Time to bring in Sarah Palin

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/25/11

Michele Bachmann was a letdown from the first. She appeared as a Palin knock off but proved herself to be merely provincial. Palin is not, nor is Rick Perry. Last year Palin, who defines herself as a “constitutional conservative” said she would enter the race if no one else who expressed the rising geist of Tea Party values did. Perry does and from the beginning it was Perry and Palin vs. the Establishment. But he needs to watch his back. And she needs to think about getting back in this as the Tea Party vote scurrys around the margins without the unifying spirit she brought to it from the beginning; Herman Cain today, Michelle Bachmann yesterday, Ron Paul the day before. Gary Johnson tomorrow.

For the new conservative values to stabilize and advance, Palin might be a necessity. She is an archetypal figure, like John Lennon or Reagan; one that hits a primal cord in the psyche that brings awakening to some and horror to others. My guess right now is that 2012 will bring Perry/Romney, or Perry/someone else, but necessity could just as well make it Palin/Perry or Palin/someone else. And they need other helpers now; Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani. Time to commit.

A McClatchy-Marist poll last week found that Obama looks increasingly vulnerable in next year's election, with a majority of voters believing he'll lose to any Republican. The biggest gain came for Palin, the former Alaska governor who hasn't yet announced whether she'll jump into this fast-changing race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

The Grizzly Mama has the animal spirits and as she has said, a “servant’s heart.” She will do the right thing. But without Perry or Palin in the White House in 2012, that which came in with the dust of the Tea Party in 2009 will be gone with the wind by 2012.

draft - Texas blues. It comes from being somplace else. they don' swagger at home. They talk quiet
Don’t rule out Sarah Palin

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/21/11

If the establishment nostalgicos can’t let go of the good old days of sustainable mediocrity and overwhelm the process by continuing to pitch the likes of Bob Dole or down market Bush employees like Mitch Daniels . . . and did I mention Jeb Bush? . . . it could hurt Texas Governor Rick Perry’s chances. Never was a group so terrified of new ideas. But that could put Sarah Palin back in the race.
Nostalgicos, the name for a specific group of cultural conservatives who fought to preserve the past and deny the future, led the way to the destruction of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. We see the same tendency rising here today.
The current excitement started with Sarah Palin the moment she took the mike from John McCain and accepted the VP offer. Things have not been the same since.
A new McClatchy-Marist poll finds that Obama looks increasingly vulnerable in next year's election, with a majority of voters believing he'll lose to any Republican. The biggest gain came for Palin, the former Alaska governor who hasn't yet announced whether she'll jump into the fast-changing race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.
Michele Bachmann was a letdown from the first. She appeared as a Palin knock off but proved herself to be merely provincial. Palin is not, nor is Perry. Last year Palin, who defines herself as a “constitutional conservative” said she would enter if no one else who expressed the rising geist of Tea Party values did. Perry does and from the beginning it was Perry and Palin vs. the Establishment. But he needs to watch his back.

For these values to advance, Palin might be a necessity. She is an archetypal figure, like John Lennon or Reagan; one that hits a primal cord in the psyche that brings awakening to some and horror to others. My guess right now is that 2012 will bring Perry/Romney, but necessity could conceivable make it Palin/Perry.

The Grizzly Mama has the animal spirits and as she has said, a “servant’s heart.” She will do the right thing. But without Perry or Palin in the White House in 2012, that which came in with the dust with the Tea Party will be gone with the wind.

Einstein revisited

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill

on 9/23/11

Will Einstein join Marx and Freud now as a god that failed? One of the “three visitors” who came to us at the turning, that is, at the end of the world and the beginning?

Einstein was Monkey God as the century opened to the new creation. His picture today hangs on the classroom walls everywhere where Jesus, Washington or Ganesh once did.

Even Franklin D. Roosevelt borrowed from his cosmic observations and make with them an atom bomb.

“My biggest mistake,” Einstein said later.

Pretty big mistake. Still the picture hangs in the classrooms. But this is characteristic of Monkey Gods – worlds fall before them and new ones awaken. They change the Creation, but have no control over the changes which will occur because of their speculation. Surely Einstein is our own Karma Dorjee, Rimpoche and itinerant ascetic enthroned in mid-air, under whose resting gaze mountains pitched and tossed, buildings shook and cracked, the sun fell like a thunderbolt and another sprang up in its place. Einstein considered himself to be such a disciple, like those from the heights of The Land of Snows.

Or not. Rumor from his niece, had it that he got it all from Madame Blavatsky and her book “The Secret Doctrine” published in 1888, incomprehensible to all but the best mathematicians. “There is no religion higher than truth,” the Russian savant wrote in her introduction.

Which would be an excellent slogan for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland.

But maybe we were too young for these truths. I interviewed a well known Indian theoretical physicist years back who compared himself to his American counterparts. In India we didn’t come out of the trees until we were 12, he said. And what made India’s physicists different from ours: “We started from God and went to math. You start with math.”

That could be the flaw in the whole century that the CERN found. But something else: This imagination seems kind of dated today. The research is government financed, project oriented, morally compromised at so many levels and third, fourth and fifth generations beyond its creative origins. The imaginative young today look elsewhere for excitement.

I felt I saw the century rising this time in a little discussion overheard on TV of a young scholar talking to Simcha Jacobovici, known to the world as the “Naked Archaeologist.”

With great enthusiasm the young man explained that Bathsheba should be reevaluated. She entered in with David to the “coniunctio,” the cosmic marriage that gave birth to time. Time rose and returns again from her womb via her son, Solomon, moving outward to create the world, and returning again to his temple.

It is not a moral tale; it is the narrative of a time machine which created the human race. Niels Bohr could not have put it so simply when he drew the “tai chi” on the blackboard to explain what he meant about particles and waves.

What the Suffolk poll means for Romney, Perry and Jon Huntsman

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/23/11

It means that Jon Huntsman has a chance for vice president.

As expected, Mitt Romney received 41% in the recent poll of Suffolk University/7NEWS (WHDH TV) of likely voters in New Hampshire’s GOP presidential primary. As expected, Ron Paul came in second with 14%. It is good news for Jon Huntsman that he gained 6 points and came in third with 10%. He can hold on now at least till the end of February, by which time he will be a household name. He has always has been an attractive and competent figure.

There was no question that Mitt Romney would win this. He lives here. Also, the composition of New Hampshire has changed. We are no longer the mythic mountain individuals of yore, with “the granite of New Hampshire made part of them till death” as the Dartmouth Alma Mater has it. More like a suburb of Boston with lower taxes. For both Democrats and Republicans, the NH primary tells how the candidate will fare in Massachusetts. Wes Clark was well ahead in the last, but Kerry won. Romney will win this time.

One of the luminous mysteries both here and in Massachusetts is that we like Mormons. My father, who was born in 1899 and by 1968 had likely never spoken to a person who was not either Irish or French Quebecois and would certainly never think of voting for any not sanctioned by the Catholic/Democratic establishment, really liked George Romney. Unlike Christians elsewhere with complicated ontological reservations, I think he and his class and generation of Irish Catholics who would not even think of marrying outside the parish, made no distinction between Mormons and any other group. They were all going to hell anyway. In a more secular time, smart people impress in New England and we see Mormons as way smart. So Huntsman should be expected to continue to rise in New Hampshire.

Huntsman has been surfing Mitt Romney’s (Mormon) wave from the beginning. If it works for Romney it will work for Huntsman. Huntsman is a great looking guy. He is young and smart as paint. Romney has a dark, vindictive edge (“No Apology”) and Huntsman has natural buoyancy. (Although Romney’s dark side would be a good match up with the good-natured Perry: Eisenhower/Nixon.) Huntsman’s got a great family and looks half-Buddhist in those photos with the tilaka on his forehead (symbolizing the “third eye” of intuition in Hindu) and we have a tendency toward that with the Emerson/Thoreau/Alcott tradition in New England.

That is what we will see, but a Texan with long lineage like Perry will see something different. Texas and Utah have historic kinship and they also have kinship with California. From our view in the northeast, California is an annex of New York where we make movies. Like Obama, we are children exclusively of the geist. But it is not. Perry spends much time in California pulling business away into Texas. Huntsman and Perry understand the west from a pioneer’s perspective and Huntsman brings natural conduit to India and Asia across the Pacific to our western shore. You don’t get that part with Mitt Romney.

Huntsman had an 80% approval rating as governor of Utah. Perry could do no better for his VP and in second position, the Mormon issues will diminish.

Mark Warner/John Lynch 2012

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/22/11

Virginia Senator Mark Warner should challenge Barack Obama in 2012. He should chose John Lynch, the popular and successful Democratic governor of New Hampshire who has recently announce that he will not run for another term, for his vice president. Warner was voted among the country’s best governors in Virginia. He marked a sea change for the Democrats. He was a successful businessman and brought business abilities and strategies to governance. A Connecticut Yankee and Harvard-trained lawyer settled in Virginia, he made himself a Virginian and was the first among the northerners to pass the NASCAR test. He sponsored a stock car and had the Stanley Brothers of Clinch Mountain play at his events. He marked a new direction and got the support of Marcos Moulitsas and the Daily Kos crowd, storied today as the so-called Millennial generation.

