The Sarah Palin show trial (Sarah Palin/Nikki Haley ’12)

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/11/11

From Washington Post coverage of Sarah Palin’s email cashe: “Palin, who since coined the phrase ‘Mama Grizzlies’ to warmly describe female conservatives, wrote an impassioned e-mail to an aide in March 2008 about criticism of female politicians: “ ‘they’ said the same thing throughout my career — ‘too young’, ‘pregnant’, ‘kids’ . . . ‘She won’t be able to do it’ . . . This coming from good ol’ boys who don’t like change . . . And so far along in my career we’ve proved them wrong at each turn.””

The good ol’ boys who don’t like change brought their women with them when they went after Palin in 2008. They also went after South Carolina’s new governor Nikki Haley with even more despicable attempts, reviving old South strategies used effectively during Jim Crow. What was telling in both these cases that women in the press stood to the side when Haley was under attack and in Palin’s case, actively initiated scrorn and contempt.

But there is a spider woman quality that lurks behind these women: Haley has since been on the cover of Newsweek and is commonly mentioned now as a vice president candidate in 2012. And South Carolina’s legislature, considered one of the worse in the country, is feeling her scourge. While those who lashed out at Palin or attempted to sandbag her (not “one of us” – she uses a Garfield calendar and reads C.S. Lewis, has children, shoots bears and eats them) like those who tapped the Egyptian crypts are followed by bad luck: Chrales Hanson and Katie Couric after deceptive, dishonest, garden path interviews are retired to the reading room after decent interval; after the giggles, Letterman found himself in a heap of trouble, and after the NYT’s, in one of the most bizarre and propagandistic pieces of front-page reporting in the history of the written word, claimed she was responsible for a mad killer’s shooting in Arizona, the editor was sent back to the trenches.

The Washington Post’s initial coverage of the Palin emails, which hordes of reporters are filing through in an unprecedented action obviously looking to publically embarrass the VP candidate of 2008. One investigative reporter reported that she once said, “Sheesh” and is this time strangely fair and eventhe NYTs and Wa Post issued open calls to readers asking them to “investigate” emails fro mher tenure as governor of Alaska.

But headlines and leads are remarkably even-handed: “A cache of e-mails released Friday add vivid new color and fresh details to the complicated public portrait of Sarah Palin, who displayed many of the same strengths, and shortcomings, as Alaska governor that she would later bring to the national political stage.”

From McClatchy Newspapers: “Emails released yesterday from Sarah Palin’s time as Alaska’s governor show a double-fisted Blackberry user fully comfortable with handling nearly every aspect of state government from her private and state email accounts.”

Prediction: This will bring an Ollie North moment. In July 1987, Oliver North, a Marine colonel, was called to testify before televised hearings of a joint Congressional committee that was investigating Iran-Contra. Cards of support which came in were left in piles on the desk. The show trial attempts flipped and Col. North became an overnight national folk hero.

Is Romney sincere in his Tea Party pitch?
By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/7/11

I’d say so.

“I’m going to insist that Washington respect the Constitution,” he told an audience up here in New Hampshire last week. He said he would “return responsibility and authority to the states for dozens of government programs – and that begins with a complete repeal of Obamacare.”

Many who claim Tea Party status have already forgotten that was/is what it is all about: Constitutional government and state sovereignty as outlined in the Tenth Amendment. But Romney was listening to Tea Party ideas as governor of Massachusetts several years before the phrase Tea Party even appeared.

And he was first to use the phrase “one size does not fit all” in opposition to federal government long before it became popular with others.

Romney inherently understands state sovereignty as it is outlined in the Constitution. He didn’t have to “re-learn” it as so many others have done. Even when gay marriage arose as a political position in Massachusetts, he used a states’ rights defense. In a speech to the Federalist Society, he said that judges should not be able to trump state legislation and that Massachusetts already has statutes governing marriage. In contrast, Michelle Bachman, pride of the Tea Party, proposed a federal solution.

His claim that when elected President he would immediately grant a waiver on Obamacare to every state is clever and offers a path to easing into a solution without chaos.

As governor of Massachusetts, Romney showed that he would learn from new ideas and that he understood the contours of change on a historic scale. He was among the first of “establishment” conservatives to support the Tea Party movement and with Sarah Palin, came forth without hesitation to support beleaguered Tea Party favorite Nikki Haley in South Carolina.

Dems find courage, conviction and common sense in Dennis Kucinich

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/6/11

Kucinich’s anti-war Resolution might be the moment on which the Democrats can regroup and even begin again. Last Wednesday, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) made the following statement after his resolution, H. Con. Res. 51, to end the war in Libya was pulled from the Floor calendar and postponed:
“I am disappointed that the President and leadership feel the need to buy even more time to shore up support for the War in Libya. It’s not surprising that some are now wondering if a preliminary vote count on my resolution came out in favor of defending the Constitution.”

Been a long time coming. A turning seemed to be ahead five years ago when Marcos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos and a commentator at The Hill, talked of a new generation rising in the Democratic party with former governor, now Virginia senator, Mark Warner and Virginia Senator Jim Webb. But conservatives stole the agrarian fire.

Problem was the Clintons, said Kos. “ . . . the New York senator is part of a failed Democratic Party establishment -- led by her husband -- that enabled the George W. Bush presidency and the Republican majorities, and all the havoc they have wreaked at home and abroad,” he wrote in the Washington Post on May 7, 2006.

Will these Clinton-era Democrats never go away, asked Kos on his famous blog?

