September 8, 2008
Foreign Policy Questions for Sarah Palin: A Better Idea from Tom Friedman (Bernie Quigley)
There are reports now that Sarah Palin, John McCain’s new candidate for vice president, is being prepped by Joe Lieberman and other experts on foreign policy for her upcoming debate. In several reports, there was a sense of “the little woman” here up against a real pro. Foreign policy debates are important man tasks; not something a woman mayor from the bush should attempt. She should keep to things like budgeting kid hockey teams or management a household of seven. This is man work. Better call the big dogs off the porch.
After all, she will be facing Joe Biden, longtime member and current chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a regular technical wizard of all the important minutia of foreign policy, although he was dead wrong on Iraq and as an influential Sen. on foreign affairs, he holds heavy responsibility in leading the other Sens. down the Bush/Rove yellow brick road. But he uses phrases like “take him out” in reference to Saddam Hussein same as George Bush, Dick Cheney and the others who never wore the uniform of their country nor fired a shot in anger. Biden is at least as good as Cheney, and like Cheney, he is a technician who studies the existing paradigm but can’t imagine it shifting. He can’t imagine the world of 2008 being organically different than 1957. And like Cheney, he is a five-time recidivist draft evader. There is something about these guys liking foreign policy and war as old men although they had asthma or something when they were called to service. > Read More
Post a Comment (2) Permalink TrackBack EMail This Post
Share this post
What's This September 6, 2008
Wrong for 12 Hours (Bernie Quigley)
Directly after Obama’s speech at the Democratic convention I wrote a column saying that Obama would be the “fourth man”; the significant figure in a historical sequence that opens the last post-war generation and the figure which the country consolidates around. It is that figure who makes history. It is that figure who is remembered when the culture turns. Everyone else who came before is forgotten.
Twelve hours later John McCain nominated Sarah Palin for vice president. History could well show that I have never been so wrong in my prognosis. But I have been wrong about things before and held on to the wrong for years, even decades. This time I was wrong for only 12 hours. > Read More
Post a Comment (22) Permalink TrackBack EMail This Post
Share this post
What's This September 4, 2008
Peggy Noonan vs. Sarah Palin (Bernie Quigley)
Peggy Noonan has long been one of my favorite writers, able to see around the corner when systemic transformations were about to occur; able to tell of danger ahead like a canary in the coal mine. What has given Noonan’s writing grace and perspective in the past is an ability to see what the pack was missing. This time she was fully riding with the pack.
Her comments yesterday caught on tape that John McCain’s nomination of Sarah Palin for vice president was “ . . . bullshit” and certain to damn McCain’s run were puzzling. What I found disappointing yesterday was the self assurance in her tone of voice. She was bemoaning McCain’s pick as a “ . . . narrative” choice by which I think she means a new face come in from the country with some stories that could be weaved for public consumption. She considered Palin a novelty. > Read More
Post a Comment (17) Permalink TrackBack EMail This Post
Share this post
What's This September 3, 2008
Like a Hurricane — Sarah Palin at the Republican Convention (Bernie Quigley)
I would like to outline a brief history of the so-called culture wars and what potential future they hold because I am getting the feeling that they could actualize out of abstraction very quickly around one extraordinary woman: John McCain’s selection for vice president, Sarah Palin. She will not let go and the Republicans will not let her go. As David Brooks said last night, he has not met one delegate who opposes her. In fact, they’re crazy about her. All of the blue-collar people I have talked to up here in northern New Hampshire, and this is a blue-collar, bears-in-the-yard, libertarian Republican state, are likewise utterly crazy about her. They will not let go of her either, from what I can see, under any circumstances.
Power Points RE: culture war:
1 — The culture wars or the division between red and blue states is a continuation of the Civil War. To paraphrase Carl Von Clausewitz, culture war is hot war by other means; by political and cultural means. Historian Dan Carter, in his biography of George Wallace, The Politics of Rage, makes the point that the Christian Coalition and the Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson movement arose in direct opposition to the perceived decadence of the Sixties — the hippies, racial integration, sexual freedom, etc. Wallace correctly guessed that the regional values of the rural South would serve as a national theme in opposition. It did when amplified by Falwell and Robertson. > Read More
Post a Comment (12) Permalink TrackBack EMail This Post
Share this post
What's This September 2, 2008
How the Palins’ Pregnancy Issue Could Hurt Obama (Bernie Quigley)
The pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s daughter will in time be a plus to her campaign. People get pregnant. Welcome to the world. She and her husband Todd do what any family that has their dinner together would do: counsel, love and encourage. This is a family that takes life as it comes and deals with it. Obama and Michelle understand because like Todd and Sarah they are family-first as well (and ideology second or, in family matters, not at all).