But Marcos asked one day in the Washington Post, “Will these Clinton-era people ever go away?” Unfortunately the answer was no. Moulitsas, as representative of the rising generation, also supported Wesley Clark and later Jim Webb and a good number of Iraq war veterans when Webb ran for senate. These, Warner, Webb, Clark, New Hampshire’s John Lynch, and a few others, brought a new sensibility to a rising generation. Warner considered running for President briefly, spoke up here in New Hampshire and had a big cover story in The New York Times Magazine. But those hopes were dashed by the Clintons.

At Daily Kos, Hillary’s support hovered around zero. When she entered the presidential contest, the party tacked to find a counterforce. Barack Obama fit the bill. He was smart and attractive and as Jules Feiffer suggested, his great feature was that he was not Hillary Clinton.

Obama got to here via a kind of neurosis. He didn’t seem to actually desire it but successfully surfed the contours of populism to the presidency and in my opinion, did the right thing. I voted for him because: He fulfilled the historic destiny begun by Lincoln/Grant and advanced by Eisenhower/Kennedy. This was absolutely necessary to fulfill those historic needs. He was not Hillary Clinton. And the candidate running against him, John McCain, had romanticized and dangerous foreign policy sensibilities.

But it can be no surprise that he did not know what to do as president. He had little work experience. He has made little progress as manager. He fulfilled his historic destiny and completed the Lincoln/Kennedy initiatives. He should not run again.

After Europe, the Anglosphere

by Bernie Quigley

For The HIll on 9/20/11

Several recent books see the end coming. John Birmingham’s “After America”: Fighter bombers rushing at us on the cover. You get the picture. Paul Starobin’s “After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age”: Planet of the apes with nerds instead of apes. Be afraid. But not that afraid. Mark Steyn’s “After America: Get Ready for Armageddon”: Self explanatory. Andrew Breitbart said, “May puke I’m so happy.” Meaning he liked it.

These books see America as an idea rather than a place because the authors don’t understand place and have probably never been to an American place they were inclined to stay in. They would get a rash in real places like Tobaccoville, NC, Haverhill, NH or Luckenbach, Texas, where Waylon, Willy and the boys hang.

But The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens this morning makes a masterful case for the decline of Europe in his essay “What Comes after ‘Europe’?” Possibly nothing. Possibly nothing – Sartre’s La Nausée comes to mind – has long settled there.

Stephens well makes the case that there is no Europe; that is, there has been no such thing in post-war world. It was a figment of the “western” imagination. (But there is no “west” either.) Quoting Bismarck he says, “Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong. Europe is a geographical expression.”

Folkloric history like the great movie “Phantom of the Opera” (the Joel Schumacher version) makes the case that Europe, as it was known in Christendom, died in 1914-1917 thereabouts. Its fate was sealed not by war but by electricity. I don’t see that it has ever recovered except as a pale rider in the shadow of America.

“What comes next is the explosion of the European project,” writes Stephens, and it's not an altogether bad thing. “But it will come at a massive cost. The riots of Athens will become those of Milan, Madrid and Marseilles. Parties of the fringe will gain greater sway. Border checkpoints will return. Currencies will be resurrected, then devalued. Countries will choose decay over reform. [Now that is a great sentence.] It's a long, likely parade of horribles.”

America will survive because America is a state, he says. Exactly! It is a place! It is a lot of places! This is the essence of Jefferson’s heroic vision, yet untried.

And America will be better off without the burden of European history on it back. But how will the UN fare in this climate? NATO, SEATO and all of the other post-war abstractions? Not good. Irrelevant.

The big question is what will England do? The EU has always been her problem. Because England is not a European country. The subtle since 1914 and before asked, where do we belong, with Europe or with America? The answer came on June 6, 1944 when America and England together invaded Nazi occupied Europe. Gene Kelly may have done the victory dance in Paris and Earnest Hemingway may have liberated the Ritz, but this joint venture reawakened the Anglosphere.

It changed everything. England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, America and England became a unified culture, one that spoke the same language and hailed from the same traditions. Anglosphere became the package of like places. If my kids today visit Australia or London they feel kinship and common ground. When they travel to China or the Ukraine they feel they are going “someplace else.”

It will always be like that and it is how we Americans should begin to think of ourselves, as the utopian, totalitarian delusions of post-war globalism crash to the ground now like dead satellites.

Pataki: Cavuto's great white hope against Texas

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/15/11

Recently, Neil Cavuto of Fox Business has been all up in the grills about the wonders of George Pataki, former governor of NY. Imus was less impressed, like he couldn't remember who he was and when it did come to mind the first impression was political corruption. Imus is a NY touchstone of common folk; much as the Daily News was say 80 years ago. First impressions are most important. When Pataki appeared last night on Cavuto he ran through his plan to save the economy. Old news now after a few debates because nothing is in it that is not well aired and better prepared by so many. The purpose of the visit seemed to be Neil's exit comment: “Why don't you run for President?”

With some fanfare Pataki almost did announce earlier in the month, but cancelled his big Iowa speech when Texas governor Rick Perry took all the air out of the room. Cavuto sees Pataki perhaps as the last man standing in the anti-Perry genre. Fear stalks the heart of upper New Jersey where Soprano shrink Dr. Jennifer Melfi lives; Upper Montclair, I think it is, when they see cowboy boots. Those brought up when only two teams mattered in baseball, the Yankees and the Red Sox and only two families in politics, those who vacation in Nantucket and those who vacation in Kennebunkport. Sooner or later they will have to face, in Pauli Walnuts phrase, “Jesusland” or the space between the Garden State Parkway and Tahoe.

But Chris Christie is too fat and Romney is a Mormon. And Jeb Bush really, as he said with sincerity on Cavuto earlier, does not want to be president. But still, Rove & his surreptitious littles persists in finding the viable anti-Perry. And Cavuto seems to be helping. It is not Pataki.

If you wanted a composite Reagan/Ron Paul candidate to go against Perry, Lew Lehman would be an authentic attempt and authenticity works best. And Lehman is as authentic as Perry and so is Romney. But the Jews in Brooklyn this week did not ditch the Weiner/Clinton proxy for George Pataki. They might have seen Rick Perry rising on the horizon.

Perry should head to Brooklyn, pronto; Juniors, Flatbush, Bensonhurst. Talk to the old Jews direct in the old neighborhoods who this week ditched their century-long, Europe-brought political sensibility. South Philly, Fishtown too because as goes Bensonhurst, so goes South Philly. Stay with the working class; stay in Pauli Walnuts territory. Authenticity rises from there. See how the old school likes him. Passion is rising now and Perry brings it.

Jimmy Carter’s twisted global caliphate

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/14/11

Will Jimmy Carter (and Hillary and Obama) conquer Jerusalem before Hamas? They are today teamed together with Hamas in their desire for a Palestinian state inside Israel. It is one of the most astonishing abuses of American power in the post-war world, possibly in the history of the world. The sons of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael, team up against their cosmic father to conquer Jerusalem for themselves. In time, Muslims have attempted to conquer Jerusalem. Christians have as well. Never since the Second Temple have they united to do so together, until today.

I am not a Christian but support Jerusalem exactly as former New York Mayor Ed Koch stated recently in an Op Ed: An attack on Israel is an attack on America. That, simply and logically, because of 9/11. As with Pearl Harbor, we did not choose our enemy, our enemy chose us. And without question, the enemy of Israel today has chosen us to be his enemy as well.

And since it is not mine I make no claim to Jerusalem as both Christians like Carter, (and presumably) Hillary and Obama do and Hamas terrorists do. In fact, they have now become allies, both with eyes on Jerusalem.

Since we have heard much from the “born again” perspective, here's a thought from a Buddhist perspective; from my perspective. In archetypal terms, the relationship between Jews and Christians and Muslims is based on the story of Abraham, Father of the Hebrew passage and widely in the current MSM perspective called the “father” of all three of these religions. I see that as a false and malevolent expedient of the recently politicized American Christians and their current power grab attempts on Jerusalem. Abraham is not the father of Christians. Not the father of Muslims. He is the father of Jews. That all are one and equal – Jew, Christian, and Muslim - is a Jeffersonianized (or Oprahized) edition of late, deist Protestantism; new world thinking in which all are equal and all have a say in each others lives. But in archetypal terms, which many Buddhists use, the Father is a mythic and timeless figure never to be equal to the children. The children live in time. The children live in the orchard as did Adam and Eve. The Jews live in timelessness. They are guardians and keepers of the Tree itself.

So it may be as Sir James George Frazer says, that it is the desire of every generation to cut down the sacred Tree, as George Washington did, so as to take the realm from the Father and claim it for themselves. This can only be what Carter and his Hamas friends are up to in their preoccupation with the Holy Land and their pending conquest of Jerusalem.

Israel’s troubles started with Jimmy Carter. They amplify today with Obama. But their claims on Jerusalem are as irrelevant as Glenn Beck’s and as malevolent as those of Hamas. That an American president who calls himself a Christian would use his power to dominate the cosmic realm which rises in time and recedes from time at Temple Mount would be the greatest blasphemy in history. If it wasn’t such a joke.