Apparently not. One appears now to be Secretary of State. And I don’t see that Obama has brought the cure to awaken a new liberal strategy and culture. He is an adult. He completes the Kennedy age. But he seems a one night stand and like the Clintons, a parlor liberal, more suited to the blithe sensibilities of the summer crowd at Martha’s Vineyard than to Sarah Palin’s mighty bunch of farmers, fishermen, veterans, bikers, preachers, red necks, guys named Darryl and Ted Nugent.

And this: The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation. – Barack Obama, Dec. 20, 2007.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

Kucinich’s anti-war resolution on Libya is a repudiation of the current Democratic leadership and direction.

During the war on Iraq, Moulitsas was a big supporter of Howard Dean’s anti-war position. I felt was a mistake: It went to the marginal in a time of crisis. But Moulitsas once mentioned that he first supported Clark. General Wesley Clark had the better ideas about the invasion of Iraq.

Clark was right again this spring in regard to Libya as well. And like Kucinich, he went again in opposition to the main thrust the Democratic leadership would take. Libya didn’t meet the test for U.S. intervention, Clark wrote in the Washington Post on March 11, 2011.

“. . . as Moammar Gaddafi looks vulnerable and Libya descends into violence,” wrote Clark, “familiar voices are shouting, once again: ‘Quick, intervene, do something!’ It could be a low-cost win for democracy in the region. But before we aid the Libyan rebels or establish a no-fly zone, let's review what we've learned about intervening since we pulled out of Vietnam.”

With the impending irrelevance of both Anthony “Sticky Fingers” Weiner (Google it) and John Edwards, north and south aspects of Clinton/Obama-era salon liberalism may be descending. Clinton/Obama seems today the party of the very rich and fashionable, and this is what has brought wind to the sails of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.
Kucinich brings the opportunity to start from scratch, back home with the people.

Dennis Kucinich on 20-years of war

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/26/11

War changes people. After the Mexican War, contention between the urban, industrializing northeast and the rustics of the heartland was no longer metaphysical. It began to take form as physical contention. After the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, war which had been brewing – in Churchill’s estimation – since the Boer wars began to bring blood to the streets and it wouldn’t stop flowing until Yalta. It began in 1914 but America wasn’t fully ready to fight until Pearl Harbor, 1941. And as Ulysses S. Grant said about earlier conflict: If you didn’t serve you would be left out. We have been at war for ten years now and those pundits, politicians and salon diplomats most reluctant to go at first lead the way here at the end against Kaddafi. Last to serve, they end up at the front of the parade when the war is over. 'Twas ever thus in war. My uncles and cousins and grand uncles and great grand uncles, participants in peace and war from Cemetery Ridge to Khe Sahn, had a name for them: “flag wavers.”
This war will change us as well. In my opinion it will psychologically empower the heartland as the Mexican War did, because that is where most of the soldiers and veterans live. It already has.
Some of different opinion and culture, have been honorable throughout: Virginia Senator Jim Webb, General Wesley Clark, Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold, the late Robert C. Byrd, senator from West Virginia, and Col. Lawrence Wilkerson come first to mind. But the unique, creative and possibly most singular and different individual in a compliant and appeasing Congress, Dennis Kucinich, representative from Ohio, belongs to the “honorable throughout” group as well and it is worth listening to what he has to say about “Permanent War and the National Security State.”
Because it is more than ten years. It started more than 20 years ago when then President George W. Bush climbed the mountain then turned around, going after Saddam Hussein in 1990, then leaving him standing, like the noble Duke of York, who was neither up nor down.
From Rep. Kucinich’s press release:
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a leading advocate for peace, today offered a broad critique of the National Defense Authorization Act which continues disastrous policies in Libya, and allows for permanent, global war and reauthorizes harmful provisions of the Patriot Act.
“I am offering an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill which would defund the war in Libya.
“The war is unconstitutional. The President did not come to this Congress, he went to the U.N. Security Council, he went to a number of international bodies, but he didn't come to the United States Congress. Last week, the President did not observe the tolling of the War Powers Act, so he's in violation of the statute.
“The action over in Libya has already exceeded the U.N. mandate; it's in violation of the U.N. mandate and there have been violations of international law.
“What are we doing there? Why does anyone think we can afford it? Why aren't we trying to find a path to peace so we aren’t called upon to spend more money there? These are questions we have to be asking; that's why Congress needs to say we're not going to spend more money there.”

Proposed New York agenda for Texas Governor Rick Perry

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/3/11

From the NY Daily News: “Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who's been tinkering with the idea of a run for the White House, will be the keynote speaker at the New York Republican County Committee’s Annual Lincoln Dinner on June 14, 2011.”
Gov. Perry’s attendance at the New York County Republican Dinner proves that New York is still the center of the universe, for politics and otherwise, said state GOP Chairman Ed Cox, who will also speak.

But is New York City still the center of the universe? The great papers are gone, the Yankees have been beaten by Boston twice in the World Series, and when the stocks crashed in 2007 the bell broke on Wall Street. The legendary investor Jim Rogers, who co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros, said it was all over for New York and London, which had been booming with investor money since the 1980s. You don’t need Wall Street to invest nowadays. All you need is one of those nerd machines; smart phones or something. Rogers moved to Singapore.

Wasn’t always like that. Once was New York City boomed in letters and cash flow, and the most prominent among us – Willa Cather, Truman Capote and editors like Esquire’s Harold T.P, Hayes and Harper’s Willie Morris – were from the heartland. The idea then was that the South and the heartland and places like Texas had something that was part of us and we were only partial without them.

