern Establishment – hope today to bring it all back home with Jersey’s Chris Christie in front and Florida’s ex-Gov. Jeb as back up.
It might work for now but it won’t work later, because nothing will stop America’s drive to the west. It is our essential myth and destiny and more important to our centuries ahead that the Puritans short and symbol visit to New England. And the 2012 election could be the turning point to our rising destiny.

And Paul Bedard’s Washington Whispers of U.S. News and World Report reports a new Republican 2012 contender in this critical transformation. Texas Gov. Rick Perry:
“Considered a very long shot by GOP pundits and political analysts, nearly one in three of those in our [Synovate eNation Internet poll] chose Perry as the sitting governor most suited to challenger President Obama. By getting 29 percent to choose him, the two-term Perry shows that he could be a force in the upcoming Republican primaries, though it also suggests that voters aren’t satisfied with the more established GOP names in the 2012 field . . . The poll was also good news for New Jersey Chris Christie and Indiana Sen. Mitch Daniels, Christie won 27 percent, Daniels 22 percent, as the governors ready to run against Obama.”

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley came in fourth with 12% and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour fifth with 10%.

Recently, Perry had kind words for Christie because of his efforts to cut spending in New Jersey and it is interesting now that this poll pits the two potentially against each other. It follows a pattern which might be called Eastern Establishment vs. “New West” first identified in Perry’s gubernatorial primary last year. His opponent, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, had the support of the full Republican establishment; Dick Cheney, George H.S. Bush, Karen Hughes on behalf of W., Karl Rove and others. Perry had only Sarah Palin in his camp and won in a landslide.

Nikki Haley: Ronald Reagan in a skirt?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/8/11

With a memoir in the works, it's become increasingly clear that South Carolina governor Nikki Haley has Sarah Palin-sized national ambitions, writes columnist Chris Haire of the Charleston City Paper. And he says he can’t stop writing about Nikki Haley, the formidable and elegant new Tea Party governor of South Carolina.

She brings a very distinctive character and a new vision to the South. Some of the Tea Party elements moving up to the 2012 primary season have a vengeance quality – Bachmann and Ron Paul - which accentuates the dark side of the movement. But Haley was a Tea Party figure there at the beginning and can bring in the positive elements of state responsibility and sovereignty without the faux revolutionary jargon of Beck and Bachmann.

Unless more enter, Jon Huntsman, Jr. looks very good in this upcoming race and Haley might be an appealing VP choice for him. A Huntsman/Haley ticket could bring an antidote to the violent torpedo of mediocrity currently afflicting American politics and culture. It would make for a vital, young and imaginative ticket.

“As a candidate, the Republican lawmaker ran against ‘good-old-boy’ networks,” David Mildenberg writes in a recent Bloomberg report. She pledged to attack what Tim Pearson, a top campaign aide, referred to then as a “taxpayer-financed fraternity party” in Columbia, the capital.

“Likening Haley’s communications skills to ‘Ronald Reagan in a skirt,’ Representative Ralph Norman, a Rock Hill Republican, said the governor doesn’t owe anybody because when she started her campaign, nobody thought she could win.’”

But Mitt Romney shows active imagination as well and might be thinking of Haley himself as his VP. He was quick to come to her aid in her recent governor’s race and he will want to include some Tea Party accommodation in his campaign. And my observation when he was governor of Massachusetts up here is that although he may not look it in that squared away business suit, he can be the rare politician who notices and responds to useful new ideas and abstractions where others get blinded by the tradition and miss them in the passing.

Rand Paul as President?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/4/11

Long-time liberal commentator Michael Barone has commented on Fox Business that the Tea Party movement parallels that of the Sixties. The first major conference in Nashville last year did have the folksy qualities I first felt in the presence of Doc Watson and The Weavers back in Newport Rhode Island in the early 1960s.

What I've been looking at in the last two years is a kind of anthropological model based on what I saw happen there in the early Sixties when I went to high school. The Newport Folk Festival suddenly awakened our world with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The Beatles said they inspired them to greater artistic challenge. Some writers of the era say The Sixties started from there; some marking the day when Dylan switched from a natural guitar to an electric guitar. It spread like wildfire. The entire generation changed overnight in a matter of one or two years.

Overnight; when real, organic change comes, it cannot be held back. There has been that same feeling in the Tea Party; rustic, folksy, from the people. If this continues and I believe it will, I'd say it is entirely possible now to see Rand Paul emerge as the significant figure in this movement, particularly in contrast with the old-school establishment Republicans. And the competence of the old-scholars doesn’t help. It even makes the old seem more crusty and entrenched. Mitt Romney, who I admire in many ways, well establishes the contrast of the establishment with Rand Paul and the Tea Party renegades. He is good, very good, but so was Duke Ellington when The Beatles arrived. The season had passed.

In this rich and volatile environment we are seeing the moment of awakening. It is now entirely possible to see Rand Paul as President. . . . with three necessary conditions: 1) Rick Perry stays out. 2) Polls show he can carry Iowa and South Carolina in the primaries. 3) Sarah Palin stays out and endorses him.

And what a contest the Obama v. Rand Paul debate would be.