Wesley Clark for Obama VP in 2012

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/13/11

The last time a Republican was elected to the seat, which covers parts of Brooklyn and Queens, was nearly a century ago, says Allysia Finley of the WSJ. That would be Anthony Weiner’s NY 9th U.S. District. Brooklyn was long considered the dead center of Democratic politics in America. Indeed, the century of populist liberal thinking was born in Brooklyn. That a Republican would take it today would send the Democrats through a sea change. It already has.

It makes no difference who wins today in Brooklyn. Change is here, but not the kind that Obama called for. If Obama wants to survive in 2012 he needs to make an immediate radical shift. Obama’s lost promise was identified immediately after his nomination. The choice of Joe Biden for VP established the paradigm. This would not be new as Reagan, Kennedy and Roosevelt brought in the new; new demands new people. This would be a party of old hacks and returned political favors. Hillary made it worse. And the foul-mouthed Thugee Society from Chicago gave the appearance of a vengeance agenda.

First off, get Joe Biden off the ticket. On July 8, 2011, Paul Bedard of “Washington Whispers” a blog at U.S. News said it was lamented that President Obama did not pick Wesley Clark, the former NATO Supreme Commander, as a running mate in 2008 or find the retired four-star general a choice cabinet spot: “That has allies suggesting he's angling to be among those Obama might consider if he dumps Vice President Joe Biden or to fill Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's post—or even defense secretary or United Nations ambassador—in a second Obama term. ‘It's a waste of brilliant talent,’ a Clark associate tells our Suzi Parker.”

It is indeed, in a cabinet badly in need of talent. With the romanticized “Arab Spring” now in the grip of soccer thugs Obama foreign policy is surpassing their storied failures on economy here at home. Clark was right about Libya. He was right about Iraq and he opposed invasion of both.

If NY’s 9th district race turns out to be a continuation of conservative trends which rose in the NY 23 race two years ago, the Dems face a landslide in 2012; not only a loss of the Presidency but of the Senate as well. And as one commentator said, Texas’s Governor Rick Perry stock has gone up in the past month like an internet stock in the 1990s. If Perry takes South Carolina, and there is every indication that he will, he will take everything.

It might not hurt the Democrats to have a Southern General on the ticket. One who knows what he is doing.

Who lost Egypt? The Secretary of State must go.

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/12/11


Who lost Egypt? This week soccer goons tore down walls surrounding the Israeli Embassy in Egypt, but Hillary opened the gate. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul calls for a no confidence vote against Tim Geithner. Forget Geithner. History will deal with him. The House and Senate should call for a no-confidence resolution against Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the entire ludicrous and incompetent foreign policy establishment.

“Egypt is not going toward democracy but toward Islamicization,” Eli Shaked, a former Israeli ambassador to Cairo told The New York Times. “It is the same in Turkey and in Gaza. It is just like what happened in Iran in 1979.”

Alec Ross, Hillary Clinton's senior adviser for innovation at the US state department, has lauded the way the internet has become "the Che Guevara of the 21st century" in the Arab Spring uprisings. Meaning that’s a good thing. The Che reference more than anything reveals the undergraduate coffee shop geist of these foreign policy innocents. The U.S. has pledged to back the “pro-democracy movement” that swept the Middle East and north Africa since January, Ross said, as disaffected citizens organize influential protest movements on Facebook and Twitter, Guardian, UK, reported on June 22, 2011.

Strange but true, we heard very similar rhapsodies about the new microcassette technology pioneered in the 1970s as a miraculous revolutionary talisman from liberal supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini. It made his anti-American and anti-Israeli rants mobile. But now soccer goons have joined the melee.

The Arab Spring was to be a nerd paradise, a Silicon Valley for Arab yuppies. At a recent debate at the National Press Club, Peter Bergen, CNN’s Hillaryland correspondent, said: When you look at the Arab spring, “ . . . not a single picture of Osama bin Laden, not a single American flag burning, not a single Israeli flag burning . . .”

Not exactly true responded Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, author of the recently released “Bin Laden’s Legacy: Why We’re Still Losing the War on Terror.”

“Historically, when you have sky high expectations that go unfulfilled as you may have with the Arab Spring, extreme ideologies can step in and fill in the void,” he responded. “We may well see that.”

Astonishingly prescient, as this debate took place on September 1. Nine days later, The New York Times reports that soccer fans, thugs known in Egypt as “ultras,” are tearing down the Israeli Embassy in Cairo and dumping documents out of the windows. The Israeli ambassador, Yitzhak Levanon, his family and most of the staff and their dependents — some 80 people — were evacuated out of the country by military aircraft overnight, the Egypt Daily News reports.

“Long known for their obscene chants and reckless brawls, the ultras have become increasingly engaged in politics since the revolution,” the Times reports.

In fact, Egypt's soccer goons have been an essential part of the uprising from the beginning with thousands shouting and chanting things like "F*** the mother of Hosni Mubarak!" and "Go f*** your Minister, Habib al Adly!" It was sympathetic MSM which conspired to create the obsequious "Arab spring" when the situation on the ground often suggested Brown Shirts and "Springtime for Hitler.”

Perry/Romney 2012

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/8/11

For the first time in 18 years I can say like Lincoln Steffens, that I have seen the future and it works. How things begin is important and the world began again last night with Mitt Romney to one side of Nancy Reagan and Rick Perry to the other. They seem to get along together potentially as a stellar team, like Lennon and McCartney, Fred and Ginger, Eisenhower and Nixon. The first few minutes were a hoot. The back and forth about jobs was clever and good humored. When Perry made the seemingly generous case that Romney had indeed created lots of jobs . . . “everywhere” Romney picked up instantaneously that the complement was not a complement and Perry was cleverly suggesting that Romney had sent jobs overseas. But it had a Rowan & Martin quality to it and Brian Williams and the audience got a huge kick out of it. An auspicious beginning. We thank the others for their support and interest. But from here on out, this is about Perry and Romney. It will be hard now to see them apart.

Debates are the least important part of a presidential race. This race will be won on the merits and character of the individuals. As President Elect Perry looks for a running mate he might now see the advantage of Mitt Romney. Perry, like Sarah Palin, rails against the nerd prom and the northeast political establishment, but he is not a radical. His swift sword is nearby and he is and was the first to raise the cry when the feds began the bailouts. But Romney spoke up in opposition as well when they bailout out Detroit. Perry does absorb the good, salient and necessary ideas that have come from Tea Party, Ron Paul et al and makes them fit. He metabolizes them and brings them to the mainstream and repudiates the rest. Romney on the other hand also speaks to these ideas and no one would be better at institutionalizing the new thinking and bringing it back home to the tradition.

But in my view the most important thing is that history must follow the contours of demographics and economy. Otherwise there will be trouble. And in our time demographics and economy have moved South, Southwest and West and demand western representation. Perry could well balance the ticket in the traditional fashion of bringing a northern pol in as VP. Romney fills the bill as he was Governor of Massachusetts and went to school here back east, but he is also as western as Perry is having made Morman passage through the Utah desert before he returned to us. This ticket would be about as American as it can get. And seeing them together they seemed to click. I think now they should not be pulled apart.

I’ve read their books, Perry’s “Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington” and Romney’s “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.” Each a kind of driver’s manual for the man. They tell you little more than the debates do. But my impression is that Perry fully knows and understands himself and has for a long time. That might come with Texas. Romney is more interesting than he thinks he is, there is more subtlety and complexity to him than people see and more than he sees in himself. Romney is actually more the Lone Ranger. He wears the mask and is yet unrevealed even to himself, but events ahead will bring him out.

Ten years after 9/11, still stalked by the Vichy virus: Why we still need David Petraeus

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/7/11

General David Petraeus gave a very moving going away speech this last week after 37 years as a man of honor in military uniform. We will still need this most respected American general since Eisenhower because:

The NY times reports that President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority said Monday that he was going to the United Nations this month to seek membership for a state of Palestine. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said at a separate event that a Palestinian bid for recognition by the United Nations would “set back peace, and might set it back for years.”

On Saturday the Times reported that the Obama administration had initiated a last-ditch diplomatic campaign to avert a confrontation this month but it may already be too late. Obama is no friend of Israel. And credible Israeli sources report that Likud figures who hold sway told Netanyahu to annex Judea and Samaria if the Arabs declare a state.

I suggested here that Petraeus be considered as Vice President in 2012. Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin or Donald Trump should all consider Petraeus for this post. Historic periods tend to end and begin again with a respected general: Eisenhower, Grant, Washington. It adds stability, clarity and purpose to the “philosopher king” who attends the historic moment of change (Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jefferson). Such a time is just ahead. The presence on the ticket of a trusted and respected general transcends party bias and unifies the country on a singular path to singular purpose. Petraeus has come to the fore through Iraq and Afghanistan when others before him proved to be woefully inadequate.