Even Imus – and I hope you talk to Imus when you are up here – said not long ago when NYTs columnist Frank Rich quit to write a column for New York Magazine; “New York Magazine? I haven’t read that since Clay Felker [of Missouri] was editor.”
It is all going on now in places in the middle where all the farms and commodities are, says Rogers, which is practically everywhere between New York City and Los Angeles. He advises his clients to trade in the Macerates for John Deeres and to buy farmland.

The shift of population, economy and influence to the southwest and west, has made us New Yorkers pouty. What role will we have in the Texas Century we wonder? Will 150 years of northern scorn have a price? I hope y’all not gonna hold a grudge. Because the question all Americans have to ask today is: Can France exist without Paris, China without Beijing, Italy without Rome, and America without New York City?

But there is still much timeless and some good new stuff here so here is a proposed agenda: A measure of any major western city today is the quality of its Chinatown and New York’s is the greatest. Lunch there or maybe meet Judge Andrew Napolitano at Fanelli’s Café between Mercer and Greene. I think the Judge works nearby. Then walk up to the Strand Bookstore, with 18 miles of new, used and rare books, and go left over to Chelsea to the new Rubin Museum of Art which features art from the Himalayas. I hear it’s terrific. Meet Donald Trump at the White Horse Tavern where Dylan Thomas died drinking on Hudson Street in the West Village. I’m sure he will take you someplace nice for dinner.

Anthony Weiner’s problem
By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 6/2/11

Anthony Weiner’s problem is that he is no longer a good fit for New York. It might be New York’s problem.

One absolutely Aquarian mystery arose in New York City in the real time of “Mad Men” which was about when Weiner was born - the sudden appearance of Jews with long whiskers and black overcoats riding yellow school buses to the diamond district.
When the orthodox Jews arrived from Russia, New Yorkers did not relate to torah as a guide. In the time of “Mad Men,” Israel was a secular state, a socialist state, led by kibbutznik Golda Meir, born in Ukraine but raised in Milwaukee.

But the return of religious, orthodox Jews to New York and Israel is one of the most important events in the post-war period and potentially in the history of faith. New York’s secular Jews like everyone else there then would have a difficult time relating to a sacred state – a state guided by God’s truths as prescribed by torah, and not necessarily John Locke’s or Karl Marx’s.

Caroline Glick, a prominent Israeli columnist, writes that President Obama’s “ . . . icy glares at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office last Friday, his address before the AIPAC conference on Sunday, and his subsequent press briefings have all made clear that he is not sympathetically inclined toward Israel, nor does he consider Israel an ally worth defending.” Why are American Jewish leaders defending Obama, she asks?

One plausible explanation, she writes, is that “Jewish leaders are concerned that their fellow American Jews are more attached to their identity as Democrats than they are to their identity as Jews.”

That is, more attached to Obama or Bill Clinton (who married Weiner, a Jew) than to the path of torah.

As I write about Israel rising today as a sacred state, I regularly receive mail from American Jews with anti-Semetic caricatures of orthodox Jewry and the followers of Dov Ber of Lubavitch.

Weiner has been a strong supporter of Israel, but his neurosis suggests a state of crisis of identity, and it is one that virtually all of my Woodstock Age Jewish friends are experiencing.

American democracy is a secular world (conquering) vision. Israeli today and likely increasing into the future, is rising to be a torah-based state.

They certainly cannot understand it to be a better state, a state of “higher law.” But in the end, the democratic, globalist vision which is the New York state of mind of recent times, and the sacred torah-based state rising today in Israel are incompatible.

Netanyahu, Perry, Trump and Palin

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/31/11

Did MSM really think that Donald Trump would go away because an elderly correspondent called him a “racist”? How did it work out back in June, 2009, when David Letterman called Sarah Palin a “slut”?

Donald Trump, interviewed by Neil Cavuto this week, had the same steam in his walk. He came across with ideas which are not coming up with the usually “establishment” candidates. They are powerful ideas and they are ideas which will be heard and taken seriously.

If anyone truly believes that Trump is a racist they share the moral complexity and density of a spider plant. It is a technique timeless to the demagogue, institutionalized in our time by Saul Alinsky. But his ideas will be considered because Trump, like Palin, now has folk status: the minions of Big Brother have tracked him down. Of course, he will be back stronger, bigger, better and more brash. He is writing a book on politics and people will listen because people always listen to Donald Trump – his is a mainstream American channel, like Oprah’s, like Letterman’s. And Trump has been endorsed by the two of the most popular religious leaders in America; Franklin Graham and Mike Huckabee. And that means to the America of big stormy stock cars and F 150s and .30-06’s. It means something to Sarah Palin’s America and Texas governor Rick Perry’s.

Which is saying something for a New Yorker. The only other I can think of who shares that true heartland karma is Rudy Giuliani, who was last married at Graceland, I believe. In fact, Trump and Palin might be considered, for lack of a better phrase, “Giuliani conservatives.” To recall, Palin was at a Yankee’s game with Giuliani when Letterman slandered her. It gave her a fresh future. This will give Trump one as well.

Trump will kick off the evening session at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference and strategy briefing this week. Get ready: Applause will come from this major group of social conservatives like that which came to Benjamin Netanyahu in his historic address to Congress.

Worth observing that there has been a regular occurrence of roaring this week with Netanyahu, interrupted 57 times in Congress, Palin who rolled with the thunder into the nation’s capital on a Harley, and Trump, reemerging on the Cavuto show. And wait till they get to hear Rick Perry. Market-wise, this accidental quaternity works well together are bringing something new; a power, a determination, perspective and enthusiasm that did not appear in politics in recent decades. It is a door that has opened – it was opened by Sarah Palin - that will not be closed.