Rand Paul rises

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/31/11

It is interesting how well and how fast Rand Paul, the new senator from Kentucky, has fit in. He comes after long advance in the tail of his father Ron Paul, who might be considered the Father Abraham of the Tea Party Movement. His speeches on the Senate floor are thoughtful, informed with history and tradition and appropriate to current events and so are his frequent conversations with Judge Andrew Napolitano on Fox Business. He calls on the heroic Cassius M. Clay as his avatar, the Kentucky anti-slavery iconoclast, who placed a Bible and Bowie Knife on the podium before he spoke and frequently used the Bowie Knife. And time appears to be opening up to him.

The invasion of Libya presents the perfect possible political moment to him. Father Ron railed daily against the invasion of Iraq, but America at first required vengeance. We are not a commonly vengeful people, but will respond as the bard Toby Keith so poignantly put it at the time, with “a boot in the ass” when we are injured, and that more than anything perhaps represented the heartland feelings about the Iraq war and 9/11. But Ron Paul had what might be called a “higher law” vision and it has now captivated almost 40% of younger Republicans.

We feel this time an active dislike but no particular vengeance against Libya about any specific hurt. Ron Paul’s arguments against the Iraq invasion might be listened to more thoughtfully when they come today from son Rand.

Harry Reid says the 49% support of the Tea Party shows Americans are disinterested in it. But President Obama’s approval rating is much lower. And the times are moving toward Rand. Invariably, widespread social movements like the Tea Party move to one champion and representative. She or he has not yet been found. But it will not be any of the so-far announced Republicans, nor will it be one like Scott Walker or Mitch Daniels who primarily serve the Republican traditions. The traditions are eroding. The world is beginning again. It may be Rand Paul.

And working in his favor is a President who no longer seems to want to be President; a President seen as one of the greatest orators on record who now speaks in Oprahworld jargon of “the conscience of the world”; a President who leads neither abroad nor at home and has no clue regarding Libya. Obama was the perfect man for the times just a few short years ago, but that time is rapidly passing and a new day beckons.

Are Mormons the Aquarians?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/28/11

A psychologist in Switzerland who treats people with visions of UFOs suggested once that these images might be understood as messages from the Unconscious, as angels were when the world awaited the birth of the Christ. But today they anticipate a new age. As C.G. Jung put it in his first psychological study in 1958, UFO visions and cultural images are manifestations of psychic changes which appear at the end of one age and the beginning of another: “We are now nearing that great change which may be expected when the springpoint enters Aquarius.” And so I was interested in the juxtaposition of two stories in the Sunday op-ed pages of The New York Times; one by professor Ray Jayawardhana on alien life, to whom it “seems absurd, if not arrogant, to think that ours is the only life-bearing world in the galaxy,” and the other on Mormons by the Times long-in-the-tooth columnist, Maureen Dowd.

They kind of converge. Traditional Christianity in all its branches emerge from earth-based consciousness, with the Christ rising out of the cave or crypt as if out of the womb of the Earth Mother. Mormons believe higher consciousness comes to us from the universe. It can be seen figuratively as a UFO-related cosmology. The past 50 years of UFO dreams and visions do relate to some kind of cosmic "awakening” which is why they are rendered so important to those that have them. And incidentally, Mulder and Scully’s fabled “Area 51” of UFO cult lore is just a few hours’ drive from where Brigham Young declared, “This is the place.”

It fits Jung’s model. The previous age was one of earth and water; the Earth Mother morphed through millennia from Mary of Nazareth to Victoria. Aquarius is the age of Titans, one of sky, space and electricity (fire). Of course Aquarius is fixed in the collective consciousness as something about the Sixties. That’s the mischievous suggestion of Hermes, the Trickster. It actually began to open in 2001, the same year as the great tragedy of 9/11.

It’s the Mormon moment, says Dowd, meaning something else entirely: “The Republican Mormons Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman may run for president, braving more questions about whether they wear the sacred undergarment and more resistance from evangelicals who consider Mormonism an affront to Christianity.”

That Mormons are being met with mockery by the squalid likes of the writers of “South Park” in their new Broadway play, “The Book of Mormon” is good news for Mormons. It is what Joseph Smith expected and intended. They are being engaged and those who live inside the box – and Dowd’s been there so long she’s about to turn to stone – are afraid of them.

So Mormons may be added to the rising karma of the suddenly relevant being met in shock and denial by the suddenly irrelevant. Along with Ron Paul, Sarah Palin, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Libertarianism, the Tea Party movement and the “Twilight” series. And incidentally, commentary suggesting that the popular “Twilight” series is a mythic tale; an indigenous “creation myth” shifting American consciousness from the Italian/British model to Native American spirit and Mormon order, morality, responsibility and work ethic, brought Mormon interest and some enthusiasm.

Outside the box. But as the brilliant and brave Thomas Woods, author of “Meltdown” and “Nullification” has been saying in the Tenth Amendment Center’s current Nullify Now! national tour, "It's not enough to think outside of the box. The box needs to be crushed to the ground and set on fire..."

Canadian government falls: Bloc Quebecois will rise

The Canadian government fell today in a vote of no confidence, clearing the way for spring elections.

What could be interesting to watch in this is the Canadian temperament or the Canadian condition. I live near Canada and do not think Canadians are boring. I think they are endlessly fascinating and are to Americans as loons are to ducks, they being the loons. But something they always have to watch out for: The subliminal drive to be just like Americans. It is a denial of Canadian character. There you find a PM who resembles Reagan, then one who resembles Kennedy, and born again Stephen Harper, walking in the footsteps of George W. Bush. And they held with him a long time.