We entered conflict in Iraq led by a five-time recidivist draft dodger vice president from the Vietnam era who still challenges and puzzles the world today with his compensation issues and a college dropout good ole boy at the head of the Army. Foreign policy then was from ad hoc to non-existent and state department is a shambles and getting worse, with diplomats today used as advance men for Lady Gaga. Petraeus returned honor to leadership and brought the term “warrior scholar” to usage among journalists. He came from us through necessity. We have found our man and his work is not yet over.

After 9/11 the enemy of Israel became the enemy of America but much of us and all of Europe are still stalked by the Vichy virus: accommodation, appeasement, nerdism (a neurotic resistance to adulthood and the difficult adult responsibilities, and the Obama administration manifests this) and denial. It did not work for France in 1940 and it will not work for America and the West today.

Is China the virus in “Contagion”?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/6/11

As one review explains it, actor Matt Damon looks on hopelessly when his wife returns from Hong Kong with a virus that will poison the world. Would that be the storied “Yellow Peril”? Not surprising that this movie previewed this past weekend in Venice, scene of Thomas Mann's masterful short novel “Death in Venice” (1911) in which a cholera epidemic in Venice stalks the western soul. Mann's vision in the day of Freud and Nietzsche brought unconscious suggestion of something happening beneath the surface ("Why are they disinfecting the streets of Venice?") as futurism and fascism was beginning to bubble up in Italy and Lenin was brooding in Paris. In that more poetic day visionaries like Maud Gonne were dreaming of rivers flowing with blood.

It would not be far off to see in this movie something beneath our control rising in our time across the Pacific. Something we are helpless to defend against: The rise of China as a world power. What impact would the movie “Contagion” have if the virus came from, say, Norway or Leuchtenberg? It is based on a real threat of the SARS virus invasion when 5000 people were quarantined in Canada in 2003. As my local TV station is CBC out of Montreal, I watched nightly the mastery of control and impending panic on the evening news fueled really by the war on Iraq and a disintegrating global situation. In fact SARS caused little damage.

Another film previewing in Venice, “The Arrival of Wang” presents the Chinese as squid-like aliens from another galaxy. As Dean Napolitano writes in The Wall Street Journal: “The film, directed by Marco and Antonio Manetti (known as the Manetti Bros.), is a modern-day morality tale for Western nations troubled by — and distrustful of — China’s growing economic power and influence in global political matters. . . The film, they said, ‘tries to reflect upon a few moral and ethical questions: How much should we trust our neighbors?’ and ‘What is a prejudice?’”

So much for diversity and globalization. We are going to need some new buzz words. “Red Corner” (1997), featuring Richard Gere, who is an advocate for Tibet, was an aesthetically excellent film which straight forwardly and responsibly questioned China' motives and authority and lacked the insidious racist undertones.

What is endemic today since 9/11 and even before is panic. The sense that things are beyond our control, beyond our reach, beyond our ability to change the outcome. It is the same sense of subliminal disturbance and doom which Mann felt wandering the streets of Venice at Europe’s fin de siècle, exactly one hundred years ago at the pending death of a different world.

The Supreme Court’s processed mind

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/2/11

That most Supreme Court members went to one of the same northeast Ivy League law schools makes a mockery of Jefferson’s America; we have become a nation of world tribes really rather than regions. From the Jeffersonian perspective schools like U. Minnesota, Vanderbilt, U. Texas at Austin, U. Virginia, U. Michigan, all in the top 20 should be included. And Brigham Young, Wake Forest and UNC not far behind. The current composition of the Court illustrates an America afraid of itself and constantly defaulting to the absurd illusion of 19th century New England royal families. This is not authentic self government. It is imitation of perceived gentry.

Are Yale and Harvard better law schools? How then could a Yale Law School grad like Hillary Clinton not have passed the DC law boards directly after graduation? Surely plenty of Howard School of Law grads passed. And why can't we see the board scores and grades of these public servants? We have reached the edge of the spectrum when a sitting president can nominate his receptionist to be a Supreme Court Justice as George W. Bush did. And to be frank, at least one of these justices seems as dumb as a post. Possibly he speaks for the silent majority as he never opens his mouth.
As my favorite former Black Panther, the most eloquent H. Rap Brown, once said about something else, there are too many people today with natural hair and processed minds. And possible nowhere else in government apparatus are the minds so collectively narrowly and provincially processed as in the Supreme Court.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the original “Tenther” and spirit father of the states’ rights movement stands today as a titan among clerks. It was he who opened the gate to the Tea Party before it got into the hands of Glenn Beck, Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich and became a garden variety rant. But first concerns were states’ rights and regional responsibility.

“Will the Rehnquist Court’s federalism revolution outlast the Rehnquist Court?” asked legal columnist for The New York Times Linda Greenhouse back in 2005. “If Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist retires this summer, as appears likely, the court's ruling last week that federal drug law trumps states on the use of medical marijuana will be its last word on federal-state relations during his tenure.”
A hallmark of the Rehnquist Court has been a re-examination of the country's most basic constitutional arrangements, she writes, resulting in decisions that demanded a new respect for the sovereignty of the states and placed corresponding restrictions on the powers of Congress.

But it is with some irony that new groups like The Tenth Amendment Center and sovereignty movements here in northern New England began just at the same time, in 2005. And potentially Rehnquist’s theme will rise now to the Presidency with Texas Governor Rick Perry.

But in the rush to cut spending Tea Party populism has led North Carolina to make the misguided decision to defund its Governor’s School. It is the kind of narrow thinking that sends the best and brightest of the regions to be processed in New England.

Schools like the North Carolina Governor’s School, which gather the bright and motivated best of the state to work together in the summer, greatly contribute to state and regional identity, building an indigenous business and culture elite. Any state or region which still has this natural affinity to place should cherish and nurture it. It is this which forms the natural state as Jefferson intended.

Gordon Ramsay’s apple

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 9/1/11

I guess I am the last to catch on but as the rabbis tell you, the gods hide in humble places and I should have looked earlier. Looked to Gordon Ramsay, the chef in the pop TV sensation “Hell’s Kitchen” who returns the life force to America. And not for the first time a fierce Englishman comes to beat us into shape. We call him out. We call him to awaken us. Without him we will die possibly and we call him out in the last breath. As we did Churchill.

I only first caught his act during the breaks in the football game last week, cutting away to other stations during the commercials. Then I sought him out. His genius is best seen and heard on the high channels, presumably in rebroadcast, which contain the profanity, elementary and necessary to the shows truth and anger.

In one episode I caught, chef is riding through the American heartland, trilled and enchanted by the vast and fertile farm that it is. What wonders could be culled from such fullness in a local restaurant. He stops for a basket of fresh apples at a local fresh daily fruit stand and brings it back to the restaurant.

He gives an apple to the local chef and asks, “What is that?” “An apple,” says the rube, nonplussed. “You don’t get it, do you?” says Ramsay. And as per the theme of the show the local chef, the restaurant, the town and the viewing world will be torn to shreds. For chef sees all of creation in the apple.

This is a primal American dream of reawakening, a very positive harbinger to a people in trance, in turmoil – call it troubled or narcotic sleep – in a dormant state of between or bewitchment which really came from great success, but success which came from so long ago its generations and origins are forgotten. But beneath the broken glass and wilted flowers, the fat and the lazy, the self assured, those tenured in crates and tethered to false hope, chef sees a new creation.

Chef is kitchen god, the kitchen the alchemical center of the psyche where the dream of being given again to new creation awakens. Chef Ramsey like Shiva tears it down and burns it, layer upon layer, slaughtering outright the sacred cows – an entrenched chef who loves to put shrimp in chicken for example – which encase and calcify the old ways of thinking and prevent the new being born, prevents the new creation from being unleashed. And under the charred remains and scorched earth, chef alone sees the apple; the new beginning. The beginning again of all creation.

And he offers us the apple.

Maya Angelou is right

A writer or orator’s second-to-worst nightmare is to be edited by a committee. A writer or orator’s worst nightmare is to be edited by a committee when you are dead. Great orators know what they mean and say it precisely as Martin Luther King Jr. did. Maya Angelou is right. The inscription on the statue makes him look like a twit.

From the Washington Post this morning. On Feb. 4, 1968, two months before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a haunting sermon at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church about a eulogy that might be given in the event of his death.

“If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice,” King told the congregation. “Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.”

But because of a design change during the statue’s creation, the exact quotes had to be paraphrased, and now one of the memorial’s best-known consultants, poet and author Maya Angelou, says the shortened inscription is misleading and ought to be changed.

Carved on the north face of the 30-foot-tall granite statue, the inscription reads: I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.

“The quote makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit,” Angelou, 83, said Tuesday. “He was anything but that. He was far too profound a man for that four-letter word to apply.

“He had no arrogance at all,” she said. “He had a humility that comes from deep inside. The ‘if’ clause that is left out is salient. Leaving it out changes the meaning completely.”

Perry, Palin, Giuliani, Trump, pt. two

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/30/11

On July 22 this year I reported: “ . . . a connection between Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has popped up in the press . . . when I asked Giuliani last Friday at Dartmouth College if he would support Rick Perry, that characteristic great-big-sea of a smile spread across his face. ‘I might,’ he said. I took that as an ‘absolutely.’"

