States must prohibit taxation of children

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 11/23/09

Once was we might have called upon Congress when reason and responsibility demanded initiative. But the feckless Pelosi and Reid have expressed such vast irresponsibility in their short tenure that we must look now to the legislative bodies of last resort: The states. First item: The states should prohibit the taxation of children. Centuries ago, as we rose to self governance, a division occurred between feudal countries which placed economic burdens on children by demanding that they pay the debts of their parents or grandparents. In free countries, a child is born free of such onerous debt. It is the hallmark of a free country. But it is no longer the hallmark of our country.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office recently testified before Congress that our fiscal situation has deteriorated rapidly in just the past few years. The federal government ran a 2009 deficit of $1.4 trillion—the highest since World War II—as spending reached nearly 25% of GDP and total revenues fell below 15% of GDP. Shortfalls like these have not been seen in more than 50 years.

Going forward,he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, there is no relief in sight, as spending far outpaces revenues and the federal budget is projected to be in enormous deficit every year. Our national debt is projected to stand at $17.1 trillion 10 years from now, or over $50,000 per American.

“The planned deficits will have destructive consequences for both fairness and economic growth,” he writes. “They will force upon our children and grandchildren the bill for our overconsumption.

But it’s not going to happen. In czarist Russia perhaps. Or Cromwell’s Ireland. But not here.

New Moon: The awakening of the new century’s first generation

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 11/20/09

From my point of view President Obama is the most intelligent and savvy of Democratic Presidents to come to power in the post-war period. He has a sensory intuition which allows him to catch up quickly on things and he is far better at external things than internal things. China ambassador Jon Huntsman, Jr., the best of the current China hands, gives him the highest marks on his visit to China. Even the Campaign for Tibet seemed cautiously optimistic. Obama’s problem is that history has cast his role at the end of a vast epoch. History has made him the last agent of a realm of ideas that are suited to an age long past and a vastly different America. The Democrats and much of the Eastern establishment have a Roosevelt hangover and dwell like Proust in a remembrance of things past. It is exactly like the South that W.J. Cash wrote about in the late 1920s. The South was ready economically to enter the greater world but the honored ghosts of history prevented it from doing so for 20 more years.

Historic periods overlap. Gore Vidal, aged and decrepit, hating America, hating everything, longing for the “gallant” Roosevelt and conjuring the ghost of William F. Buckley, Jr., when he was awarded for “lifetime achievement” at the 60th annual National Book Awards this week, might be seen as the Roosevelt era’s “last Confederate” still waving the red flag after the world has gone on; gone on to Elvis, to Reagan, to Twilight. There were still Victorians long after the age had passed. And when Elvis first rose in the world on The Ed Sullivan Show he still had to contend with Stonewall Jackson over who would represent the post-war South.

Generations are the engine of history and the channel of historic change and those who look for generational change should get in line tonight to see the opening of New Moon, the second of the series of four new vampire movies. Tickets have been selling out months ahead like a Beatles concert. But when the first movie, Twilight, came out it was called a cult movie and a passing fad. Like they said about the Beatles. Critics said the writing wasn’t any good. Like they said about the Beatles. We are at the century’s turning. It hasn’t turned yet and it won’t for a few years. But it is beginning to rise new against old generations as generations always do, and the old ideas and the old century. In our period, even an old millennium.

When cultural patterns including political ones are established by the old generations, everything that is new “doesn’t fit” and becomes a challenge to the old generations. All at every level of power become priests and defenders of the old in opposition to the new. But we began to see the turning with the Twilight movie, which was widely panned by critics and promotion institutions although the book by Stephanie Meyers had already sold 30 million copies, mostly to young teenage girls. It is the politics of denial. The new are denied entry into territory already controlled by the old people. We are seeing in spades a similar pattern with Sarah Palin. We have been seeing it with Ron Paul as well.