Trump may be out of the running for president in 2012, but like Mitt Romney, Ross Perot and other corporate chiefs – include Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, Mike Bloomberg and others – his positions and work and life experience should put him in the highest rank of candidate. He might make a nice running mate in this rising campaign which is delightfully outside the box and rapidly leaving the pale and watery behind.

Consider Perry/Trump ’12 or Palin/Trump ’12. There could not be a better salesman for the American spirit as it rises as if born again fearless and free into the new century.

Will Sarah Palin denial now turn to panic?
By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/26/11

The horror! The horror! Mr. Kurtz last words

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Sarah Palin might run for president in 2012. The Washington Post headline is “Palin signals she still has White House ambitions, stokes speculation with latest moves.” The NY Times reports today that “Signs Grow That Palin May Run.” From the NYTs:

Sarah Palin is fortifying her small staff of advisers, buying a house in Arizona — where associates have said she could base a national campaign — and reviving her schedule of public appearances. The moves are the most concrete signals yet that Ms. Palin, the former governor of Alaska, is seriously weighing a Republican presidential bid.

A new Gallup survey out today, completed after decisions by Mitch Daniels, Mike Huckabee, and Donald Trump not to run for president, shows Palin in second place, close behind leader Mitt Romney.

It may be that the MSM no longer reports news, but denies news. This was reported first by Real Clear Politics and repeated by Drudge. It has been said here from the beginning: It is now and always has been about Sarah Palin. On the Republican side, the rest is side meat.

Netanyahu speaks as America’s patriarch. Sarah Palin prepares to enter.

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/25/11

The century ahead could be seen to have taken shape this past week with President Obama’s stunning claim – a wish really – that Israel repeal 50 years of history and return to its indefensible 1967 borders. It was followed by an address yesterday by Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that shook the halls of Congress. Obama then, travelling in Europe, where he feels most comfortable, brought forth an op ed in The Times of London with England’s Prime Minister David Cameron, calling the “Arab Spring” a situation similar to the fall of the Soviet Union, and comparing themselves to be the modern day Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Possibly this helped Netanyahu. His speech was greeted with roaring applause and dozens of standing ovations. For the first time in my memory, and Israeli leader appeared as an authentic American patriarch; a strong and ancient Father Abraham here to speak – to intervene, perhaps – on our behalf.

This administration, which clearly takes its initiatives from Bono and pop culture mavens like Bob Geldof of The Boomtown Rats, should understand: We are not the world. We are Americans. We play football. They play soccer. In one way Cameron’s and Obama’s comparing the Arab uprisings to the fall of the Soviet Union two decades ago is correct. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the cat died of natural causes and the mice declared a revolution to have occurred. The same might be said of the movements in the Arab desert today. In fact these movements are the final degeneration of states which flourished in marriages on harmony and contention hundreds of years ago but began to die around 1914, compartmentalized and crated today as new states with new ideas like The Boomtown Rats, but as writer Robert Christopher has quotes Japanese views on post-war Europe, they may merely be a bunch of restaurants.

America is a rising arc and today, it is clear, so is Israel. As we inherently feel England to be our ancestor, so we feel today about Israel in a way we have not felt before. Possibly because 9/11 has finally sunk in and we understand that we share a common enemy.

Two items related to that:

The Boston Globe reports the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston will vote on whether J Street, a fledging Jewish advocacy group that promotes vigorous US actions to help create a Palestinian state, should be stripped of its membership. J Street is widely expected to be allowed to remain one of the 42 organizations represented on the council. But the discussion over J Street’s membership — and whether the group is truly “pro-Israel’’ — reflects a passionate debate among American Jews over the meaning of the term.

And Sarah Palin: Because Palin understands that we are not the world. But we are Israel. And Real Clear Politics reports that the Palins have in hand a two-hour-long, sweeping epic, a rough cut extolling Palin's governorship and laying to rest lingering questions about her controversial decision to resign from office with a year-and-a-half left in her first term. It was screened privately for Sarah and Todd Palin last Wednesday in Arizona, “where Alaska's most famous couple has been rumored to have purchased a new home. When it premieres in Iowa next month, the film is poised to serve as a galvanizing prelude to Palin's prospective presidential campaign -- an unconventional reintroduction to the nation that she and her political team have spent months eagerly anticipating, even as Beltway Republicans have largely concluded that she won't run.”

Chief of Staff Bill Daley: Obama’s “man in the center"

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/23/11

As photography goes, this one brought the perfect moment. President Obama had ordered the SEALs to descend on the den of Osama bin Laden and kill him. 12 are framed waiting pensively in the War Room, waiting to hear the code phrase, “Geronimo E-KIA” indicating that bin Laden had been killed and the assault successful. And spontaneously and naturally composed by the moment, it was the perfect photograph.

It is always 12, as in Leonardo’s “Last Supper.” The full deck of the zodiac; six yin (three water, three earth), six yang (three air, three fire). But this photo, with the President dressed casually to right of “man in the center” was even more holistically balanced. To the right of “man in the center” - the “power” side, sat the three: Vice President Joe Biden, President Obama and the Air Force general running the show at the computer, which could almost be seen as Captain Kirk’s starship. To the left of “man in the center” are the advisors, including Hillary Clinton and the wise Robert C. Gates; the “spirit” force.

This illustrates the most primary of psychological relationships; three left, three right, with the Transcendent Seventh in the center. This is how a menorah presents the universe and the many Buddhas and Brahmas in the east do as well. In the Hindu, the right hand represents advancing karma, like the positive numbers in math (Vishnu). The left represents receding karma or the negative numbers (Shiva). The “man in the center” is not a man but Brahma, neither man nor woman, neither left nor right, neither one nor the other but all and none.