Now it would be more than Palin behind Perry, I claimed. It would be Giuliani as well, “ . . . and my guess is he will have another New Yorker who passes the NASCAR test: Donald Trump.”

This week several reports have it that Rick Perry has been on the phone with Donald Trump since he entered the race.

From Newsmax, 8/27/11: “Word is that Trump has spoken on the phone several times with Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the new front-runner for the GOP nomination. Sources say Perry called the billionaire and offered high praise for Trump's business acumen.”

Trump and Palin are already bonded and so are Perry and Palin. And Giuliani brought her to a Yankees game the night of the infamous Letterman slander.

A Perry, Palin, Giuliani, Trump quaternity could form a new political matrix. It could break the nostalgico political establishment, a cartel run by two royal New England political families, House of Bush, House of Kennedy. It could awaken a new political element, a new America and a new New York ; one that belongs again to America.

Quigley’s Grading Scale for Presidential Viability, grading presidential candidates as you would cheese or New Hampshire maple syrup, traditionally reserved second tier for “military commander” right behind “governor of a big state.” This year military commander is thrown out (although warrior/scholar David Petraeus should be considered) in favor of a leader of a vast corporation. America needs the business. Trump would fit right in.

The NASCAR test is a personality type test for political candidates. Imagine how Mike Bloomberg or Hillary Clinton would look at a NASCAR race. Those who do not pass are sent to tier seven with Zoroastrian fire worshipers, professional wrestlers and Charlie Sheen. But Trump and Giuliani fit right in as do Perry and Palin.

When men wore pants: Chef Ramsay will save us

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/29/11

There is a world inside striving to find the will and intelligence to be born again. I noticed when my youngest son just entering college started listening to Tony Bennett and saving up for a suit.

The Fifties are here. Just under the surface. Just bubbling up. And “Mad Men's” Don Draper, the fictional shaman who created America in the 1950s (“America is everywhere I am . . . as far as I can see.”) has created it. Now come knockoffs of men in suits and women in uniform: Two new TV shows this fall: “Pan Am” and “The Playboy Club.”

Every athlete does not get a trophy in this world. Every book is not a great book. Every president and ex-president no matter how nuts or squalid does not get a Nobel Prize. That is Oprah world and it is fast dwindling. Chef Ramsey (“Shut up! What is that? Do it over! Stop crying!”) is the antidote; the anti-Oprah.

And Don is the anti-Timothy Leary, the anti-Jerry Garcia: Turn on? Don will take two. Tune in? Don sees everything. But never, ever, ever drop out.

You could see this coming with Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of Truman Capote in “Truman.” The return of mastery with both Hoffman and Capote. And in Ed Harris's portrayal and direction resurrecting “Pollock.” Warrior artists and writers from the fifties who have found no match. Warrior monks then as well: D.T. Suzuki, C.G. Jung, Nancy Ross Wilson, Walpola Rahula.

Recently, in a speech in Toronto, Shmuel Sackett, who speaks for an Israeli group which calls for Jewish leadership in Israel, asked why Israel at war in the 1960s found such strong support here in North America and finds so little today although the situations are not that different. But that was before Bono started writing opinions for The New York Times. Before the Bob Geldorf School of International Studies. I mean, who are you going to listen to, Lady Gaga or Hannah Arendt? And who is Hannah Arendt?

But it was then that a few men still wore pants and not jeans. And they are starting to again.

Signs in the heavens, signs following: A new age of Jefferson

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/25/11

“The spaceship has landed,” said Steve Jobs here at the end. Perhaps he was talking about several things. We at the turn of the millennium are sensitive to signs. Even the steady and solid same as the visionary holiness preachers who see “signs following” in the eastern hollows of old Kentucky. And this week we have seen signs. An earth quake in Louisa co., virtually in Thomas Jefferson’s back yard. One that shook the Washington monument and left a few cracks. And gold dropped more than a hundred bucks all in an afternoon.

That second is a good thing. Gold is a harbinger . . . a measure of wellness or weakness in the general economic environment. A drop in gold as dramatic as this, like a hurricane or an earthquake, comes from somewhere. Too bad that only the Natural Law Party which by the way very much likes Dennis Kucinich (and I do too) takes the view of physicist Wolfgang Pauli of what is called the collective unconscious. Pauli called it synchronicity: Nature and the human spirit is compliance. Everything means something, everything is connected. So what brought sudden confidence in the gnostic economic situation? Possibly the President leisurely taking to the sands in blissful New England and keeping his hands off things. Possibly the rise of a new figure from Texas who brings responsibility and maturity to government like we have not seen in at least 18 years in presidential politics. And it was as the earth awakened around Monticello that Rick Perry jumped to a big lead in the front of the pack after only one week away from announcing he would run for president.

Historian Frank Owsley in a famous essay titled “The Irrepressible Conflict” wrote that the American condition is always about two people and two places: Hamilton and Jefferson, New York and Virginia. New York took the advantage early on and so we had Yankees and Red Sox dominating the imagination. Until Ted Williams moved to Texas. And two politician families dominating still from that region. One basks at Nantucket the other at Kennebunkport. But Ron Paul, like the dutiful Amish, does not vacation. And Rick Perry will not be vacationing in Little Compton or Martha’s Vineyard. The sands have shifted. These two bring to us a new paradigm and Rand Paul and Mike Lee in the senate help enormously.

History has its zen moments and centuries stream from those moments as the seven rivers do from the Himalayas. One such moment was Jay’s Treaty of 1794 when Washington cast his lot with the New Yorkers in opposition to the Virginians, Jefferson and Madison. The men and the regions never got along after that and the northern dominance was sealed at that moment. But after the Second World War cultural dominance of the northeast. The energies dissipated. The karma shifted west. When they went to the moon they went from Texas. Norman Mailer said at the time that the “Protestants” had gone to the moon while we the “beatniks” in the northeast were out getting stoned.

All the people and all the regions would be coming up now as Jefferson wanted, not just the Hamiltonians in Boston and New York. This is a new day and could well be called the age of Jefferson. The true center now should not be DC but somewhere around Louisville. Or Peyton Manning’s Indianapolis.

It's all ahead. Whitman wrote back in 1869 that when we returned to earth from our journeys to Sirius, Jupiter and beyond, the “true Son of God” would come “singing his song.” The visionary Salvador Dali pictured this “second Christ” as an American football player in 1943. And again later as a Buddhist monk in yellow robes, descending from the sky to a desert in Texas.

China without the Tao

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 7/6/11

Tao in the world is like a river flowing home to the sea. – Daodejing #32

Henry Kissinger’s new book, “On China,” explains what might be seen as a modern telling of China’s fourteenth-century epic novel, “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” the three kingdoms being Mao’s China, the Soviet Union and the United States. What I found to be of particular interest is how the diplomatic relationship developed between China and the United States. Ambassador George Kennan had proposed that the Soviet Union would not survive if it could not expand and would fall apart internally. A U.S./China diplomatic friendship would fence the Soviets in and sure enough, less than 20 years later the Soviet Union fell apart.

But something – someone – is missing from Kissinger’s book. Laozi, Taoist sage and author of the “Daodejing.”

Rightfully so, as Tao played no role in Mao’s revolution nor does it in today’s China. I began to worry about China and ourselves, because China without Tao is not a place but an economic zone; it is Israel without torah or India without the Bhagavad Gita. Kennan’s observation could just as easily be made about American capitalism and the “Beijing model”; without expansion, they would fall apart. China has survived these six thousand years with the Tao – the path of integrity – the path of receding power or the way of return. Without Tao, the only way of return is crash and burn.

Liu Junning, an independent scholar in Beijing, suggested in June in a Wall Street Journal essay titled “The Ancient Roots of Chinese Liberalism” that Beijing’s power path without Laozi is brittle. At the Chinese Communist Party’s 90th anniversary, Hu Jintao said “Success in China hinges on the party.” Liu Junning writes:

“That view is to be expected from the party secretary. Perhaps more surprising is the extent to which outside observers have come to believe it, too. These foreigners—academics and journalists prominent among them—look to the "Beijing model" or the "Beijing consensus" as a desirable alternative to Western-style economic liberalism.

“The Washington consensus counted on free trade and open capital flows, plus deregulation, the rule of law, and the pre-eminence of the private sector to spur development. China at first glance appears to have achieved 9% annual growth rates or better for years by challenging that rule book. Visiting dignitaries and columnists see gleaming skyscrapers, straight roads, booming industries and upwardly mobile citizens . . . Yet on closer inspection, the most significant transformations from the perspective of boosting prosperity have involved loosening of control over the people, not some alchemy of power and Marxism.”

The Beijing model has the "virtue" of allowing the government to act quickly and decisively, writes Liu Junning. But when Beijing makes mistakes, the result historically has been a Cultural Revolution or a Great Leap Forward.

What we now call Western-style liberalism has featured in China's own culture for millennia, he writes. We first see it with philosopher Laozi, the founder of Taoism, in the sixth century B.C. Laozi articulated a political philosophy that has come to be known as wuwei, or inaction. "Rule a big country as you would fry a small fish," he said. That is, don't stir too much. "The more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people become," he wrote in his magnum opus, the "Daodejing."