In fact, this could hurt Obama and he knows it. Recently, on a PBS series called “The Sixties,” Todd Gitlin, a professor at Columbia, recalled the state of the nation in the mid-1970s when bitterness and anger replaced objectivity and purpose in the anti-war movement. He made the lucid point that a few individuals who went to extreme positions created a slingshot effect and consolidated the vast middle of America in opposition, engendering a conservative backlash. > Read More
Post a Comment (29) Permalink TrackBack EMail This Post
Share this post
What's This September 1, 2008
The Four Conservative Mavericks: Sarah Palin Comes into the Country (Bernie Quigley)
Americans were always meant to be Alaskans, just as we were meant to be Texans and New Englanders. Emerson instructed us to “go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men.” Our fate is to find ourselves again here in nature and don’t look back. That is why we go west and that is why we go to Alaska.
But it is one thing to go alone into the wilderness as Thoreau did when Concord was still in sight and with Emerson within a short afternoon walk for thoughtful conversation about the Vedas. Quite another is Jack London’s narrative of the Klondike almost a hundred years later: “He knew that at fifty below spittle crackled on the snow, but this spittle had crackled in the air. Undoubtedly, it was colder than fifty below — how much colder he did not know.” > Read More
Post a Comment (1) Permalink TrackBack EMail This Post
Share this post
What's This August 29, 2008
McCain’s VP Pick, Gov. Sarah Palin (Bernie Quigley)
In his acceptance speech on Thursday night, Barack Obama made the point that John McCain voted with George Bush 90 percent of the time. Therefore, he’s only been right 10 percent of the time, Obama quipped.
It was a good and catchy line, but it is that 10 percent that makes McCain a maverick. And that maverick quality is what has always made McCain interesting and trusted by a large bipartisan swath of Americans. What makes mavericks necessary and important is that they imbue the rest of their party with flashes of insight and original thinking that the others are constitutionally incapable of experiencing. Mavericks are not hidebound and blinded by institutionalization and orthodoxy. They open new gates and horizons. And McCain has done just that in his choice of Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, for his vice president. > Read More
Post a Comment (14) Permalink TrackBack EMail This Post
Share this post
What's This Obama’s Speech: Enter the Coyote (Bernie Quigley)
When I first heard tapes of Obama’s speeches, I started checking the Chicago papers. There was a funny and distracting story one day about a coyote. A corner grocer in Chicago went to work one morning and found a coyote in his store. No one knew how he got there or what he was doing there. He was sitting peacefully near the cooler section. They called the city’s animal removal people to remove him. How could something like that possibly happen in a place like the Windy City, when everyone was asleep and no one was paying attention to the quiet things in the night?
I felt the first change in tone last October when I pulled my kids out of school to go see Obama at a high school in Littleton, N.H. I usually dread going to these things because I can’t stand the music. Someone — a consultant of some kind — usually advises them to play the most fascistic music they can find to get the crowd “fired up.” It also makes them evil-minded. But Obama’s team was playing the sweet and gently rolling Motown classics of Sam and Dave. > Read More
Post a Comment (10) Permalink TrackBack EMail This Post
Share this post
What's This August 28, 2008
Tom Friedman: China Olympics Bring a Sea Change (Bernie Quigley)
Back during the Nixon presidency, Norman Mailer caricatured the binary nature of American politics by referring to left and right as “Beatniks” and “Protestants.” In his book Of a Fire on the Moon, he wrote that the Beatniks had let their guard down, and while they were out getting stoned, the Protestants had sent a rocket to the moon.
The country was due for a restoration, and within a few years, we would have one.
Today we have come full circle. And once again we have let our guard down. Today we have no big-name novelists like Mailer. But perhaps the most influential public citizen’s voice in our time is Thomas Friedman’s of The New York Times. And yesterday, after returning from the stunning Olympics in China, he called for a sea change.
The Pundits Blog’s Kathy Kemper has been reporting on this all along while most of the other print press was either in denial or hoping to demonize China. Friedman writes: “ … as snapshots go, the one China presented through the Olympics was enormously powerful — and it’s one that Americans need to reflect upon this election season.” > Read More
Post a Comment (1) Permalink TrackBack EMail This Post
Share this post
What's This August 26, 2008
Life After the Clintons: Mark Warner (Bernie Quigley)
Joe Biden: he of the plagiarized speech; he of the bad hair weave; he of the long-winded and sonorous stemwinder and random aside. The one really good thing about Biden is that he is not Hillary, and it is driving the Republicans crazy that she will not be VP. Rove and Co., with an obvious hand now behind McCain’s show, are as broody as Russians. Their whole playbook is based on one Clinton or another poisoning the political water. It has granted them easy and unlimited access to unspeakable power. Such easy targets. Sort of how Bush & Co. thrill to invade little tribal countries and then … uh-oh … suddenly find themselves facing Russia.
This week Elvis leaves the building and so does the missus, and nothing could be worse for Bush/Rove. Bush/Clinton is like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty locked in embrace, going over the waterfall together. Good for America. Good for Obama. > Read More
Post a Comment (5) Permalink TrackBack EMail This Post
Share this post
What's This