Bernie Quigley

Rightfully declaring certain recent Republican challengers to be “the stupid party,” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) steps up and claims that anyone thinking of running for president in 2016 now, when there is work to do, is crazy. And then he takes the first steps himself. And it is so good to have him. Jindal belongs to that rank of able and optimistic intellectuals that left conservatism with the passing of William F. Buckley Jr., leaving a bitter wake. He bristles with new thinking and the abilities to see it through. And with Jindal, you also get Rick Perry and Ted Cruz without the Texas talk. His is a new vision of America, so fresh and new it is hard to grasp its full potential. He appears potentially like one of those leaders the world has seen through millennia, who appears out of nowhere and leads a benign horde to a new awakening, as if deposited there by a force of nature.

President Obama’s expressed concerns about violence in football a week before the Super Bowl seem oddly calculated. Are his recent comments intended to parallel his campaign against guns and his assault on the Second Amendment? Are we Americans — the ones who watch the Super Bowl — inherently violent? He wouldn't want his boys to play, if he had any. They might hurt themselves. Surely, a viewing of Hockey Night in Canada would send Obama to the fainting couch. But it is not hard to see him in future days high up in the stands with Bill Clinton and Mick Jagger and old friend Beckham and his Spice Girls missus, hoping against hope that some unheard-of Third World nation, newly thrown together by Western clerks and movie actors, will win the World Cup in soccer (and swooning with disgust when it goes once again to those gnarly Germans).

“Maybe we will see all new people by 2016,” I wrote here on 4/17/12. “Call it Republicans vs. Jeffersonian conservatives, leaving the Democrats to dangle. Today Rand Paul hobbles the old school by demanding that $2 billion in foreign aid to Egypt be stripped. 2016 starts already … Rand Paul/Joe Miller 2016: Vote for grown-ups.”

But 2016 will not be a good time to be president. The economy will be in a shambles and there will inevitably be blood. It comes, said Charles Dickens, the moment economy sinks below equilibrium, which is now. And today we see first blood among my relatives (on both sides) in Northern Ireland. But don’t sweat the small stuff. China has not yet avenged itself for the horrors brought upon it by Japan in World War II. And it will, because karma, the soul force of the East, demands it. China, said Richard Nixon, remembers a thousand years.

Briefly: The big surprise in the Israeli election was the sudden rise of Yair Lapid, a handsome and photogenic MSM celebrity “known for his chic, casual black clothing,” as The New York Times wrote, seemingly out of nowhere. But in politics, nothing comes out of nowhere and spontaneous awakenings like Lapid’s come in reaction to something else. Israel has recently been through a critical sequence: In October, Benjamin Netanyahu called for early elections to maximize his chances of reelection. Rockets fired from Gaza in mid-November attempted to intimidate the Israeli electorate. They did just the opposite and awakened a warrior instinct. Suddenly Israel then began to hear about the young Naftali Bennett, “the Zionist pin-up blazing a trail,” and his equally young colleague Ayelet Shaked, who rose to the Knesset in the Jewish Home Party with a determination to defend Israel.

"It makes no difference who is sitting on the throne," Moshe Feiglin writes from Jerusalem this week in his commentary on Torah. “What really matters is where the heart of the nation resides." Feiglin is writing about how Pharaoh sees the great power he is, a power telling him he is god the river, and god the creator of all that is, as it disintegrates around him and the world awaken again from the wreckage with Aaron and Moses. It is a fully appropriate reading for this week as Israelis prepare to go to the polls. The creations of Pharaoh appear on the verge of falling into the river, and Israel on the verge of finding its heart.
 
The questions we have asked here since Sandy, the storm, and Sandy Hook — guns, federal aid, psychotic movies passing as high culture, fascist computer games — suggest symptoms. Mentioned here recently, China has stepped away. Germany recalls its gold from the world. And on Jan. 22, Israel steps away from America.

This is the year of Lincoln — so many books and movies, so little time. But to understand Lincoln and his America, it might be worth turning to the first words publicly put forth by his most effective public agent, William Lloyd Garrison: “Our country is the world. Our countrymen are mankind.” Without question, this speaks for Hollywood today and Bill Clinton and Amy Poehler and Tina Fey as well, who hosted the (world) Golden Globe awards, which The Washington Post said "our culture" (the world) deserves. The awards this year come with a touch of lament — possibly why Daniel Day-Lewis’s Lincoln appears to look so plaintively to the past, like that portrait of Whistler’s Mother. Because there is trouble here this year and this year, 2013, could be the year of big trouble.

It is not just because Hollywood has managed to lose China. Jackie Chan says we Americans are the worst people on earth. But Ang Lee has long cast America in cryptic and neurotic shadows. Hollywood is the dream that reflects our anxieties and dangers, and two issues could open this year that might haunt us for years, maybe decades. This year we might see executive orders on guns and the debt ceiling. President Obama will bring a challenge to America. America will accept the challenge.

There seems no exit now from the “monster of Monticello” — the headline that blazoned across the unbearably light op-ed pages of The New York Times not long ago. Not since George III has there been such a deep and venomous chant hurled at Jefferson, the father of American vision and transcendence. And coming from these thin reeds — Bono visits these pages on occasion — it brings palpitations. The piece was soon followed by another op-ed proposing America acknowledge that the U.S. Constitution is filled with “archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions,” and we should extricate ourselves from its bondage and move toward an “unwritten constitution,” like that of Britain. Got the picture. And New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, from one of the newer royal New York families, says he intends to ban guns there and other states will follow. Note to the young prince: I’ve been to the other states. Probably Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont will follow. Most of the others pack.

“You’ve got to make concessions; you’ve got to compromise,” said Wolf Blitzer in that solicitous MSM salon of salons named like muscle-bound Mike of “Jersey Shore,” “The Situation Room.” He was lecturing the brand-new senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, on the same day Cruz was sworn in to the Senate. Telling him how to act. Welcoming him into the big leagues. “If you’re just going to come into Washington and say, ‘Do it my way or the highway,’ you’re not going to get anywhere.”

Dates to mark. They will change the times.

Janu. 11: “Zero Dark Thirty,” which tells the story of the CIA’s hunt for Osama bin Laden, is released to the public. Said to be one of the most effective movies ever made. There is no substitute for success and President Obama killed Osama bin Laden. It will be his story as well.

The Senate vote last night was a touchstone event, a benchmark, if you will, to mark the progress of history. It is, in that regard, much like the Senate vote to approve George W. Bush’s trillion-dollar vengeance assault on Iraq to bag Saddam — and in retrospect it is hard to see any other purpose for that adventure. But the Senate vote to approve the invasion in October 2002, told us who was brave when it was time to be brave and those lions of the Senate, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Joe Biden, who approved, then disapproved, were not. It has been zero-sum, no-fault politics ever since; we continue to vote them in and advance them to greater leadership — even after astonishing incompetence and systemic state failures in the Middle East — because we are familiar with them, because they have been around so long, because we have become a blindly partisanized nation, because we don't really care. But we are at a sea change and two to watch at the quiet turning of the tides today are Rand Paul and Mike Lee, senators from Kentucky and Utah, who voted against the fateful "fiscal cliff" agenda last night. The century might start this year with them.