And in this historic photo, the key ‘three and three’ are balanced, sitting on each side, sloping downward; the world partial, in its parts, made whole by the “man in the center.” Only Brahma/”man in center” is fully awake, aware, fully dressed, the center of the six, like a Templar in action.

But in this picture, the Transcendent One, the Brahma mind, the “man in the center” is not President Obama like it is supposed to be. It is Bill Daley, the President’s Chief of Staff.

So what’s up with that?

Obama and the Nerd Conquest

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/20/11

The Washington Post reports that President Obama’s speech was greeted with apathy in the Arab world. There is a picture of a “rebel fighter” in Libya in dashing beret, Che whiskers and an AF-47. 15,000 have died in Libya alone in the “Arab Spring” – the phrase popularized by nerd American journalists like those who politely raise their hands at Obama press conferences. It was supposed to make Egypt the new Silicon Valley for hip young Muslims who use smart phones, not AK-47s. All conquests are attempts to make The Others like us. This one to make the random hordes of the Arab deserts more like nerd generation archetype Mark Zuckerberg.

The idea of this slaughter was brought to Obama by his National Security advisor Samantha Power. It can’t be all Power’s fault; the rush to invade – to make Islamabad a hip, Muslin, Mill Valley – pervaded the nerd press. But perhaps they had heard expressions like “Repression will fail . . . tyrants will fall” and America “cannot hesitate to stand squarely on the side of those who are reaching for their rights” before, from the Ayatollahs, from the Soviets, from the Americans.

So it comes as no surprise that the Obama administration has no use for Israel’s Jews. Jews are dense. You cannot abide the wise Dov Ber of Mezeritch in your cannon if you have Bono. Hannah Arendt and Lady Gaga do not flush. Jews have anchored Europe to the earth for two thousand years; they are the egg from which our universe hatched. The rising reichs of Europe were the first to recognize that certain deeply extroverted material progress in the world was deemed impossible by the presence of the introverted Jews. The Intelligentsia of Russia in the 1840s as well – the “new man” had no use for the Jew, who anchors the human race to the ancient and the cosmic. Losing the Jew is first necessity of virtually every “new man” movement. Likewise, the newly hatched Nerd Mind cannot abide such complexity; it floats aloft in a hundred balloons, a celebration of the unbearable lightness of being endlessly young.

But it would be egregious to refer to these people as anti-Semites because they support the Palestinians and dislike Jewish Israelis. Like movie director Lars Von Trier, who the Beautiful People threw out of Cannes yesterday for joking he was a Nazi, saying they were “disturbed” by his comments, they find Israeli Jews merely annoying. Anti-Semitism requires a certain heft of passion and dark character which is antithetical to nerd karma. Frankly, it requires manhood.

Every phase of the Euro/American imperial conquests has been the same: First we send the soldiers, then the priests, then the anthropologists and now at the end we send the nerds. Now there is nothing left to conquer. It is the last inning, when they send the fat kids in to play. The conquest is complete and the nerds are given the last stronghold: Jerusalem, the cosmic egg, the center of our humanity, the unconquerable.

YouTube: “Obama advisor calls for an invasion of Israel”

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/19/11

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” – William Butler Yeats, 1920

The Ayatollah is long dead, Saddam toppled, Osama bin Laden gunned down and Kaddafi on the run. But now Israel faces its greatest existential threat: America. In the end, Obama will be crowned caliph and conqueror of Israel. Those who for 90 years now have puzzled over the Irish wizard’s occult vision of the time of turning; the time when the falcon cannot hear the falconer and things fall apart, the time when golem “finds its way out of twenty centuries of stony sleep” and heads to Israel at the end of the world, look no further than Samantha Power’s conversation about Israel as a “thought experiment.” This conversation before she held her current post. That this woman – who has called Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a “monster” - has since become (from Wiki) Special Assistant to President Barack Obama and runs the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights as Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs on the Staff of the National Security Council (whew!) is beyond imagination (YouTube the full conversation: - “Obama advisor calls for an invasion of Israel”):

“In the Palestine/Israeli situation there is an abundance of information and what we don’t need is some kind of early warning mechanism there, what we need is a willingness to actually put something on the line in service of helping the situation. And “putting something on the line” might mean alienating a domestic constituency of [chuckles] tremendous political and financial import. It may more crucially mean sacrificing - or investing I think more than sacrificing - literally billions of dollars not in servicing Israeli’s military but actually investing in the new state of Palestine investing billions it would probably take also to support I think which will have to be a mammoth protection force. Not of the old Srebrenica kind or of the Rwanda kind but a meaningful military presence because it seems to me at this stage – and this is true of actual genocides as well and not just major human rights abuses which we are seeing there – but is that you have to go in as if you are serious . . . you have to put something on the line and unfortunately in position of a solution on unwilling parties . . . .”

Moshe Feiglin, leader of the Jewish Leadership political faction in Israel which desires to turn “the state for Jews into the Jewish state,” writes this week in the Israel newspaper Makor Rishon: “There is a strange factor common to the developing revolutions in the Arab world: They present no real alternative to the existing regime; no ayatollah in exile in Paris is waiting to take the reins of government in any particular country.”

No, beneath the “blank and pitiless” gaze of the nerd conquistadors – what Galbriath called the (global) “culture of contentment” of the Clinton era - and within the indecipherable and cryptic language of evasion, comes Yeat’s golem, “A shape with lion body and the head of a man”; Samantha Power in New York and Barack Obama in Washington.