And right now they are thinking it is time to give up the pseudo-Bush thing and get on to the pseudo-Clinton/Obama path. That would be Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, who has spent most of his life working in Massachusetts as a Harvard professor and is the closest thing to an American NPR liberal one could find and still claim to be a Canadian.

Not that he would not be a good PM. But this is what I’ve seen: Canadians really are one of the most unique peoples in the world and when they fall into the American tailwind Quebec will react. Quebec will demand that they come back to the fight between the Habs and the Leafs and leave the Americans behind. A liberal Canadian government following in the wake of Obama would bring with it a Tea Party reaction and Canada already has one. It is called the Bloc Quebecois and it is the mother of all Tea Parties. I happen to know because I was there at the beginning and we based our American sovereignty efforts on those of Bernard Landry and the Bloc during the invasion of Iraq.

Sarko ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/23/11

For those who still see Bill – I mean Obama – as the center of the “global village” called HIllaryland, it will come as a shock that France wants to secede. All Bill – I mean Obama – has now in the “global initiative” are Haiti, Ireland and one or two others in its NATO military arm. But he’ll always have Nantucket.

Say goodbye to the comforting cant and familiar phrases like: “coalition of the willing,” “leader of the free world,” “the court of popular opinion,” and the “forces of good” (the phrase of Hillaryland Master Chief Anthony Weiner who compares taking action in Libya to preventing the Holocaust) and of course the “Clinton Global Initiative” and all the happy face lies and make believe we use to make global policy with their insidious totalitarian underside. Sarko wants to cut loose. He ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more. Say hello to the French Foreign Legion.

France has proposed a new committee outside NATO be responsible for overseeing military operations over Libya. The Guardian reports that at a meeting of the North Atlantic Council, the French representative reportedly stormed out after being accused of hindering NATO's involvement in the campaign. France had flatly refused to agree to the proposal, which was later agreed by a majority of member countries.

And he does the right thing for France. France is now free to be French. They will be secondary and pseudo-Americans no longer; citizens of Hollywood and Hillaryland, to a lesser degree than we regular Americans, but better than being commies. Good bye Bono and Lady Gaga. Hello Charles DeGaulle and Andre Malraux. And Eleanor, Cosette and Madeline and the 12 little girls in two straight lines. Maybe it was all about France, always.

This would mess up all the Democrats and their world priests and most of the Republicans, but I think might be alright with Rand Paul, Judge Andrew Napolitano and former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson.

“If NATO exists in ten years it will have been a failure,” said Dwight Eisenhower in 1949.

World War II is over. Americans are the last to know. It brings an absolute change in the global paradigm, the end of the ruse of globalization, which is to say the Americanization of the entire world by speed, light, air, movies, music, lies and guns.

Waiting for Dorothy: The unbearable quiet of Hadas Fogel

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/21/11

As Yoav, 11, Elad, 4, and their parents Ruth and Udi Fogel were stabbed to death by terrorists in their home in Itamar, and three-month-old Hadas who had her throat slashed, France’s Sarko urged Obama to open fire on Kadafi. These were parallel events although we on the far perimeter of the world’s four corners may not have noticed what was going on in the center of the world. Nor did we notice when Palestinian militants in Gaza fired in 50 mortar shells into Israel on Saturday, the heaviest barrage in two years.

“Slaughter of a sleeping baby is unacceptable as a tool in the struggle for any type of liberation. It comes from a dark place, from a place that simply wants to destroy you,” said Moshe Feiglin, an Israeli leader who wants Israel to turn “the state for Jews” into a “Jewish state.”

In Washington, the Shaman King was ruminating at length and with astonishing detail, in a full court press about March Madness, which incidentally, foreign readers should understand, is not about rabbits but about basketball.

It was different this time around. Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin last time led opposition to the invasion on behalf of France while Colin Powell lied outright to the UN on behalf of George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. This time there will be no lies and presumably no torture and repeal of habeas corpus. So something must have happened since then.

When he first entered office, Sarko actually came up here to New Hampshire to vacation on Lake Winnipesaukee, a purely symbolic vacation spot full of beer cans and Boston boaters and summer rentals for politicians who see our state motto, Live Free or Die, as an anthem. His wife was so bored she went back to Paris after one day and filed for divorce.

Sarko wanted then to tell us that although they opposed, the French were not cowards. And so do the liberals this time around who urged this war on Kaddafi. And Kaddafi has none of the Nazi-era swagger that Saddam had and is such a stupid looking man that he seems an easy target to those who wait timorously on the margins, waiting for Dorothy to give them courage.

It is a shadow event; an event that follows, like a shadow; the Rolling Stones to the Beatles, Emily Brontë to Charlotte Brontë, as the dark will follow the power, like a shadow follows a person walking in the light. Liberals in America want to show that they, like France, are not cowards too. But following shows neither courage nor cowardice: It is marketing; the safe repackaging of an idea already awakened by somebody else.

