Obama’s duty: End the wars

President Barack Obama has lately been accused of “Nixifying”the White House. He’s also been compared to Jimmy Carter quite a lot and, of course, to JFK, Roosevelt and Lincoln. So far no one has compared him to President Gerald Ford. Ford was bland. He was awkward. He was always bumping his head. But he was a great and noble man and a great president because as president he did the work that needed to be done. He ended the war in Vietnam. And that is what Obama needs to do in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One of the bravest moments in our history was when Graham Martin, the ambassador to Vietnam, suffering from cancer and pneumonia in both lungs, infuriated President Ford by parking the U.S. Navy in the Sea of China after the fall of Saigon. For three sleepless days and nights he stood on deck and refused Ford’s order to leave the region. The Vietnamese who helped the Americans knew they would be slaughtered when the NVA headed south — and they were moving fast. But Martin had promised them he would keep his ships nearby for three days and anyone who could reach him by whatever means would go back with him. He arrived back in America with a full ship and the lives of tens of thousands of Vietnamese in American families now into the third generation were saved by this heroic action.

The Vietnam era — names like Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, Bill Ayers and H. Rap Brown come to mind — poisoned America. Ford closed the book. We were able then to go on to the next thing: happier days when the Americans beat the Soviets in hockey and Jimmy Carter, followed by Ronald Reagan and a new generation of prosperity. But the prosperity and power that rose American wealth to its highest post-WW II peak in the Reagan, Bush and Clinton period would not have been possible without Gerry Ford. He was the vital link between chaos and order. Things need to end before they can begin again. And if Obama passes these wars on to Romney, Palin, Huckabee, Rick Perry or anyone else, he will have failed history. Prosperity will not return. America will descend again into chaos.

The Obama group and the Congress today seem to value nothing more than going to meetings. Both parties — but not the new group rising in the NY-23 election — seem stuck in the past. They seem detached. For a cluelessness test, they might be stopped randomly by the press and asked, who are Bella and Edward and what’s up with Taylor and Taylor? If you don’t know, ask a kid.

Instead of heading out nightly to those big-hair, dress-up, self aggrandizing lobbyist dinners — Newt Gingrich once compared them to those of the Mandarins of the Empress Dowager Ci’an’s court, before he joined them — they might turn on cable to see what is going on in America.

Linda Gray and Larry Hagman have been asked to reprise their Sue Ellen and J.R. Ewing characters for a remake of the Reagan-era soap “Dallas.” Good for Rick Perry and suggests a George W. Bush revival. But to see what’s really going on in the amorphous, uncharted waters of the collective unconscious, plug into “Sons of Anarchy,” the FX production that recently beat Leno in the ratings.

It looks pretty hot, like Kurt Cobain meets Hell Boy. It suggests the awakening days of the rising ’60s when Hell’s Angels and the Bay Area hippies were brother and sister. Days of love and thunder awakened by war across the Pacific. Which suggests a California revival.

Some quotes from the trailer: “Seems like the original idea of the MC was something simpler. You know, social rebellion ... call it a Harley commune ... ” And a mother’s advice to younger woman: “You love the man ... you learn to love the club.” (Harley is family.)

When a local cop stops Jax, the Kurt Cobain guy, and tells him, “I will not look the other way, Jax ... a friendly warning,” Jax replies, “We’re all free men, protected by the Constitution. You look any way you want, Chief.”

Guns, Harleys, the Constitution. Oh my! That’s the rising theme here. This is the new generation and it is soon to be upon us. And David Letterman is afraid of Sarah Palin?

Visit Mr. Quigley's website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.