Visualize Rick Perry

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/18/11

I’d like to see them do away with the New Hampshire primary. It no longer means much. Ours were once considered the heart of rugged independence; itinerant mountain brahmins making do in pickups held together with Bondo and houses built by the hands of husband and wife with wood cut and milled from their own land. I know more than a few like that up here today, but many who can change both a diaper and the engine of an F150 have moved to Alaska. Or Texas.

What happened is the roads got too good and the cars too pleasureable to ride in; air conditioned, four-wheel drive – you can listen to opera all the way from New Hampshire to the job in Boston. Today it is all about Iowa.

In a forecast for The Week, the NY Times’ Ross Douthat is quoted as saying that with Huckabee out, Tim Pawlenty, “has an excellent shot at a clean victory in Iowa.” That, of course, if Palin stays out. But one problem, says Amy Sullivan in TIME. Evangelicals and value voters “don’t know who he is,” Tim who? But they know who Sarah Palin is.

And in The Wall Street Journal this morning, “The stumbling start of Newt Gingrich and the withdrawals of Mike Huckabee and Donald Trump from the presidential race have boosted Mitt Romney's standing in the Republican nominating contest, while opening lanes for other candidates to jump in.”

But what about Iowa? How’s he going to do there? And as Iowa goes so goes South Carolina. And how’s that Romneycare thing working out with heartland voters?
Last year Sarah Palin said she would enter if no one else with Tea Party karma came forward. I thought she was talking about Rick Perry, Governor of Texas. Then Perry said the same thing. I thought he was talking about Sarah Palin.

Real Clear Politics reports that a presidential push for Perry is quietly gaining steam: “Gov. Rick Perry has insisted on multiple occasions that he has no interest in the presidency, but RCP has learned that political associates have begun to nose around quietly on Perry's behalf.”

And this phrase well sizes it up: “As many grass-roots Republicans remain in search of a conservative candidate with the pizazz to go toe-to-toe against President Obama, a man from deep in the heart of Texas who was tea party before the tea party was cool appears to be giving the presidential race some thought.”

Don’t underestimate the pizzazz thing. It is an absolute necessity in Hamiltonian populist politics. It has been since Lincoln, since Jackson, since Washington. And Mitt Romney has zero pizzazz. Same with Pawlenty, Daniels and what’s his name. When they pull out the Harleys and the electric guitars to show they’re not squares it makes it worse.

History naturally follows the contours and demographics of power; it goes where the people and the economy goes. It must. Otherwise it will bring neurosis, novelty candidates and kook presidents (or relatives of former presidents or people who look like former presidents), division, culture clash and even warfare. America has been heading west since the post-war period began and even since the beginning. That is the meaning of Ronald Reagan. Rick Perry is the next best step in this original American journey of natural statehood.

Note to RAfi on the UN's declaration of a Palestinean state in Jerusalem

Yes – excellent. The history of the “western” world can be seen as an archetypal or cosmic manifestation of the two sons of Abraham, Isaac and Ismael, manifest in external time as Jesus and Mohammud and forming the 2000 year platonic month known as aeon Pisces. The determining myth of the past 500 years – the rise of capital and Protestantism – is Rabbi Loeb’s dream of Golem in Prague in the 1600s. Until then European Jews lived among themselves but manifested outward creating Europe out of barbarism through the Jerusalem-based churches. Jews were forbidden by torah to engage with gentiles in their external activities as they were narrow and profane. Rabbi Loeb’s myth brought a fork in the path: Jews began to enter in with gentiles on the path of Golem – the practice of capital and external and material expansion - and others entered on the path of God back to Israel. NY can be seen in this as the “shadow” path or the path of Golem (Golem’s final external destination in aeon Pisces), the reawakening of Israel as the opening of God-consciousness to be fulfilled by the restoration of Temple Mount and the “return of the King” – these myths might be symbolized in Tolkien’s “Rings” stories: death of golem/return of king (the symbol of Aragorn’s chest as “king” is a menorah). For the UN (NY’s global agency), whose ideology and purpose is purely material and whose vision has become totalitarian to declare a secular state in Jerusalem would fulfill William Butler Yeat’s vision of a “rough beast” (golem) coming to Jerusalem, indicating the end of the world.

Thanks, Rafi - Sorry for the confusion. It helps to understand the passing age as a construct with four 500 year parts which consist of sequentially, Orthodox, Islam, Catholic, Protestant. They might be understood as the four “personality types” of C.G. Jung or as “four elements” in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life – they are one and the same. Israel is the tree itself, the four elements external manifestations of the internal world. The rise of Protestantism 500 years ago represents “power” or the “thinking principle” isolated from feeling and intuition. Golem in the world starting in the 1600s represents this “shadow” and the true patriarch must flee back to Israel – it is the beginning of “the return.” The source of the four is Jerusalem – identified as an egg in this mystic picture linked below of William Blake. In the East the egg is Brahma the whole of rising and receding karma; time in all directions. In our world the egg is internal time/cosmic time/all time found at Temple Mount. For the UN to territorialize Jerusalem brings the end of time.

Does America hurt Israel?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/16/11

A young German acquaintance – a waiter – says without malicious intent that all the troubles in the world today are because of the union between Israel and America. It is the European waiters consensus, he says. Not a new story. When West Virginia’s Robert C. Byrd, who singlehandedly spoke against the invasion of Iraq in the Senate, traveled overseas in 1955 as a young member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, he said that while visiting Arab camps of refugees in Jerico, he “heard voices of deep animosity toward the United States, and the refugees voiced a fierce determination to return to Palestine.”

Does American might put to the defend of Israel help? Or does is simply make Israel the convenient scapegoat for America’s many sins?

