Warrior Dems in NH; Royal Republican Guard in VA

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Thursday May 10, 2007 · 10:23 AM PDT

2007/05/10 · 10:23

Was great to read about Wesley Clark, Lt. Col. Andrew Horne of Tennessee and friends here in New Hampshire. The core of the Fighting Dems speaking out together with fellow lifelong Republicans like Gen. John Batiste, in opposition to members of Congress who support Bush’s misguided Victorian adventure in Iraq.

"I am outraged, as are the majority of Americans," said Batiste. "Our strategy in Iraq today is more of the same, a slow grind to nowhere which totally ignores the reality of Iraq and the lessons of history," he told the Associated Press.

Batiste was here with Paul Eaton, another retired General featured in ads by VoteVets.org.

"The fact is, the President has never listened to the soldiers on the ground effectively," said Clark.

Bernie Quigley

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Tuesday April 17, 2007 · 10:49 AM PDT

2007/04/17 · 10:49

The Republicans are turning to Fred Thompson increasingly since the Barbara Walters interview with Rudy Giuliani. I happen to know that Giuliani's favorite TV show is The Sopranos (it is mine too). And I thought his answers to Barbara Walters were kind of spooky. They were much like a session with Dr. Melfi.

To review: The premise of The Sopranos is that Tony was sent to a psychiatrist after he fainted in his yard watching some ducks fly away from his swimming pool. The psychiatrist is the wise and beautiful Dr. Jennifer Melfi. She, like Tony, is a second-generation New Jersey Italian and with Tony, struggles with a classic second-generation identity crisis. There is a sense of no longer really being Italian, but not yet feeling fully American. (Not feeling fully at home in "Elvisland," says Paulie Walnuts, the vast panorama west of New Jersey.) Dr. Melfi becomes Tony’s muse. Her character appears to be based on Beatrice in Dante's Divine Comedy. Beatrice is a spirit form and is Dante’s guide to spiritual awakening. She is what psychiatrists call his anima – his female side, don't cha know.

Bernie Quigley

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Saturday April 07, 2007 · 8:48 AM PDT

2007/04/07 · 08:48

" . . . seest thou not God's purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann'd, connected by network,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage . . . ."

Walt Whitman, "Passage to India"

History is in the details, and this week when the ’08 candidates presented the cash available for the upcoming primary season, history turned the corner. I knew it when I went to Canadian Broadcasting Company looking for a hockey game. An ad came up for CBC news with all those fast action photos they run by you – a Bush close up, war in Iraq, fires in California, bears slipping on ice floes in The Great White North.

This time there was a new face: Barack Obama’s and it popped up a few seconds even before Bush’s. Another famous face was conspicuously absent: Hillary Clinton’s.

Bernie Quigley

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Saturday March 31, 2007 · 4:16 AM PDT

2007/03/31 · 04:16

Revenge is the secret and unspoken motivator in warfare. Beneath Sun Tzu, beneath Clausewitz, there is the driving and motivating press to restore human equilibrium after a disturbance has occurred in the force: Revenge will be in equal and opposite counterforce to the insult which has disturbed it.

In one of the greatest war movies ever, Akira Kurosawa’s "Seven Samurai," the master director makes this point. After the Samurai have completed the fighting, a village chief comes forward to open a peace conference. But something has to be done first: An old peasant woman’s innocent grandchild has been killed in the fighting and this has to be settled first. The prisoner of war who killed him is brought forth and constrained in the village center. The village chief parts the crowd and the old woman comes forth to beat him to death with a hoe. The two tribes have found equilibrium. A peace conference can go forward now.

Bernie Quigley

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Tuesday March 27, 2007 · 7:22 AM PDT

2007/03/27 · 07:22

This week, the Washington Post has a big front-page story on Mike Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, possibly running as an independent candidate for President in '08. This story is almost identical in content to an article run by the New York Sun a few weeks ago, several run in The Free Market News in the past year and one in New York magazine last fall.

There is no new news to this story. It is akin to the array of "Hillary not running!" stories sent out week upon week by the likes of Cable News Network, bored and disinterested in the everyday workings of democracy in the ’06 races and seeking instead celebrity. But what it implies is that here today in Political Cloud Cookooland, the MSM is getting tired of Hillary, Obama, Edwards and McCain. Like Gilligan’s Island, you can only rerun these stories so many times. They are no longer interesting and there are no more non-stories out there to tell again.

Bernie Quigley

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Tuesday March 20, 2007 · 5:43 AM PDT

2007/03/20 · 05:43

Fred Thompson, movie star and former Senator from Tennessee informed us last week that he might run for President. You might have seen him recently in the movies or on "Law and Order."