Did the Stanley Cup loss reverse Canada’s fortunes?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/23/11

Pimco’s Bill Gross, leery of the wobbly American fundamentals told Bloomberg recently they are looking for new investments, mentioning Canada, Germany and others. The Canadian banking system is solid, there have been no bailouts, and the Canadian dollar has been growing strong against the American in recent years. But uh-oh. Something happened in early summer. What happened? The Vancouver Canucks lost in the Stanley Cup final to the Boston Bruins.

FOREX (FOReign Exchange market) blog author wrote on June 8, 2011: “In April, I wrote a post entitled, ’Economic Theory Implies Canadian Dollar will Fall.’” But did FOREX author take into consideration hockey theory and the Canadian psyche?

Perceptive FOREX blogger argued that the currency’s impressive rise was belied by fundamentals: “It seems the gods of forex read that post; since then, the loonie has fallen 3% against the US dollar alone. Based on my reading of the tea leaves, the loonie will fall further over the coming months, and finish the year below parity.”

Or possibly the hockey gods knew what would occur on June 18 when Canada, uncharacteristically confident that they would win, lost to Boston. Since then the graph for Canadian dollar conversion to American has bounced around like a lie detector graph for a liar.

It is a problem when national identity is so closely linked to sports as Canadian psyche is to hockey. Hockey is in Canada, as one commentator astutely says, a “national religion.” With such intense identification a sports victory or loss can have the same psychological effect as a military one.

When Canada took home the gold in both men and women’s hockey in the Winter Olympics of 2002 I compared the win to Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in 1805. As Richard Nixon once wrote, England got an extra hundred years of history from three hours at Trafalgar. Making the Canadian victory sweeter was the presence of the dour American Vice President, Dick Cheney, basking in the contempt he awakened in almost everyone in the world outside the Bush administration, to remind the crowd of the obsequious “Miracle on Ice” – a make believe moment in the Jimmy Carter presidency when the Soviet Union lost to America in an Olympic hockey game. The addled American mind, worn to a thread by Vietnam, conjured a real victory against the Soviets. A summer reading of Henry Kissinger’s “On China” gives the cleared picture. It was America’s linking with Mao’s China that blocked off future growth for the Soviet Union. As George Kennan had advised, if the Soviets could be kept from expansion it would collapse internally. And it did barely a dozen years after the Nixon/Kissinger initiatives. It had nothing to do with hockey.

Canada might have gone through a cultural renaissance since their great 2002 victories, gaining confidence in dealings with both the United States and Quebec. But Nixon left something out: Yes, Trafalgar, but what if Napoleon had came back 10 years later and beat England into the ground at Waterloo? The tune would be different. England would not have gotten its next hundred years and there would be no Victoria, no Beatles and no Stanley Cup because there would have been no Lord Stanley.

Too early to tell, but if the 2002 games were Canada’s Trafalgar victory, they would have needed a win like the Duke of York’s victory against Napoleon at Waterloo this year in Boston to rise to a booming Canadian Century like that predicted. But something celestial was going on. The presence of a giant before the Bruins’ net should have been the tip off. And Canada did not get its victory.

The FOREX blogger may have it. Not that I would advise Bill Gross or Pimco on this. I’m just saying.

Clinton v. Perry: Bill Clinton should start a new party

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/22/11

I’ve been writing about Democrats and Republicans as anachronistic appendages of history dominated by two wealthy and influential New England industrial-era, Gilded Age families, the Kennedys and the Bushes, holding the culture in sway – in a trance, maybe - for decades. It was only Bill Clinton who successfully broke free from this family pattern.

But Hillary’s hopes for the White House were dashed overnight by Carolyn Kennedy when the whole clan suddenly rose against her. Just as Jimmy Carter was sandbagged by Uncle Teddy. Just as the Bush team today hopes to demobilize Texas governor Rick Perry.

When Clinton said famously, “The age of Big Government is over,” it was a correct statement and a historic one. The age of the plantation was over as well and the age of the vast factory floor with its horde of immigrant workers pouring out together at the lunch whistle. America is no longer an empty, endless primeval forest awaiting occupants but rather a fully developed and diverse group of regional cultures. One size no longer fits all. We need new regional thinking. Today up to 85% of Americans work in small business. But the Kennedy/Obama Democrat’s mind set – like the Bush Republicans – is still bound to the age of field and factory.

For awhile between Reagan and Clinton the economy worked well. Now, with Pelosi, Barney Frank, Reid and Obama, it is clear that the old Roosevelt-era industrial vision was only in hiding; quietly lurking under the stairs of the university and planning a vengeful sequel.

But I see this as the last hurrah. Tea Party rose in direct opposition and America repudiated the old ideas. The people opposed. Virginia Senator Jim Webb said when the Bush-era bailouts were announced by Hank Paulson that calls were ten-to-one against to his office.

It is unfortunate that Bill Clinton came to the support of Obama during the debt ceiling crisis this month because he should have been on the other side. In fact, he should have been leading the other side. This and all of the original thinking of states’ rights, sovereignty, opposition to global empire, freedom and individuation that we hear today from Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, Judge Andrew Napolitano and the Tea Party pretty much started here in Vermont and New Hampshire in opposition to the imperial Bush/Cheney/Rove adventures. A quick check of the Vermont Commons: Voices of Independence web site and its thoughtful newspaper can confirm.

Today, with no place left to turn, New York looks to Vermont for direction. As NY mayor Mike Bloomberg hopes to buff his shine by presiding over the wedding of the first gay couple in NY, it is old hat here. Democratic Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin does so this week.

Our America today is no longer Marx v. Keynes in imperial global projection. It is now Keynes v. Hayek in regional competition. The regional competition which Texas Governor Rick Perry today advances was suggested first in the most liberal quarters of New England during the George W. Bush administration. These ideas are not yet fully formulated in either party and need someone with the status and cache of Clinton to advance them on the left. He is on a vegan diet; he advocates David Lynch’s Transcendental Meditation; he is a man of the geist, he’s still hungry and he comes from a different creative place. He needs a new vehicle; his own vehicle. And at least half of his generation can think of nothing else.

Conservatives have been the first to begin to grasp the meaning of the new century in the new libertarian and regional thinking. But that could easily flip.

When people live in an outmoded system their lives become strange and temporary. Revolution beckons to them. As Peggy Noonan wrote recently, today no one dies here where they are born. We have no cousins. Maybe this will find improvement.

Rove joins the Bush anti-Perry campaign

Karl Rove, that dutiful Jeeves of the Bush family, has joined in the loyalist chorus to have someone – just anyone – run against Rick Perry in the primary, so to get Jeb Bush on the ticket as VP in 2012 and have him advance in 2016.

What kind of man wants to be VP anyway?

Via HotAir by Tina Korbe: “Karl Rove: Christie, Ryan, Palin might still grow the field”:

“We’ve got a good field,” Rove said on Hannity on August 15,”. . . I think we are likely to see several other candidates think seriously about getting in . . . I think Chris Christie and Paul Ryan are gonna look at it again . . . I’m starting to pick up some sort of vibration that these kind of conversations are causing Christie and Ryan to tell the people who are calling them, you know what, I owe it to you, I’ll take a look at it.”

Dude, I wonder who is calling? Jeb Bush? Former Bush employee Mitch Daniels? Karl Rove?

This is Rove street theater to have Jeb Bush as VP on a Christie or Ryan ticket, to win or lose in 2012 is irrelevant. It will return it to the Bush family via Jeb in 2016.

As said here months back, Chris Christie is the Bush family’s Barack Obama; the last chance for the family fortune before the millennium finally awakens, as Obama was/is for the Kennedy family. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard blurted it out on TV months back when Christie was the flavor of the month. The ticket should be: “Christie with Jeb Bush as VP.” Got it.

The problem here of course is that Mormon, Mitt Romney, who demands to be heard as a free man in America. As Anne Coulter blurted out some months back, Christie should run because Romney cannot win.

That is, he cannot win in the heartland because he is a Mormon. Perhaps. But at this moment, Mitt Romney virtually holds the future of the world in his hands. What the Bush proxies want is for Romney not to win in New Hampshire’s primary. Because Christie or whomever the push ahead will then have gone through Iowa with nothing, then a big win for Romney in New Hampshire, then a big win in South Carolina for Perry and onward and upward for Perry/Bachmann in the red states.

Even the jolly, likeable and apparently loyal Bushido Christie would not have a chance. He doesn’t have a chance in South Carolina or Iowa anyway. He would have to win New Hampshire to go forward.

The only way he could do that is if Mitt Romney, ahead by a large margin in NH right now, dropped out of the race completely before the primary. Mitt’s decision is, do I take one for the team? That is, do I fold in with the Bush plantation or take my chances in America? Anyone who has watched Romney in Massachusetts and anywhere knows one thing; that he is his own man and he is a free man.

Why doesn’t Jeb Bush just enter?

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/18/11

Possibly Jeb Bush demurred about a run for the presidency in 2012 as he saw Obama to be unbeatable when the first Republicans headed toward the primary season. 2016 would be the better time. But with Gallup showing Obama today with a low approval of 26% on the economy that might have been a miscalculation. And now that a wily coyote has slipped in under the shadows of a Comanche moon and taken the lead over Mitt Romney and the rest of the pack after only having signed on three days ago, it is starting to look like a big mistake on Jeb’s part.