Each generation has its own gods and goddesses: Victoria, Douglas Fairbanks, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Eisenhower, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. They form and fulfill their own generations and place them in sequence to generations past and those ahead. The new gods, Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, awaken the long-awaited fourth post-war generation tonight with New Moon.

A high stakes Super Bowl . . .

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 11/18/09

Historian Frank Owsley said that the two most representative figures in the Colonial period were Hamilton and Jefferson. But I can’t think of anyone today who represents America better than New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick and Indianapolis Colts former coach Tony Dungy. The New England team logical and decision based, the Indianapolis team a heart-driven, consistent and persistent model of “quiet strength.” Heart won over head late last Sunday night in a game that is still talked about up here, which may have turned the tide for the season. Or longer.

Great things have happened to us here in New England since the Quaternity of Belichick, Brady, Moss and Welker came to us. Having been born and reared up here it feels like we have finally entered the real world. Boston has left behind its key competition with New York which it had for the last hundred years in baseball, for a new competition with Indianapolis. The Patriots/Colts midseason game is being called the “competition of the decade.” It is good for us here because for the first time we no longer look longingly to New York where we always come in second in everything, but to the heartland of America, which we have never really acknowledged before nor felt we belonged. Not a day goes by up here when someone like Boston-area Matt Damon will try to get us to play rugby or do something else as they do it in England, but football has truly brought New England into the American heartland.

Football and all sports are modified contention. The American Indians used sports as a substitute for war; the Canadians last century found that hockey would keep working class French and Irish from killing one. The pioneering psychiatrist Edward F. Edinger said the matrix formed by sports will show the pattern of future history. In baseball, which rose in the Civil War era, the big teams were Boston and New York and they still are today. But in the post-war period football is the American game and the big teams are throughout the heartland; Green Bay, Dallas, Indianapolis and now us here in New England as well.

America is finding a new “center” and that is why perhaps the “beltway” mentality no longer fits the heartland. Our old center kept North and South in equilibrium, but now we are a full country North, South, East and the frozen North. Perhaps it is time to find our new center.

The Nation’s Capital was supposed to be sacred space; the benign, omniscient, impartial Brahma eye of the oculus high on the Capital Dome holding the heart-driven Old South and the head-bound industrial North together in a marriage of harmony and contention. At one time it was, but as Jefferson said, that time would pass and what would follow in its place would be a contentious bureaucracy; a republic of dress up and political pretension. Here’s a thought: Let’s let the Nation’s Capital be hosted instead by whoever wins the Super Bowl this year; possibly Boston/Foxboro, but maybe New Orleans or Indianapolis. And leave it there for a while. See what happens. Start a new century. Start a new millennium. Get rid of the riff raff and get a fresh start.

Katie Couric and Sarah Palin: Will Rick Perry go rogue in 2012?

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 11/16/09

We will learn one thing from Sarah Palin’s new book, Going Rogue: She will not be humiliated; she will not be intimidated; she will meet you head on. This should be considered in answering The Hill’s Pundit Blogger Armstrong Williams’ question whether there will be a dark horse Republican candidate in 2012. Conditions are almost perfect for a dark horse because an original, new conservative theme has developed this past year and that theme has a rising spirit attached to it: Former Alaskan governor and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. She could well be the candidate in 2012. But this is a movement forming and not yet fully formed. When it is fully formed a new champion – a dark horse – may arise.

Katie Couric will get her fair share in Palin’s book. Couric is the major networks’ official greeter. She is a gatekeeper. Her role is archetypal rather than journalistic. When she embarrassed Palin by insinuation and mnemonic slander (“. . . not one of us”) implying that she never read a newspaper, she turned Palin away from the door. She unofficially granted permission from the networks and sent forth the winged monkeys – Tiny Fey, Letterman, etc. – allowing them free fire character assassination.

The interview Couric did with Palin will be considered a milestone of journalistic history. In previous elections we had pack journalism but what happened in 2008 might be called horde journalism. The 2008 election reminded Johns Hopkins professor and frequent Wall Street Journal commentator Fouad Ajami of the “politics of crowds” in places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, “ . . . of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini.”