Now there are two approaches. From a conservative Republican perspective it is a defense of Israel; the center of the world for Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox and Islam; the four-cornered castle from which the west morphed out of barbarianism in the past 2,000 years. The non-ideological American heartland; those folksy red state Tea Party types who are not the least bit Europeanized, see that actually more clearly; they support Israel in the heart and not the head and that is more dependable.

But For Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who wanted this war when Obama did not, it is not about that at all. It is about Bill because it is always about Bill and can never be about anything else. It is about restoring the world to what it was like in the 1990s, before 9/11, to what was envisioned Bill’s “global initiative.” That is, a vision of the world in which Bill was the center and Israel was an archaic interference.

The “Palin Doctrine”: Obama follows Mama Grizzly to war in Libya

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/18/11

On March 11, 2011, Wesley K. Clark, former NATO chief, penned an op-ed in the Washington Post to say that Libya doesn’t meet the test for U.S. military action. General Clark’s statement suggested a division in liberal opinion brewing and two days later former advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Anne-Marie Slaughter, challenged his view in the New York Times saying “Colonel Qaddafi makes the most of the world’s dithering and steadily retakes rebel-held towns.” She called for a no-fly zone and discussed five main arguments against, none of which, she said, held up. Yesterday, President Obama and Secretary Clinton got their no-fly zone.

What I thought was odd about this discussion was that it appeared to begin in the mainstream press only with Clark’s thoughtful opposition while one major political figure likely to enter the presidential race of 2012 had already discussed a no-fly zone on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show: Sarah Palin.

There was no lengthy discussion or response elsewhere. To the MSM, she wasn’t there again today!

But this Wednesday, Benjamin Korn, director of Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin had a post in the New York’s “The Sun” coining the phrase “Palin Doctrine.”

In an article titled “Palin Doctrine Emerges as Arab League Echoes Her Demarche on Libya” he writes: “The call by the Arab League for Western military intervention in an Arab state — in this case asking that a UN ‘no-fly zone’ be imposed over Libya – is not only without precedent but it puts in formal terms what Governor Palin stated three weeks ago should have been America’s response to the political and humanitarian crisis now unfolding there.”

Palin had proposed a no-fly-zone to protest the armed and un-armed opposition to the Qaddafi regime on February 23, writes Korn.

The Palin Doctrine, writes Korn, “ . . . contrasts sharply with the foreign policy being conducted, if that is the word, by President Obama, who is perplexing not only the Arab world, to which he reached out in his Cairo speech at the start of his presidency, but even his own supporters in the liberal camp, and many in between, who are upset by what might be called his propensity for inaction. It’s an inaction that suggests the Arab League won’t be the only institution that might find itself surprised by the logic of the alert Alaskan.”

Irish drink? Bloomberg should tune in to “Mad Men”

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/17/11

"Normally when I walk by this building there are a bunch of people that are totally inebriated hanging out the window. I know that's a stereotype about the Irish, but nevertheless we Jews around the corner think this," New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg said during a speech at the American Irish Historical Society.

A Quinnipiac University poll found 52 percent of voters had heard about it and were not sure if they took offense. 45 percent said Irish Americans should “laugh it off.”

The Irish should brush it off, especially if they insist on naming bars all over the northeast with names like “Quigley.” Back when, everyone drank, especially the northern Europeans – English, Irish, and Russians – but the Irish seemed to do so with greater personal pride as if it were something we were particularly good at.

I’d worked on 31st and Madison for years on St. Patrick’s Day and it was a bloody sight. Bloomberg grew up where I did in the tribal Boston region where the Irish were the dominant political life force. Jews were, in my father’s phrase, “better to work for than Protestants.” The French, however, “could not be trusted” and therein lies why they fight at hockey games. It was a vastly different time. I’ve a friend whose mother was born on the same street as mine in Massachusetts and her grandfather was born in the same town in Ireland as my grandmother. She made the comment recently that back then it was considered odd to marry even another Irish person who was not in your parish. And in the church, if 1,000 people were present, at least 200 would be blood relatives.

The old ethnic neighborhoods with their cultural idiosyncrasies can still be found in Detroit and Chicago but less and less in Boston and New York. Bloomberg presents himself as somewhat behind the times. He still lives in the day of “Miller’s Crossing” when all the ethnics must answer to the Irish, as they did in Boston, New York and Chicago, because there were more of us. He might tune in to “Mad Men.”

Michael Weiner’s mastery of the times is akin to that of Gogul or Turgenev and the elegance and truth of the craft unprecedented in superb troupe acting by Bryan Batt, Myra Turley, Joel Murray and so many others. Our American condition is masterfully represented there as it is; a vast metamorphosis for every individual lucky enough to be here. What you were will disappear and what you will become has not awakened yet. You are like the Texas masked man alone in his desert between past and future and that moment is identified in this masterpiece as a moment of the new creation when the central character quits drinking and smoking. It is as if he comes out of a trance and awakens for the first time, sober, American and only that, in all its potential, joy, danger and unpredictability.