They, the Bushes, have been looking for a proxy; Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, John Thune, just anybody. All they need to do is win the primary and let Obama have it another four years. They can wait. Then it will be Jeb. But Perry is big, strong, unpredictable. Feral, dangerous and alive like west Texas. To think that Paul Ryan, running as a Bush proxy – he is being encouraged to run by former W. employee Mitch Daniels, Jeb and other Bush loyalists - would do any better than Daniels, Tim Pawlenty or the others against Perry, who has long been the Bushes worst nightmare, is the end of imagination.

Which is why this race is so interesting. The Bushes, like the Kennedys, have reached the end of imagination. Like Holmes and Moriarty, they may now be going over the falls together. Why doesn’t Jeb just enter himself against Perry? If Perry wins it will be a new strong force in American politics. A new political culture awakened in America. Jeb won’t have a chance in 2016 and will thereafter be long forgotten.

Always disliked that Bush senior compared himself and W. to the Adamses, who served as father and son presidents. A stunning presumptuousness to make such a claim about a Founding Father. And many Jeffersonians consider John Adams, father of the totalitarian Alien and Sedition acts, to be among the worst presidents. Second only possibly to W. who may have taken his cue from Adams when he repealed habeas corpus, virtually suspending the Constitution. That Janus image was rather suggested; the god had two faces, because the Romans understood that things ended as they began.

But with Rick Perry, America gets to begin again and bust free from the two northeastern families; Montagues and Capulets that have masqueraded as political parties these past 40 years. As Ronald Reagan said, it is morning in America. But it is getting now to high noon.

Petraeus for VP in a Rick Perry administration

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/17/11

Felt that Massachusetts senator John Kerry lost his presidential campaign – and I campaigned relentlessly for him in New Hampshire in 2004 after Wes Clark dropped out – because he was successful as a soldier and proud of it. Had he strode resolutely to the podium with a metal leg and a cane when General Wesley Clark introduced him at the Democratic Convention, he might have had it. Success meaning just that: Like Arjuna in battle, he saw the eye of the enemy and hit the target. Not to cast aspersions but so many who fought honorably and were later successful in politics – Jack Kennedy, H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, and McCain – would not have met the Arjuna standard or those of Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff.” To those who flew fighters out of Southeast Asia and remained alive to talk about it today on the History channel, the only course was to hit the target or die trying. Nothing else matters to samurai. We love our military, especially those who sank the boat, were gunned down or crashed the plane. I take this to mean that we love our military but are afraid of them. Until everything gets unraveled and then we call them up. But when we do it maybe brings clarity of the heart. Eisenhower, for example, brought America to accept the conquest. The war was over. We won. Let’s build on the confidence and success which comes with victory.

We will have that moment as well with this war and soon and when we do I suggest we will look to General David Petraeus, recently installed Director of the CIA.

Michael Brenner, Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations; Professor of International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh, seemed to suggest yesterday in the Huffington Post (“I Petraeus”) that Petraeus may be tempted by higher office:

“Petraeus, as CIA Director, is operating in a foreign policy environment that leaves much room for individual initiative. His counterpart at the Pentagon, Leon Panetta, is known less for his subtlety and bureaucratic skills than his heavy-handed use of the hammer. He has none of Robert Gates' suave manner and gravitas. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is vocal on a selective basis, travels relentlessly, but lacks both a coherent strategic vision and diplomatic finesse. As for the National Security Council apparatus, it is the marked by weak leadership, thin expertise and a view of the country's external relations shaped by domestic political considerations. That leaves President Obama. His recent abject performance on the debt ceiling issue underscores the distinguishing traits of his person and his presidency. He is indecisive, yields to the pressure of those more willful than he, and has few pronounced views on any matter other than an all-consuming desire to occupy the White House until January 2017. Within 48 hours of the dramatic surrender to the Tea Party, and its profound consequences hitting home, he was prowling the moneyed precincts of Chicago and Hollywood on the hunt for big bucks from fat cat contributors. . . . For a man of ambition like Petraeus, it is a tempting -- irresistible? -- opportunity.”

Petraeus would be a good fit for VP in a Rick Perry administration. It would enhance the states’ rights position which Perry emphasizes in his book, “Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington.”

A President’s first job is to run the military. She or he must also secure the borders and deliver the mail. The rest is up for grabs.

Obama’s good bye bus tour

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/16/11

The President travels the country in a Greyhound bus now in a new campaign pitch. Stops at 7-ELEVEN maybe for a slurpee. Get down with the people. I suppose they are feeling Sarah Palin. Sarah rides a bus. Better ride a bus. Sarah Palin rides a Harley. No, better not. It is a mask that fits with her. Not Obama. On this long hike since 1960 the Democrats have been cursed by a monarchist trend, starting with Jack Kennedy. Ending with Obama. And Jack Kennedy would have seemed ridiculous riding a bus.

Anything is possible in America. You can break the chains of a thousand years and find the dharma path. Or you can get a tattoo of the Zig Zag man on your arm and ride a Harley. But for Obama now nothing seems to fit.

Among us Irish immigrants, and Kennedy was married in my high school parish, the general direction was to build our own parallel institutions like Notre Dame. Previous Catholics had done the same with Georgetown, which still, more than most, carries the karma. But the Kennedys instead went right to the citadel and sent their kids to Harvard, seeing themselves in direct shadow opposition to Protestant New England; Lodge then, Bush today. Kennedy then, Obama today.

Not sure it was the right move for us and Obama seems an extension of us, to go take the citadel of the WASP and their so-called Protestant Work Ethic. Even we proles from the public schools like University of Massachusetts had heard about the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism from Max Weber. The storied work ethic may have been a fraud as the Marxists taught us but the only ones who seem to have it now are Mormons. Maybe they took it with them from New England to the desert.

The lesson Obama learned when Harvard professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr. charged a Cambridge cop with racism in Obama’s year was one of image, not a lesson of the heart. Obama looked silly affirming Harvard Yard’s pretentions as his own in opposition to the meat and potatoes cop of Fenway Park. Now he looks silly riding the bus trying to get along with “real people.”

The real people are practically in revolt. Democratic commentator Pat Caddell has called it a “prerevolutionary state.”

I don’t think so. I think it is 1979 part two and much akin to the first when the country shifted from the frivolous, make believe and escapist representative image of itself as a peanut farmer, Sunday school teacher from the Deep South with a crazy brother to a more authentic reality. Four years later Ronald Reagan was reelected in an unprecedented landslide, carrying every state but one. He even carried the storied land of Obama’s Harvard, long conquered and broken by us Boston Irish.

The Hill

New parties, Pimco’s Bill Gross and Tibetan Prayer Flags as economic indicators

By Bernie Quigley

For on 8/15/11

As liberals flee Obama and conservatives flock to Perry, expect a new “no name” party of Obama conservatives and Bush liberals to rise against a virtually brand new conservative life force starting with Perry (and Romney now!), Palin, Giuliani, Trump, (and maybe David Petraeus?). Bloomberg money may go behind the new no names; he was first mentioned three years back in first rumors of a third party in a Unity ’08 scheme from Maine’s former governor Angus King and actor Sam Waterston.

But if so, maybe Virginia Senators Mark Warner and Jim Webb with General Wesley Clark, Elizabeth Warren, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and indeed, he who has earned his place among the venerables, Rep. Dennis Kuchinich of Ohio, should also think of going alone and leave the Democratic party an abandoned skin of Clinton nostalgicos and Kennedy relatives. Think ahead to 2016 to build again from scratch. The Democrats should have run Mark Warner for President in 2008 in the first place. 2016 is not too late.
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Would be nice to see Perry and Romney transcend the debates entirely and run on their records, on their resumes, on their lives, character and experiences. Leave the American Idol-style debates to the amateurs. End these painful pretentions. Debates do not tell how one would govern. They tell how one would teach.
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Today does indeed mark the critical turning. The most succinct analysis of the economic crisis goes perhaps to Pimco's Bill Gross in Thursday's Washington Post. As he explains, change is here to stay but it may not be what we expected.

“But while our debt crisis is real and promises to grow to Frankenstein proportions in future years,” he writes, “debt is not the disease — it is a symptom. Lack of aggregate demand or, to put it simply, insufficient consumption and investment is the disease. . . We and our global market competitors are and have been experiencing a lack of aggregate demand for several decades. It is now only visibly coming to a head, as the magic elixir of leverage is drained and exhausted.”

Economist Harry Dent has been saying as much for the last 20 years. War babies, born all at the same time, will recede and die all at the same time. Starting now. All 40 million of us with another 40 million behind. And half of us forgot to have children, depending instead on government and corporation for elderly support. As Dent said on Cavuto a few weeks back, old people do not buy things.

Explained in this column on October 27, 2008: As economic indicators, the sequence of Tibetan prayer flags reflects the human progress of rise and decline from birth to death in individuals and in cultures as well. The flags fly in this sequence: white, red, green, gold, dark blue. As we began with white in 1946, we enter now dark blue or as Tibetans see it "the between" – end of the life cycle and return to the Earth Mother. The cycle begins again with white – rebirth - 20 years later.