The Western world – upon all its beauty and advantages – will always act as a “static anvil for the murderous hammer descending upon the Jews from above – be it the Nazi hammer, the Arab hammer or any other murderous, anti Jewish hammer,” writes Moshe Feiglin, political leader of Israel’s Jewish Leadership Movement, which calls for authentic Jewish leadership in Israel.

The time when Israel will have to decide if we are willing to entrust our fate to the very same West that will always be happy to be rid of the "Israel Problem" is rapidly approaching, he writes. Israelis see themselves as an inseparable part of the Western world. It is difficult for them “to accept that the West, our cultural patron, will simply close its eyes with relief when six million Jews in Israel will once again be facing wholesale slaughter.”

“What invasion am I talking about? If we were not living in denial, the media would be abuzz about Samantha Power, head of the National Security Council, who advocates taking the funds that the US now invests in the IDF and investing them instead in the 'Palestinian' army. In no uncertain terms, she discusses a possible US invasion of Israel – to keep the peace, of course. When that goal is accomplished, Power advocates leaving us here to enjoy the loving kindness of the righteous souls in Ramallah.”

Feiglin has been called a Tea Party type in Israel by the New York Times and his commentary does suggest that of libertarian Ron Paul, who shows no sympathy for American military support of Israel: There is life after America, says Feiglin. Israelis do not need American aid. All they need is to return to their tried and true Jewish identity.

“It is urgent to cut the psychological ropes binding us to the West,” he writes. “We are not Americans. We are Israelis and we have an independent and strong faith and culture from which we draw our own existential legitimacy – not from the West.”

Does America hurt Israel?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/16/11

A young German acquaintance – a waiter – says without malicious intent that all the troubles in the world today are because of the union between Israel and America. It is the European waiters consensus, he says. Not a new story. When West Virginia’s Robert C. Byrd, who singlehandedly spoke against the invasion of Iraq in the Senate, traveled overseas in 1955 as a young member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, he said that while visiting Arab camps of refugees in Jerico, he “heard voices of deep animosity toward the United States, and the refugees voiced a fierce determination to return to Palestine.”

Does American might put to the defend of Israel help? Or does is simply make Israel the convenient scapegoat for America’s many sins?

The Western world – upon all its beauty and advantages – will always act as a “static anvil for the murderous hammer descending upon the Jews from above – be it the Nazi hammer, the Arab hammer or any other murderous, anti Jewish hammer,” writes Moshe Feiglin, political leader of Israel’s Jewish Leadership Movement, which calls for authentic Jewish leadership in Israel.

The time when Israel will have to decide if we are willing to entrust our fate to the very same West that will always be happy to be rid of the "Israel Problem" is rapidly approaching, he writes. Israelis see themselves as an inseparable part of the Western world. It is difficult for them “to accept that the West, our cultural patron, will simply close its eyes with relief when six million Jews in Israel will once again be facing wholesale slaughter.”

“What invasion am I talking about? If we were not living in denial, the media would be abuzz about Samantha Power, head of the National Security Council, who advocates taking the funds that the US now invests in the IDF and investing them instead in the 'Palestinian' army. In no uncertain terms, she discusses a possible US invasion of Israel – to keep the peace, of course. When that goal is accomplished, Power advocates leaving us here to enjoy the loving kindness of the righteous souls in Ramallah.”

Feiglin has been called a Tea Party type in Israel by the New York Times and his commentary does suggest that of libertarian Ron Paul, who shows no sympathy for American military support of Israel: There is life after America, says Feiglin. Israelis do not need American aid. All they need is to return to their tried and true Jewish identity.

“It is urgent to cut the psychological ropes binding us to the West,” he writes. “We are not Americans. We are Israelis and we have an independent and strong faith and culture from which we draw our own existential legitimacy – not from the West.”

Men of Honor

By Bernie Quigley – for the Hill on 5/11/11

Like the old Politiboro-driven popular front of “violence inherent in the system!” polemic, the Republican punditry today are quickly dispatched to call the Obama victory a historic “Bush-Obama” drama. Who are these guys kidding? The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld adventure was a journey to the end of the night and an American disgrace that will never be forgotten. Our best warriors and men of honor of both parties like Senator Jim Webb, former NATO chief Wesley K. Clark and Colin Powell’s chief Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson brought the strongest dissent. It was a hoax from the beginning, said Wilkerson. The invasion of Iraq was “ . . . the wrong war,” said General Clark. This war will instead be remembered as beginning to go forth with some credibility when George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was thrown out of office and Robert C. Gates was brought forth to try and retrieve any remaining shreds of American character.

Before Gates, the Iraq invasion was so poorly orchestrated and morally inept that for the first time since 1865 it brought forth secession movements and nullification efforts that won’t go away and led the dynamic dissenter Ron Paul to the front of American politics.

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 Bush/Cheney government and there can be no greater betrayal of the human spirit than the manipulation of the human heart for political purposes.

It might be suggested that the Republicans today are so intent on getting a third Bush – and the former Florida governor appears to be even more unremarkable than the first two - back into the White House to forge the false legacy, or even worse; to keep the President’s Men of the pre-Gates period of torture, mayhem and moral abandon out of possible war crimes trials.

“Geronimo E-KIA”: Obama kills the lion (draft)

Things would have been different if back in April 1980 the helicopter hadn’t crashed; eight went into a desert sand storm to rescue 52 Americans held hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. One crashed and another had to turn back. Desert One was a dismal failure on the heels of Vietnam, telling the world that we, the Americans, could not do things well anymore. The helicopter wrecked in the desert became the symbol of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, but it would have been different if the rescue attempt was successful. Carter would have been a great hero and America would have been renewed because all that matters in war is whether or not the spear hits the lion. Had he been successful there would have been no “morning in America” just ahead – no need for it, no Reykjavik Summit, and probably no Ronald Reagan. So there was a moment of anxiety when the one helicopter went down on Sunday on the way to the compound at Abbottabad. But this time it was different. This time the spear hit the lion.