Invasions to nowhere: Gingrich, the sequel, starring himself

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/16/11

The Hill’s observations on the Republican line up reveals inherent weakness in the Republican position going into 2012. It goes from damaged goods (Newt Gingrich) to a “blank slate” (Tim Pawlenty). But time is on their side. One would never guess that the country is actually experiencing a renaissance of creative governance with Bob McDonnell in Virginia, Bobby Jindal in Louisiana, Rick Perry in Texas and even Nikki Haley in South Carolina. Two issues: First, in politics, dinosaurs rule and The Tea Party has been commandeered by the likes of Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich, refried agent provocateurs from the Clinton age (visualize that: before Pokémon, before Kurt Cobain, before Y2K, 9/11 and the 21st century) – it will be nothing but a red neck howl if it continues following that cue and in short order will be “. . . in with the dust and gone with the wind.” The anti-government tenor in Congress today resonates much like the old Gingrich; Gingrich, the sequel, starring himself. At the time it seemed inspired essentially as personal invective against a President who lived below the usual threshold of adulthood. But Gingrich has outdone him. Worth repeating is the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass’s comment on Gingrich: “Is that the Constitution in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

The second problem is the MSM embedded in the two-party system; Ford guys or Chevy guys, they are flabbergasted when a new idea occurs. I recall the cry when a Volkswagen first appeared on our streets when my father drove a car which resembled the Batmobile. As in politics so it is in the press; dinosaurs rule – maybe because they all hang together. New ideas require new generations and this will take awhile. We hate new ideas and substitute novelty.

The Tea Party was and is about states finding integrity and self-determination. Its work is that of state governors and state legislatures. A Congressman’s role in it is limited. Tea Party inherently questions the American global military empire. It was a perfect fit for the post-war period of 1947 when much of the world was in ruins or under tyranny regimes. Today it is as anachronistic as the Soviet Union.

Can we afford these invasions to nowhere which land us in Afghanistan today and who knows where tomorrow? North Carolina’s courageous representative Walter B. Jones, who lives where the soldiers live, calls for the defunding of the Afghan adventure at a time when we cannot afford to feed poor children or care for elders. Or when we are firing excellent teachers here in Haverhill, NH, in schools that can’t even meet the fire codes. What’s it going to be, global empire or local schools?

The Tea Party has brought to the Senate two good men; Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Senator Mike Lee of Utah. That is enough for now, but it is not enough.

Arizona’s lace curtain secessionists

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/15/11

First I heard about ideas like this when driving through Chapel Hill, NC, 15 years ago and listening to a radio interview with Dr. J. Michael Hill, writer and founder of The League of the South, a secessionist organization which seeks through democratic and non-violent means a “free and independent Southern republic.” It was a local NPR show and quite a generous interview as I recall. The interviewer brought to her story that morning surprise so featured in NPR stories in those days when it was discovered that penguin husbands sat on the eggs (Huh!”) or pig snouts could actually smell out Truffles in the hills of North Carolina. Now that is something to think about. And here was a guy who wanted to reawaken the Confederacy.

Before the cry of the Orcs went up, he did manage to get a word in. Isn’t it against the law to, you know, secede, asked the interviewer?

Reared in Rhode Island where we were taught funny things about the South – possibly because of the vastness of our involvement in the slave trade – I was quite surprised by the answer. As I recall, he said that it was one of those historic snafus. When Ulysses S. Grant became President after the Civil War, Jefferson Davis, President of the South, was in prison, pending, potentially, a trial for treason for advocating the secession of the Southern states. But Grant was advised that such a trial would open or reopen a can of worms because Davis may have been within his Constitutional rights in that regard. The invasion of the South as it hatched in the minds of Northern thinkers was called “higher law” in motive. It would be a moral campaign to end slavery. It was not Constitutionally sanctioned. In fact, Jefferson had written a secession clause in Virginia’s Constitution and New York and Rhode Island had one too. (Huh!)

This little breach of Constitutional etiquette did not go unnoticed here in Vermont and New Hampshire when George W. Bush invaded Iraq, an invasion which took place with full cooperation of an appeasing and weakling Congress of Easter Peeps and a cowardly and accommodating Supreme Court; an invasion which bought torture, stripped Americans of their most basic Constitutional rights, repealed habeas corpus and unleashed other un-American and unconstitutional strategies. An invasion for which men of honor lied outright at the United Nations and the press went along fully embedded in the cause.

It was in my opinion inspired by “the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man,” – John Locke’s phrase to describe the essence of tyranny. So secession was proposed in Vermont.

Now liberal Arizona wants to secede from conservative Arizona simply because it lost influence in a recent election. Author Paul Starobin, author of After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age, wonders what California would look like broken in three? Or a Republic of New England. “Picture an America that is run not, as now, by a top-heavy Washington autocracy but, in freewheeling style, by an assemblage of largely autonomous regional republics reflecting the eclectic economic and cultural character of the society,” he has written.

Capote’s Holly Golightly meets Nathan Bedford Forrest. In an age where world opinion is formed on Oprah’s couch, Nobel Prizes are given to just anybody and Lady Gaga forms the mind or mindlessness of a generation, the question that should be asked is, is there anything left? Is there anything to retrieve? Is there anything worth retrieving?

Israel and the Tea Party: Rick Perry, Sarah Palin and Heartland America support Israel

Two overviews dominate American influence on Israel; the one emerging from that old Pepsi commercial of a bunch of waifs holding little candles in some kind of world concert singing “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony”. This is team Hillary, with help from Bono and Bill. They want to turn back to the 1990s. The other is the Kagan/Kristol axis who sends their littles like Charles Krauthammer to the major media. Loosely called the neocons, it is a small group with a big vision; a vision of America suited to 1946. They want to turn back to the 1980s.