Couric and the networks intentionally set out to subvert a Presidential race by destroying one of the candidates. The networks – and the NYTs and the Washington Post – had already decided by mid July when McCain was 15 points behind Obama where the election would go. The celebrations for the first black president were all prepared and the invitations had already been sent out. Suddenly, with the arrival of Palin, they were dead even. It changed everything.

Palin’s was a dynamic new voice in America, potentially one as vital and relevant as Andrew Jackson’s. Couric should have been fired, instead she was honored and rewarded by Princeton University and she mocked Palin throughout the event in her bright red dress. Possibly no incident in the post-war period showed the full convergence of the networks, the press, academia, undergraduate bloggers by the millions, virtually all of Hollywood and the entertainment industry, converging on one point with Couric leading the charge. And now it is revealed in her new book that Palin’s own Republican apparatus was a coat carrier and appeared to help in the herding of the Obama horde to Mile High Stadium by intentionally subterfuging Palin.

The country needed a break and Barack Obama, bright, young and black, would be the antidote to a few grim years. Now the young President is thin and prematurely graying. At this point it is fair to say he does not appear to know how to be President and America’s health, welfare and possibly freedom are dangerously destabilized. A year on, we are beginning to hear the phrase, how did this happen?

The unprecedented, uniform, institutional contempt by the press for Palin had an empowering effect on the heartland. They – the New York and Washington political industry - hated Sarah Palin because they hated the rest of us who live in the hills and hollows where Johnny Cash wandered it was said. In subtle but pervasive ways this is true.

But in the past year we have watched history rising against this background. It is still not yet formed but in the next year it will begin to find form. By 2012 it will be in coherent shape. What is forming is a concoction of Ron Paul and Austrian economics, the April 15 demonstrations against the bailouts and the deficits and the subsequent town hall demonstrations. These rude awakenings began to find legitimacy in NY 23 when Doug Hoffman gained support as a Conservative Party candidate and when Tim Pawlenty, governor of Minnesota, offered his support. The unapologetically conservative candidate’s win by 17% in the governor’s race in Virginia suggests that substantive change is at hand.

In a word, the times have awakened but they have not yet fully formed. Everything is changing and change requires new people. The newest Gallup numbers show independents leaning to the GOP by 52% to 30%. The traditional Republicans are like the elegant jazz musicians of the 1950s, suddenly faced with the new music of the Sixties. Newt Gingrich will try to present himself as the new guy and so will others, but they are the old jazz musicians. Tim Pawlenty is new, Sarah Palin is and so is Rick Perry and these are perfect conditions for a dark horse.

Palin will be there as she was at the beginning. But Rick Perry, governor of Texas, was also with this movement from the very beginning. He is highest ranked and most respected of the new people advancing the new ideas. He would be the likely dark horse to consolidate and legitimize these issues – bring form to the formless - if this movement is to go forward. While the others are demure and cosmetic, Perry speaks clearly. He recently told a gathering in Texas that Obama was “hell bent” on socialism, raising a startled “oh my!” from the punditry fashionistas. This is what is required at beginnings. But Virginia’s new governor-elect Bob McDonald can now be seen in the wings as well.

Katie Couric and Sarah Palin: Will Rick Perry go rogue in 2012? - this is an unedited draft

We will learn one thing from Sarah Palin’s new book, Going Rogue: She will not be humiliated; she will not be intimidated; she will meet you head on. This should be considered in answering the question posed by Armstrong Williams here whether there will be a dark horse Republican candidate in 2012. Conditions are almost perfect for a dark horse because an original, new conservative theme has developed this past year and that theme has a rising spirit attached to it. Former Alaskan governor and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin is the rising spirit, although she may not be the dark horse candidate.