President Obama is elegant and stylist; even likeable in a way that presidents have not been since JFK, but that can be considered to be a weakness and belonging to the poet’s corner and there is not much room for the poet in warfare – even Hemingway was only allowed to run alongside in a jeep. But if it is accompanied by bravery and intuition it brings a champion and amplifies his abilities. On Friday by demanding that the compound which held Osama bin Laden not be bombed but taken, Obama showed himself to be both brave and intuitive. And to be a leader worthy of the company of Dam Neck, Virginia’s Navy SEALS, a group of elite warriors formed in 1980 in the wake of the failed attempt to rescue the U.S. hostages from Iran.

Because what started then ended this week, and now as Osama bin Laden sinks to the bottom of the sea’s unconsciousness, the tide can begin to recede. Obama's speech in New York will be a great one not only because he is a great speaker, but it is the speech we have been waiting for and hoping for ten years. And until now it could not have been given because, to speak plainly, America and 9/11 had not been avenged. He won’t talk about that and it would be wrong to do so and he is a better man than that, but he has already done the deed that nature demanded to be done. And it can be time now to move on and to build again with endless thanks.

draft The Second Coming of Smiley Face: Eric Wilson’s “Against Happiness”

A well-known teaching hospital in New England has adopted “laughing yoga” as a therapy. In an article here in the papers the participants are pictured laughing together like crazy monkeys. They laugh when they see each other. They laugh holding hands in circles. They laugh lying down with their heads in a circle. They laugh all the time.

Dr. Madam Kataria of India, Laughing Club founder, says in an interview with of all people, John Cleese, that it helps you unwind the negative effects of stress and also it boosts your immune system.

But what is creepy about it up here is that they pass out buttons to you that are pretty much advanced models of the Smiley Face button that appeared unfortunately in the world in the 1970s to accompany the phrase, “Have a nice day.”

It seems a condition of and even a celebration of ennui; a way of saying: “ . . . I can go no further, but thanks for asking. Have a nice day.” If that is the issue there are time-honored antidotes; hockey, opera, cats, church, Jane Eyre, George Dickel or Maker’s Mark. But something else is afoot here; something about this simplification; something to this lack of complexity. I think Wiki describes Smiley accurately in his first incarnation: “ . . . said to have become a zombifying hollow sentiment, emblematic of Nixon-era America and the passing from the optimism of the Summer of Love into the more cynical decade that followed.”

Eric Wilson, a professor at Wake Forest University and author of the book “Against Happiness” says the creative mind in artist and politician lives instead in melancholy and understands the power of negative thinking. He writes in his blog, “Against Happiness” (http://againsthappiness.blogspot.com):

“It's quite possible that Abraham Lincoln's brilliance as a leader came from his chronic melancholy. While Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate states, was overly idealistic and quick to make decisions based on his optimism, Lincoln wasn't afraid to question long-standing assumptions, to deliberate over his many options, and to be sensitive to vagueness. Joshua Wolf Shenk's Lincoln's Melancholy examines this connection between Lincoln's gloom and his creative leadership.”

There was something in the ‘70s that said the major events were over. It is the valley of wu chi; unmanifest karma in slow times, then as now. But as the Smiley button with a bullet hole in the head used in the promo of Alan Moore's fin de siecle "Watchmen" books suggests,unmitigated and detached joy has an unconscious aspect; something dark underneath; something’s not right . . . something is coming.

Bringing Osama to the Sea: The President must provide conclusive evidence of Osama bin Laden’s death

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 5/2/11

The first reports of Osama bin Laden’s death told us that he was buried with 24 hours of his death and ”buried at sea” because “finding a country willing to accept the remains of the world's most terrorist would have been difficult.” So we would assume there would be physical evidence of the death if there is no body. That would presumably be photographic identification or DNA evidence. During the Vietnam War, the military on the ground was notoriously unreliable about physical evidence in combat.

Because if I have this right, “the sea” is at least 800 miles from the Abbottabad region of Pakistan where reports say bin Laden was killed. How did they get him from there to the sea? Did they drop him out of an airplane or travel by land convoy 800 miles with the six and a half foot corpse? Then other reports said the body was delivered to Afghanistan. Did they bring him to Afghanistan and then bring him to the sea? That would have been more than a thousand miles to haul the corpse.

Other reports said that he was or would be identified by DNA evidence. Results of the DNA tests should be available in the next few days, “the official” told Reuters. But then WCVB in Boston reported that “The death of a sister of Osama bin Laden at Massachusetts General Hospital allowed the United States to confirm bin Laden's death, ABC News reported.” So then it won’t take a few days like the Reuters report claimed? Did they or did they not know through DNA evidence that it was Osama bin Laden they had killed? Especially important since the corpse may have been disfigured in the shooting, so photo evidence would not be conclusive.
What’s it gonna be?

The President needs to clear this stuff up pronto because credibility in crisis is of vital journalistic importance. And precisely at these times you don’t want mischievous and false myth to awaken, like did we fake the moon landing, what really happened at Roswell, where are Biggie and Tupac, was Obama really born in the United States and is Osama bin Laden really dead? This kind of pesky misinformation and seditious and nihilistic propaganda can plague the tabloids for decades. Especially with a press and populous like Fox Mulder, that wants to believe.

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.