Israel, like China and Germany, has moved solidly into the second decade of the 21st century and both these views put Israel in jeopardy. The Hillary/Bono people see no distinction between Moses and for example Muammar Gaddafi – we are all the same inside. The others really see the world with important places like America and Israel and a few unreliable friends, surrounded by dangerous enemies. This is a version of the British “frogs and wogs” variety.

Ron Paul’s criticism of this is well known and he has been called an anti-Semite because of his views. The neocon view wants American military influence everywhere including and especially Israel and Paul opposes this. His Congressional rants do indict Israel for seeking and finding vast sums from American pockets for Israeli’s defense. I don’t know if Ron Paul is an anti-Semite but there should be a distinction between anti-Israeli polemic and anti-Semitism. Paul opposes American foreign policy everywhere, including and especially Israel.

But there is no question that this has fostered new anti-Semetic attitudes in some of his follower. Many professional libertarians share Ron Paul’s views on Israel. Recently, the Republican Jewish Coalition rejected a proposal by Sen. Rand Paul to end foreign aid, including aid to Israel, as "misguided.”

Something in the relationship between Israel and America changed at 9/11. We in the United States suffered a direct attack on our most important symbols by Israel’s enemies. Heartland America was changed by 9/11. To the heartland, which does not share in East Coast Europeanism and like Texas Governor Rick Perry does not care what they think in New York, Israel became our closest friend. The Hillary/Bono axis and the neocons and even the newly influential libertarians don’t see it because they are bound by ideology. And they are largely East Coasters and don’t understand the heart-based thinking of America. But heartland drives America; increasingly so, and this is what America will be. A savage attack like those on 9/11 brings it out.
The Tea Party – the non-ideology Jacksonian populist uprising – instinctively understands this and the two major politicians closest to it do as well. That would be Texas Governor Rick Perry and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. They are Israel’s best friends in America.

This, at its core, explains the breach today among conservatives. Tea Party America, especially the rough and tumble variety here in the heartland, have like Israel, China and Germany, entered the new century with a clear, existential view of the world and our place in it. The others are still stuck in the past.

Let Brady, Manning and Brees run the country as a Council of Watchers

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/11/11

As the pending government shutdown looms, we might think to let famed quarterbacks Tom Brady, Peyton Manning and Drew Brees run the country. They have offered themselves as plaintiffs in the event of an NFL shutdown, and their instincts for leadership, management, problem solving and the ability to get along with others is legendary. The NFL lockdown clearly runs a parallel with the government shutdown. But compare these quarterbacks and the skills, dedication and physical courage of their teammates to the motley crew in D.C. today.

A country that thinks about football more than it thinks about politics is a healthy country and one with a life force and a future, but sometimes that inattentativeness can let things slip. So we might hold on with Brady, Manning and Brees after the shutdown as a kind of Triumvirate and let them form their own Council of Watchers to keep an eye on things while we are watching football.

Because anything can happen when you are not paying attention. The Supreme Court might randomly decide that a privately-owned power company in Quebec can take over say, former Supreme Court Justice David Souter’s private house in New Hampshire. Or it might decide that individuals can be forced to buy health insurance. Then such a crisis occurs that the only honest recourse once people wake up to what has happened is a Constitutional Convention. Or the Supremes and Congress might even decide that every single school-aged child, like those 90 with babies in one high school alone in Kentucky, needs an iPad more than she needs a father. There is no telling.

In ancient times we had such a Council of Watchers. It was called “the Senate.” Late in life the great ambassador George Kennan proposed that we need a new one; a kind of Council of Elders with political autonomy made up of people we trust; people who might be better than the rest of us in some ways – gods really – to bring us back to the path when we, the earthly mortals, get lost in the woods.

Christie vs. Palin? Guts and Gonads conservatives prefer Rudy

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/9/11

The Hill reports this morning that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Sarah Palin are engaged in a feud of “rock star proportions.” This follows the trend of party division which rose to anxiety in the Texas governor’s primary last spring. The traditionalists, including George H.W. Bush, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Karen Hughes –as proxy for W. – lined up against Rick Perry. Sarah Palin lined up for Perry all by herself and he won in a landslide. Since, even Barbara Bush, dowager of the Bush souls, has joined the faint-of-heart chorus which cries out for the sending of Palin back to Alaska. But wishing doesn’t make her go. Chris Christie is the East Coast establishment’s new single combat warrior against Palin. But “Guts and Gonads” conservatives are calling for Rudy Giuliani.

“Guts and Gonads” make Rudy the only choice in 2012, writes Joan Swirsky of Right Side News in a commentary which has been reprinted elsewhere.

“If you visit any online or neighborhood bookstore, you will see dozens of books about leadership, all of them—except Rudy Giuliani’s “Leadership” - written by corporate or policy wonks who wrote their treatises based more on high-falutin’ theory than on “real life” experience . . . In fact, Giuliani’s 2005 book is the only book on this subject that doesn’t have a lengthy gobbledygook subtitle, but rather stands on that single word alone to describe what millions of people around the world wanted to know after September 11, 2001: How did he rise to the occasion to lead a city—indeed a world—out of the deep despair and paralyzing fear that gripped every sentient person after the worst attack in history on the American homeland?”