Katie Couric will get her fare share in Palin’s book. Couric is the major networks’ official greeter. She is a gatekeeper. Her role is archetypal rather than journalistic. When she embarrassed Palin by insinuation and mneumonic slander (“. . . not one of us”) implying that she never read a newspaper, she turned Palin away from the door. She unofficially granted permission from the networks and sent forth the winged monkeys – Tiny Fey, Letterman, etc. – allowing them free fire character assassin.

The interview Couric did with Palin will be considered a milestone of journalistic history. In previous elections we had pack journalism but what happened in 2008 can only be called horde journalism. The 2008 election reminded Johns Hopkins professor and frequent Wall Street Journal commentator Faoud Ajami of the “politics of crowds” in places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, “ . . . of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini.” Couric and the networks intentionally set out to subvert a Presidential race by destroying one of the candidates. The networks – and the NYTs and the Washington Post – had already decided by mid July when McCain was 15 points behind Obama where the election would go. The celebrations for the first black president were all prepared and the invitations had already been sent out. Suddenly, with the arrival of Palin, they were dead even. It changed everything.

Palin’s was a dynamic new voice in America, potentially one as vital and relevant as Andrew Jackson’s. Couric should have been fired, instead she was honored and rewarded by Princeton University, mocking Palin throughout the award ceremony in her bright red dress. Possibly no incident in the post-war period showed the full convergence of the networks, the press, academia, undergraduate bloggers by the millions, virtually all of Hollywood and the entertainment industry, converging on one point with Couric leading the charge. And now it is revealed in her new book that Palin’s own Republican apparatus were coat carriers and appeared to help in the herding of the Obama horde to Mile High Stadium by intentionally subterfuging Palin.

The country needed a break and Barack Obama, bright, young and black, would be the antidote to a few grim years. Now the young President is thin and prematurely greying. At this point it is fair to say he does not appear to know how to be President and America’s health, welfare and possibly freedom is dangerously destabilized. A year on, we are beginning to hear the phrase, how did this happen?

In the past year we have watched history rising from the unformed. It is still not yet formed but in the next year it will begin to find form. By 2012 it will be in coherent shape. What is forming is a concoction of Ron Paul and Austrian economics, the April 15 demonstrations against the bailouts and the deficits and the subsequent town hall demonstrations. These rude awakenings began to find legitimacy in NY 23 when Doug Hoffman gained support as a Conservative Party candidate and when Tim Pawlenty, governor of Minnesota, offered his support. The unapologetically conservative candidate in the governor’s race in Virginia winning by 17% suggests that substantive change is at hand.

In a word, the times have awakened but they have not yet fully formed. Everything is changing and change requires new people. The newest Gallup numbers show independents leaning to the GOP by 52% to 30%. The traditional Republicans are like the elegant jazz musicians of the 1950s, suddenly faced with the new music of the Sixties. Newt Gingrich will try to present himself as the new guy and so will others, but they are the old jazz musicians. Tim Pawlenty is new, Sarah Palin is and so is Rick Perry and these are perfect conditions for a dark horse.

Armstrong asks who is the dark horse. Palin will be there as she was from the beginning. But Rick Perry, governor of Texas, was also with this movement from the beginning. He is highest ranked and most respected of the new people advancing the new ideas. He would be the likely dark horse to consolidate and legitimize these issues – bring them to form - if this movement is to go forward. While the others are demure and cosmetic, Perry speaks out. He recently told a gathering in Texas that Obama was “hell bent” on socialism, raising a shocked “oh my!” from the punditry fashionistas. This is what is required at beginnings. But Virginia’s new governor-elect Bob McDonald could now qualify as well.

The Vatican Wants to Believe

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 11/11/09

The questions of life’s origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe deserve serious consideration, says the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observation. Fox Mulder couldn’t have said it better. Has Father Funes been watching The X Files? The Vatican is calling in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and it implication for the Catholic Church.

