Will Hillary kill us all?

By Bernie Quigley - 08/19/10 10:53 AM ET

The list of federalist incompetencies is spiraling the country down the drain: healthcare, Medicare, a broken dollar, a $13 trillion deficit, Katrina, Arizona, Afghanistan, Blagojevich.

The turning began when Bill Clinton turned a prefect failure of a presidency into a cult movement of himself by having kinky sex with an undergraduate in the Oval Office. It was a Dada masterpiece. His generation understood. As an act of political nihilism, Jean Genet could not have topped it.

Clinton was the first rock ‘n’ roll president. After all the bribes and lies and continuing undergraduate squalor, that he and his wife are still in the public eye is testimony to our inability to govern ourselves any longer with clarity and character.

As first lady, Hillary Clinton’s healthcare debacle was historic. She has been a perfect failure as secretary of State, having presided over the fatal alienation between America and the world’s two original sources of human awakening: Israel and China. But now, Hapsburg-style family politics and no-fault governance continues as she is mentioned for secretary of Defense. She could get us all killed.

Compared to the firepower we have aligned in the South China Sea and the potential for devastation, Afghanistan is simply a patriotic distraction. At the beginning of the war in Iraq I proposed that New Hampshire and Vermont need not participate, based on Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions. The idea seems to be catching on today in the middle conservative states, as 30-some now have state sovereignty resolutions. I expect little will come of them, but the idea is beginning to sink in.

Really I meant that we shouldn’t have to participate if we as a state and region thought it was wrong — then it would be our moral obligation to oppose — or because we saw no benefit in it. This is an idea whose time is not far ahead.

In recent comments, Andrew J. Bacevich, professor in international relations at Boston University and author of Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, made the point that in our system the one political party is imperial and so is the other. A point I have been making here myself. The gods always come in two faces: Ford and Chevy, Mac or IBM, Republican or Democrat, but they do more or less the same work.

The only defense against this is regional — that is, a commitment to a New England point of view; a Texas point of view; a California point of view; or a Pacific Northwest point of view. I would go so far as to say that we New Englanders should not necessarily share governing, moral or even cultural issues with any other group of people and should have the most limited and practical relationships with the rest of the continent, primarily mutual defense. Ambassador George Kennan supported this idea when it was presented to him in his very last days.

We the Anglo/Americans have been at war in Asia since 1835. We have used nuclear weapons there without a moment’s hesitation. Two out of the four postwar generations have served in separate wars there, and now Secretary Clinton sends gunboats again up the South China Sea as England did in the Opium Wars. Individual dissent is soon absorbed. The only way to oppose these policies is for a region — New England, Rick Perry’s Texas, Jerry Brown’s California, the Pacific Northwest — to find the courage to refuse to participate. It does not take a village. It takes a governor.