She may have something there. Another word comes to mind: Spine.

If the race to 2012 looks like it hasn’t started yet although Mitt Romney is shaking hands up here in New Hampshire and Tim Pawlenty is quoting the Bible in Utah, it is because it hasn’t. There is an elephant in the room and that elephant is the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The 2012 race will start there. We have, with Obama, put it aside and hoped it will go away, but it will not. We hope to do so again it is my impression with that jolly Kris Kringle of conservatism, Chris Christie. But it will not go away. The density, the immensity of the tragedy will ring for a thousand years, especially the events in New York City. They try to keep the pictures out of our consciousness, but whenever the Twin Towers pop up in an old film, it comes back – it sends a chill.

Patterns of history run like this: After the Second World War the world wished for peace, but Eisenhower was brought back. In England, Churchill was rejected for socialist Clement Attlee – and President Obama sending the Churchill bust back to England suggests the same temperament – but Churchill was brought back. We are today in the same valley. Christie’s comments on the 9th anniversary of 9/11, like Obama’s, were puerile and forgiving (Palin’s were not). But as it is our nature to recall these things and it must be, it is Rudy, who instinctively rushed to his front like a soldier on 9/11. He still lives there like that in our hearts with the fire fighters who rushed up the stairwells of the Twin Towers to certain death without hesitation.

It will never go away. And we will come out again in September.

Draft Carly Fiorina

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/8/11

Mitt Romney liked to say about his Democratic opponents in the 2008 race that not one of them had managed as much as a corner grocery store. A most relevant observation and as co-founder and head of Bain Capital, one that should put Romney at the top of the heap today. Of course, he was Governor of Massachusetts as well but he must not have felt dominion with that state as he lives part-time in New Hampshire now, which is different. And in the current day, it is hard to see that he was a successful governor as his health care plan is out of vogue, and he only seemed to want to be governor as a step to the Presidency. Nevertheless, he was enormously successful as a CEO and should continue to go with that. In fact, I’ve decided to update Quigley’s Grading Scale for Presidential Viability and put “CEO of a Major Corporation” second from the top, throwing out “Top Military Commander” entirely.

In fact, in our new century, maybe “CEO of a Major Corporation” should be first in place of “Governor of a Big State.” But big state should be included as a reality check. This is where power orients, and there are five: California, Texas, New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

Romney is up here now and Tim Pawlenty is out there quoting the Bible in Iowa. It’s the “new” Romney. “His tie – ever present in 2008 – was gone. His hair – always perfectly coifed – flopped over his forehead.” No, it is not about this at all; it is not about looking different, it is about thinking different, being different. Image will naturally emerge. One thing you have to admire about Dick Nixon: He never blow dried his hair. And a Republican publicist pitching a book to tell politicians how to “win” in 2012, says Pawlenty has “the perfect temperament” to be President. There is a phrase they use on the TV drama “Mad Men” when they have doubts; better “run it by Don” first.

In this regard, the Republicans suffer from what might be called the “Duck Phillips Syndrome”; reference to an ad man masterfully presented by Mark Moses. Duck is the ad man who constantly wants to repeat the past, when the future is opening like a hurricane. As it is today. Choice Republican candidates today look like they were drawn from a survey of Knights of Columbus, Veterans of Foreign Wars, those guys who work at National Review and the Baptist Convention. They might run it by Don first.

There is no one in this race from California, our most influential and creative state and there should always be. And Romney’s claim that the Democrats couldn’t run a candy store pretty much fits this Republican line up as well.

Need new ideas, not new hair. New people relevant to the day and the zeitgeist. Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina – like Romney – both lost their races in a quirky state. But they were the best candidates in their races, they were right in their approaches and history will vindicate them. And both, like Romney, are qualified in our time not because of their political backgrounds but because of their business leadership and vision. They should both go to the top of the list in 21st century America.

A good day for Israel

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/4/11

David Horovitz writes today in the Jerusalem Post RE the “era defining series of popular uprisings”: “Exacerbating our concern is the striking failure of our much-vaunted intelligence services to see any of this coming.” We have heard that before, most recently when the money crashed, but first in our time with the fall of the Soviet Union. But all these things were well predicted, it was just that they who made the predictions were completely ignored by the press. It was suggested then that the fault fell to the feet of political science. It is not really a science, they said. Why don’t we just do without it and downsize by eliminating those departments of political science and sociology from the university? When history and literature and language were studied instead, knowing was complex and its practitioners vast.

I don’t know why Israeli intelligence is so confused by this because the conservative, bearded Israelis I’ve been talking to for a year now have been predicting a new Israel rising out of the old as a butterfly rises out of its casing; inevitably, turmoil would surround. But one of the problems I think is that the commentary in Israel is a Western/American hybrid. Jerusalem Post and Hareetz read like New York newspapers. But Israel is not by its nature a western country and increasingly it is no longer an America annex. It is a Jewish country.

I predict that this turmoil will bring a good day for Israel. Israel is awakening to a new generation. Rabbi Dov Ber will bring the rising karma; Lenny Bruce and Seinfeld will be left behind. It will be a generation which feels comfortable with bearded Russian rabbis – the kind that rode yellow school buses from Crown Heights to the Diamond District in New York 30 years ago to keep apart from us Jews and gentiles alike. Israelis will feel as comfortable with them as Tibetans do to Buddhist monks. They are/will be the heart of Israel. That rules out most of my New York friends of 30-years ago, but I find my college-age kids and their Jewish friends are increasingly comfortable with it.