This is maybe – to paraphrase T.S. Eliot – the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a movie star who looks like a President actually running for President, and with a people so easily deceived and the tenacious will to self-governance which made us a free people in the first place worn so thin and threadbare, that we willingly select the mirage rather than the thing in itself.

Bernie Quigley

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Sunday March 18, 2007 · 4:47 AM PDT

2007/03/18 · 04:47

Joe Sestak, the new representative from Pennsylvania, will be on "Meet the Press" this morning. Joe was heavily suported by The Fighting Dems and Wesley Clark's group, WesPAC, and is representative of the new spirit which rose to Congress out of the '06 race, featuring new people with new ideas like Carol Shea-Porter of NH and Jim Webb of Virginia.

Bernie Quigley

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Thursday March 08, 2007 · 7:45 AM PST

2007/03/08 · 07:45

(Cross posted on "Raising Kaine.")

There is so much discord and dissent in the present Panic Primary Race because our country is undergoing a Clash of Generations. We are at the turning of the fourth post-war generation, a generation writers William Strauss and Neil Howe call Millennials, in their fascinating book, "Millennials Rising."

The Millennials are the only generation which will to be remembered years from now. All who came before in the political world will be forgotten.

Bernie Quigley

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Monday March 05, 2007 · 2:11 PM PST

2007/03/05 · 14:11

In the last half hour I’ve gotten a handful of calls and emails saying that Wes Clark has stated that he is not going to run for President. This is not true. He has made no such statement or suggestion. Claim is that he said so at a fund raiser in Portsmouth, NH, on Friday night. I was in the room with him all during the event and there was no suggestion of change of status whatsoever discussed or even suggested. There was no discussion of this by anyone present, no new direction sparking interest, no surprise, and no sense of ambiguity in what he said. I can’t see how anyone in the room could have come away with any different impression.

Bernie Quigley

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Sunday March 04, 2007 · 3:25 PM PST

2007/03/04 · 15:25

I was with Wesley Clark in Portsmouth, NH, Friday night. He spoke specifically and in lengthy detail on a potential Iran invasion. About two hours northwest, where I live, it rated a two-paragraph story in our local paper on the bottom of page two (below this headline for an article which took up half the page: "Proposal Could Lead to Gay Marriage"). I see this as denial journalism: It says "Let's talk about something else. War is two stressful." It is a form of journalistic infantilism. I think the average age of MSM reporter today is probably 55 - they don't want to think about war; they want to think about health insurance for their pending prostate operations. They also suffer from the illusion that they "make history"; that is, the things they like to think about – whatever they be - become "history" if they write about them. It is all part of the Wonderfullness of Who We Are.

Bernie Quigley

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Tuesday February 13, 2007 · 1:19 PM PST

2007/02/13 · 13:19

Like many of Willa Cather’s great tales, the protagonist in this one seemed from the first inherently fraught with inauthenticity and destined for failure by an original misconception. The heartland girl from John Wesley’s choir on the Great Plains who went back east with innocence and naivety to the Big House in New York and even sought the Presidency. This one could end likewise as Cather’s stories often do. How often the things from the Pastures of Plenty come in with the dust, as Woody Guthrie expressed it, and then so suddenly are gone with the wind. But maybe this one should end with a law suit.

Bernie Quigley

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Saturday February 03, 2007 · 10:42 AM PST

2007/02/03 · 10:42

cross posted at Raising Kaine

I heard John and Elizabeth Edwards up here in New Hampshire the other day and found their new ideas about poverty to be oddly familiar. Then I realized John seemed to be talking about the same set of ideas which I had written about in 1975 in Philadelphia; naive ideas which created an almost permanent underclass and a culture of welfare in the U.S. They are ideas which almost ruined the Democratic Party and sent millions to Reagan a few years later. Simplistic ideas like interspersing poor people into wealthy neighborhoods to end poverty; ideas like everyone should go to college. And funding these ideas with deficit spending. These ideas vastly expanded the welfare state and were wholeheartedly rejected by the Democrats and by most Americans almost 30 years ago. It took decades for some very good universities to recover from them (including my own, U. Mass.) and some have never yet recovered.

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Warrior Dems in NH; Royal Republican Guard in VA

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In the End: Clark vs. Giuliani

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Joe Sestak on Meet the Press This Morning

The Jim Webb Generation

No Change in Wesley Clark's Status

Will anyone listen to Wesley Clark?

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Recall Mark Warner