Not that I know anything about this, but it has been my assumption that Catholics, Buddhists, Mormons, and the faithful of most all other religions believe in extraterrestrials, thus the winged beings on all of those stained glass windows. And “the Father” who art “in heaven.” And the Three Pure Ones, the deities of the East, said to live somewhere beyond the Big Dipper. And Kuan Yin and Andromeda and those three great pyramids in Giza, simply representatives of the more subtle consciousness of three of the stars in Orion’s Belt as any kid who just saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen could tell you.

Father Funes, if he is following the zeitgeist, may be a little behind the times. The Western mind has been heading to space since Buck Rogers or maybe as Walt Whitman said, since the beginning. The Star Wars and Star Trek epics brought the high water mark of this psychic adventure.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell said our journeys to space are a search for God but the epic journeys today are all of returning to earth. And what is kind of fascinating is that as the pop culture epic returns to earth from space, it appears to be landing in the Vatican. Sky walkers and Jedi have yielded the cultural ground to Templars and Cardinals in Dan Brown’s novels and movies like The Da Vinci Code and many other books and movies. The Vatican is even suggested in the blockbuster Twilight sequel, New Moon. And Fox Mulder’s guides and mentors in the recent X Files movie are no longer the three hippie scholars, the Lone Gunmen, well crafted in the last episode of the TV series as the Three Magi, but a Roman Catholic priest.

Will Levi Johnston save us from Sarah Palin?

by Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 11/10/09

When the great historian Robert Massie, author of Dreadnaugh, went back to find the root of the Second World War, the Great War and the rise and fall of Victoria, he found the singular warrior of Britannia who, in one astonishing afternoon in 1805, turned Napoleon’s fleet away from England, Lord Nelson. We face tough times ahead in the world again today. Unfortunately we have no Nelson. But we do have Levi Johnston. Possibly he will save us.

Not since Jon Gosselin has there been such a man. The press covers him like a blanket because they see the potential. He holds the power to save us from Sarah Palin. And, like Nelson at Trafalgar, he is quite possibly our last line of defense. It almost seems like that economic meltdown of September, 2008, began because of her. It occurred only days, minutes practically, after McCain announced her to be his VP. And everything has changed since then. Like she’s a white she devil or something. Suddenly a live, feral wolf girl rises up out of the northern forests, like those vampires of Twilight. A character threat to all we have gotten used to: to the Bidens, the Clintons, the Bushes and all the women in the room who come and go speaking of Michelangelo. This could ruin everything.

And she’s agile. She maneuvered past the first line of defense, Katie Couric, Charles Gibson, the New York Times Frank Rick and virtually all the women who work at the Times and the Washington Post. She outshined Tiny Fey. And William Shattner, drunk or sober, could not stop her on the late night talk shows. Then she single-handedly ruined David Letterman. Ruined his entire career. It was like some witch curse. But it must be said that she did not act alone in this. She had help: Glenn Beck.

It may surprise some that, Palin and Beck, one man and one woman from the bush working virtually alone, could successfully evade the entire institution, but that shows the insidious guerilla stealth of these people.

Is seems now the networks and the press have found the solution and thank God for that. Levi Johnson. Not since they joined forces with the government at the beginning of the war on Iraq have the press and the networks been so resolute and united in their efforts. After his big interview in Vanity Fair he has been everywhere. He’s all over the TV, buffing up and getting ready for his big photo shoot at Playgirl. He has never really done anything in his life so far – I think he’s only 12 – but he did manage to get a 17-year-old-girl pregnant and walk away from it. Happens. Too bad. But these are not Lord Nelson’s times. These are Oprah times.

He says he knows things. We already know a lot. She shot a moose. And she ate it. And the ever-vigilant Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post has uncovered this: Someone gave her a grouty Garfield calendar for Christmas and she keeps it on her desk. He says he’s got the goods on her. He knows thinks about Sarah Palin that will end the curse; end the swine flu, stop the drought, restore the dollar and return manufacturing from China. He used to live near her and went to her house once. Let’s hope he is right. He is our last line of defense against Sarah Palin. He is our only hope.