The rabbis told us centuries back that the “gods” hide in lowly places, so I don’t look to the political scientists; they usually miss the turning as they did again this time. I do watch the Academy Awards. And this year brought a harbinger. The show was hosted by the immature and talentless Anne Hathaway and James Franco, representing the Hollywood that never grew up. But what was interesting was that the key awards brought our world back to first principles: The one was given to a British man in the role of an English king, an elder in our tradition. The other given to a Jerusalem-born woman who happened to be with child, representing a force even deeper and older; a force even timeless. I felt it suggested in archetypal terms a return to tradition and adulthood and a good day ahead. Possibly we will even find our center.

Chris Christie is the Republican Barack Obama

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 3/3/11

The Republicans are looking for an anomaly; someone joyful and charming – a happy fat man maybe; a novelty and a brief entertainment to hold off Sarah Palin. It is exactly the same situation the Democrats were in in 2008 facing a future of Hillary Clinton as candidate. Obama saved the day. He was charming, he was handsome, he was black and he reminded people a little of JFK. And he was not Hillary Clinton. Christie is charming and jolly, interesting to watch and sort of interesting to listen to compared to most Republicans (like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum). And he is not Sarah Palin.

Republicans have been experiencing low blood sugar for so long that it has become their everyday experience. They will recall this phrase because it is from the 1950’s; the Ted Mack Amateur Hour; they have “tired blood.” It has been like this since Bob Dole.

When I interviewed William F. Buckley, Jr. many years ago he said that with Ronald Reagan conservatives experienced a dream come true. But all the excitement seems to have worn them out. Instead of the Gipper, the Republicans have become the party of the Bushes. And the Bushes are unremarkable. All of them. H.W. was nothing but a closer for Reagan and he has made the Republican Party a nostalgia party. That his son was elected was a feature of a receding self-governing temperament, just as the Hillary (wife of Bill) impulse was. Self governance had reached its lowest water mark and was beginning to grovel toward the monarchist default.

Now they are looking for somebody merely interesting to go against Obama as Obama went against Hillary. But there was no substance behind Obama and we today suffer the consequences. What we know about Christie is he effectively yells against government workers; like a New Jersey “Big Daddy.” We know little else. And the conversation keeps going back to that as if that is the core of the problem in America.

The problem in both parties is that they are beholden to the traditions; a situation reinforced by mainstream media which refuses to enter the new century and strives to repeat the past. Isn’t that what American Idol is all about? Let’s find the “new “ Michael Jackson; the “new” Elvis. There is no new Elvis. That was the idea of Elvis. He was new. You can’t be new twice. Second time around you are nostalgia which wears on the heart and wearies the mind as the Bushs and Clintons do.

The Democrats had some great people coming up eight years ago including Mark Warner, senator today and a very successful governor of Virginia. Wesley Clark, former NATO commander, as well. And Jim Webb, a truly novel warrior, writer and Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy. The Democrats had little interest in them. All they could think of was “rock stars” and escapist governors from the backwoods of Vermont like Howard Dean.

With Alaska’s Sarah Palin, with Texas governor Rick Perry, with Virginia governor Bob McDonnell, with former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, Jr. the potential today is vast and the future opens up to them. Conservatism is on the verge of being born potentially to a historic new age of self governance and it terrifies the Republicans.

Rick Perry 1, Obama 0

by Bernie Quigley

for The HIll on 3/1/11

. . . states rights, states rights, states rights . . . ! – Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, at the first Tea Party event on April 15, 2009

To put it simply, the most astonishing thing that has happened these past two years is that the states have suddenly seen, as if through a glass darkly, that they do not have to do what the federal government tells them to do. Consider the consequences. The idea seemed incomprehensible when it was first presented up here in northern New England five years ago. Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s truly shocked comment when she was told she couldn’t just do anything she wanted was, “Are you serious? Are you serious?” Today, the Supreme Court faces state sovereignty challenges which promise to shake the nation.

If the Supreme Court upholds a lower judge’s ruling which allows gay marriage after the state has clearly indicated its collective will in opposition in a referendum, it will bring an existential situation to California. Five years ago it might have gone unnoticed. Today such a ruling would prove to Californians that their plight via Washington is no better than that of Tibet, dominated by alien and arbitrary rule by foreigners thousands of miles away.

37 states at first initated challenges to ObamaCare and the Obama bailouts when the Tea Party arose as a movement on April 15, 2009. The lower courts rulings have been clearly politicized. These states, most of which are in proximity to one another, will not accept a Supreme Court ruling in opposition to their view and will likewise see the federal government reaching into realms where it has no right to be. A Supreme Court ruling on the states challenge to ObamaCare could potentially open to a legitimate revolutionary situation.

So the President has backed down. “Obama backtracks on health mandate, wants opt-out from start,” reads The Hill headline. President Obama backed a significant change to the healthcare reform law for the first time Monday, supporting a plan that could delay implementation of the unpopular mandate to buy insurance.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said Obama’s change of position “makes the case” that Republicans have made against the entire law.

Rick Perry 1, Obama 0.