Not to worry, the new “greatest generation” will save us, just as it did in 1946. But as the downturn began then in 1929, the “greatest generation” was only nine years old. So we may have to sit awhile.

Rick Perry and Barack Obama

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/9/11

Camp followers of that clever system of history outlined by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book “The Fourth Turning” will be closely watching this week’s events as world economy unravels; unraveling as well the current president. Strauss and Howe have it that all historic periods begin and end with a major conflagration and that historic periods follow generationally, each generation having a 20-year influence. At the end of 60 years the entire system starts to collapse. Struggles ensue in the next 20 years as collective intelligence and will strive to be born again to a new era. We are now 65 years into the post-war period and are feeling, experiencing the descent. The theory marks culture as well as politics, each generation antidotal to the last. That is, in a phrase historian Arnold Toynbee used, yin becomes yang. My opinion on those who most affected our post war period and brought about its metamorphosis are in generational alternating sequence: Dwight Eisenhower, John Lennon, Ronald Reagan and the Dalai Lama.

Many followers of this system which is based on archetypes as well as demographics saw Barack Obama as the figure who would rise to awaken the transitional period; a period that would also awaken the century and potentially the millennium. I did not. I saw him as the figure who completed the Kennedy period and even the age of Lincoln. The Obama presidency also ends the exclusive influence of the northeast as the historic determiner for America. Mission accomplished. As T. Roosevelt was prelude to FDR, Reagan was prelude to the age to open ahead which will advance a political and cultural awakening to the South, the west and the heartland. When history fulfills its purposes it moves on. Every period gives evidence to that. I see the rising figure as Rick Perry, Governor of Texas. Demographics have been moving in that direction since the end of WW II. It is entirely appropriate and right that he begin the tenure of such vast responsibility and scale with a prayer as he did this week in Texas.

America needs a “super committee” of Governors

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/7/11

A fine mess now, Ollie. It was a mistake from the first to allow S&P, Moody’s and the others an unelected overview and a voice in the life of American sovereign states. Now, like those tragically broken school systems in Atlanta and Pennsylvania, the ones with so many erasures on tests that the odds are three trillion to one that they are authentic, this Congress with the lowest rating in American history calls for a “super committee” of its own members to repair itself.

We have just recently had a super committee called the Simpson/Bowles Commission. To the surprise of some it brought quite a dignified, fair and sensible beginning. Congress ignored it and so did the President. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia did not get the credit deserved in the debt ceiling debate although his opinion and that of the Gang of Six incorporated Simpson/Bowles conclusions. And as one commentator said, there is already a super committee to discuss these issues . . . it is called the Congress.

Certainly no super committee will go beyond the modest recommendations of Simpson/Bowles. And any new committee will only express the collective will of that same congress.

Recently, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley had a good idea. The new governor gave a report card to the state legislature. It might be considered one of the most dysfunctional in the nation and no doubt needed reform. But they kicked at the idea of the governor overlooking them. No doubt they would prefer to have their own super committee like Washington wants.

Let's have a super committee but as Haley asks to overlook the legislation in South Carolina, let’s have a super committee of governors to overlook Congress. It has been suggested in this column before to create a super committee of governors and former governors; a council of 12 to advise and inform as a Board of Trustees does a college. Warner, former governor of Virginia should apply and Haley too. And Jim Hunt of North Carolina. And Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sarah Palin of Alaska and Jesse Ventura of Minnesota and Mitt Romney and Rick Perry. Now would be the time as we are quickly coming to the end of things. Almost overnight the home of the brave has become the land of frightened thoughts. The Chinese are saying no more plastic daddy. They’re going to pull the credit card.

Before he died, the great ambassador George Kennan recommended such a group. He called it a Council of Elders. America was never intended to be world without walls; a world of wandering tribes represented by lobbyists here and abroad with greater power than our current batch of shop-till-you-drop senators. It was intended to be a nation of places with regional representation. And in its earliest awakening, the Senate was intended to be such a watchdog. Particularly since the passing of the 17th Amendment in 1913 it has lost that function.

A zen history of Canada

by Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/3/11

“Why is Canada beating America?” Jason Clemens asks this week in the Wall Street Journal.

Ten years ago Canada was on the skids. The Bloc Quebecois was on the rise, the IMF was glaring and Canadians were self effacing and avidly in between, not sure if they were real unto themselves or a kind of cold country American. At that time the Canadian dollar was converting to 75 cents American. Today it is worth $1.04 U.S and rising. What happened? How did Canada get strong? It overcame two existential and psychological challenges, the United States and Quebec.

Over long periods history can be looked at as a chemistry experiment. England’s fate can be seen going back to only two days in particular: The day Elizabeth I removed one of the chemical elements by chopping off the head of Mary Queen of Scots is the first. It changed the chemical makeup of England. It ended a long thousand year irritant – longer – from those pesky Picts who came from Ireland to the space now Scotland and just wouldn’t go away. It is the kind of irritant that makes you strong and keeps you on your guard. Trafalgar again changed the chemistry. Tiny England soared to world conquest and remained in the game until Sean Connery was knighted.

Canada faced a similar situation with Quebec, natural enemies united from the first in confederation as protection against colonization by the Unites States in the 1800s. Today Canada and Quebec have come to terms. In the recent election the Bloc Quebecois, which seeks secession from Canada, received only three seats. The movement has effectively ended. I have felt that the Quebecois movement was a conspiracy to make Canada stronger and more independent from the United States and when that happened the two would find common ground.

And that moment happened after 9/11 when George W. Bush invaded Iraq.
Canada, under the leadership of Jean Chrétian, the “little guy from Shawinigan” who spoke English with a hilarious accent, directly told the U.S. he would not support the effort. Quebec vehemently opposed the American invasion. Bernard Landry, leader of the Bloc, openly expressed his support for Chrétien and the Bloc and Canada were one.

But Canada and the U.S. no longer were. There was no chopping off of heads, but the beating America took from Hayley Wickenheiser and the Canadian women’s hockey team at the 2002 Winter Olympics might be considered Canada’s Trafalgar moment. Canada would no longer be a footnote to American efforts. Canada broke free at that moment. Since, with the reelection of conservative Stephen Harper in the age of Obama and the weakening of the Liberal party and demise of the Bloc, Canada has gone its own way.

“While the U.S. remains mired in debt and slogs through a subpar economic recovery, Canada is moving ahead steadily,” writes Clemens. “Its unemployment rate peaked at a little over 8.5% and is now 7.4%, and there were no bank bailouts. Real GDP growth is expected to be roughly 3% this year.”

Canada may now be seen as leading the way if Rick Perry makes progress into 2012 as Perry and Harper share characteristics in culture, politics and outlook. And a Perry presidency will accommodate the Tea Party much as Harper was able to accommodate Quebec.

The Canadians might have gotten it right first. It is easy today to imagine the Loonie worth $1.30 one day soon given the situation in America today.

No doggie for Mitt

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 8/2/11

For a long time now the east coast establishment and the Bush family in particular were sure Mitt Romney was their man. Mormon or not; we yanks, even the ones in Texas, don’t care about that stuff. But he looked just right in that suit and went to Harvard and apparently everyone in New England wants to do that. And he is smart as paint. Possibly like the Kennedys and Obama the Bushes hoped to give him a little family puppy to show their affection. To show how well he fit in their parlor. But after his call yesterday for “cut cap and balance” and his repudiation of the debt ceiling agreement there will be no doggie for Mitt. Where will the establishment turn now? Chris Christie? Too fat. John Thune? Lives in that spooky northern heartland. How about that Kay Bailey Hutchinson? She’s nice, too. How would that work out? No always the same. Better bring it on home to Jeb.

“I personally cannot support this deal,’’ said Romney in his historic moment.

Anyone who thought Romney was a Bush family puppy was not looking closely at his record. He is and always has been independent minded and original in his thinking. And even as governor of Massachusetts he was more the westerner than the Bostonian. He is the true west conservative come back east while the Bush east coast establishment is Boston moved to Texas. They used to have a name for that after the Civil War.

And anyone who sees irony in Romney’s move sees the shadow before she sees the light. Romney as a conservative long quietly wished for a balanced budget amendment most likely. But only now, this day, did it become entirely possible.

Romney’s vote does several things: It puts him strategically in opposition to Rick Perry who cleverly dominated the moment when he and Nikki Haley together placed an op-ed in the Washington Post defending “cut cap and balance.” And he enters now into this competition ON RICK PERRY’S TERMS.

It brings “cut cap and balance to the fore as we enter September and for the first time in our era it legitimized the idea of a balanced budget with Romney’s imprimatur.

It lends legitimacy to the Tea Party movement and recognized its fateful progress. Romney was among the first to do so.

It makes Romney a contender by pulling him out of the establishment. He never was an establishment politician. Pending what Sarah Palin does on Sept. 3 at the Iowa Tea Party Labor Day rally, this race is now between Rick Perry and Mitt Romney. One of these two will be the next president and that is very good for America.