Newt Gingrich, Officially

[muckraker10021]

Re: VIDEO - RepubliKlan Mob Idiocy Revealed in 9 Minutes


Once again, the video below (March 2010) illuminates the subconscious racism & cultivated ignorance, cultivated by 24/7 <s>FOX</s> FAKE News & 24/7 right wing hate talk radio shows. Propaganda works!!! The ‘puppet masters’ , right-wing corporate America who are banking billions of dollars exploiting their ignorance, are laughing their asses off at 35,000 feet, cruising on their private jets. As you watch the video of these dolts notice their blank stares and perturbed countenance as they are minimally challenged with “inconvenient facts”. When asked were they get their information from, surprise, surprise, they all say <s>FOX</s> FAKE News.

[FLASH]http://www.youtube.com/v/pilG7PCV448&hl=en_US&fs=1&[/FLASH]

<font face="arial black" color="#d90000" size="4">Lying sons of bitches Quotes</font><font face="trebuchet ms" size="3" color="#333333">
<br>&quot;You don’t need a health Gestapo in the United States. And do the Democrats really want to
campaign in September, October favoring 16,000 more IRS agents to enforce Obamacare?&quot;
- Newt Gingrich, urging RepubliKlans to campaign on a mythical charge,<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2010/04/07/gingrich-health-gestapo/"> Link</a>

Q: Will the IRS hire 16,500 new agents to enforce the health care law?
A: No. The law requires the IRS mostly to hand out tax credits, not collect penalties.
The claim of 16,500 new agents stems from a partisan analysis based on guesswork
and false assumptions, and compounded by outright misrepresentation.
--FactCheck.org, calling Gingrich a bald-faced, lying bastard,<a href="http://factcheck.org/2010/03/irs-expansion/"> Link</a>

<br>&quot;This wildly inaccurate claim started as an inflated, partisan assertion that 16,500 new
IRS employees might be required to administer Obamacare. That devolved quickly into
a Rethug claim that 16,500 IRS &quot;agents&quot; would be required. Ron Paul even claimed
that all 16,500 would be carrying guns. None of those claims is true.&quot;
----FactCheck.org, calling Ron Paul a bald-faced, lying bastard,<a href="http://factcheck.org/2010/03/irs-expansion/"> Link</a></font>

 

[thoughtone]

Re: Pussy & Politics

source: Huffington Post

Newt Gingrich Exposed By Ex-Wife: Messy Relationship Life, Meltdowns, And 2012​

Newt Gingrich's Ex-Wife Goes Public: Messy Relationship Life, Meltdowns, And 2012

A new Esquire profile of Newt Gingrich offers a rare glimpse into the personal life and political ambitions of the former House Speaker as he vies to make a comeback after resigning in disgrace over a decade ago.

Gingrich himself was interviewed for the feature story; however, some of the juiciest insight into the life of the prominent conservative voice comes from his ex-wife, Marianne Gingrich, whom he divorced in 2000.

"He asked me to marry him way too early," she revealed. "And he wasn't divorced yet [from his first wife Jackie Battley]. I should have known there was a problem."

Marianne Gingrich suggested that the former House Speaker found himself in the same relationship pattern eighteen years later when he sought to marry his current wife, then-congressional aide Callista Bisek.

"I know," she explained. "I asked him. He'd already asked her to marry him before he asked me for a divorce. Before he even asked."

The profile paints a silhouette highlighting the intersection of Gingrich's personal life and political career:

"There's somebody else, isn't there?"
She kind of guessed it, of course. Women usually do. But did she know the woman was in her apartment, eating off her plates, sleeping in her bed?

She called a minister they both trusted. He came over to the house the next day and worked with them the whole weekend, but Gingrich just kept saying she was a Jaguar and all he wanted was a Chevrolet. "'I can't handle a Jaguar right now.' He said that many times. 'All I want is a Chevrolet.'"

He asked her to just tolerate the affair, an offer she refused.

He'd just returned from Erie, Pennsylvania, where he'd given a speech full of high sentiments about compassion and family values.

The next night, they sat talking out on their back patio in Georgia. She said, "How do you give that speech and do what you're doing?"

"It doesn't matter what I do," he answered. "People need to hear what I have to say. There's no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn't matter what I live."

As for 2012, Marianne Gingrich shared her take on speculation swirling over the possibility of Newt Gingrich making a run for the White House in the next election cycle. The bottom line, she said, is that "there's no way" he'll be president.

"He could have been president," she explained. "But when you try and change your history too much, and try and recolor it because you don't like the way it was or you want it to be different to prove something new . . . you lose touch with who you really are. You lose your way."

Marianne Gingrich suggested that her ex-husband "believes that what he says in public and how he lives don't have to be connected" and added, "If you believe that, then yeah, you can run for president. ... He always told me that he's always going to pull the rabbit out of the hat."

Gingrich's second wife zeroed-in on what she suggested might be her ex-husband's achilles' heel:

"He was impressed easily by position, status, money," she says. "He grew up poor and always wanted to be somebody, to make a difference, to prove himself, you know.

There's much more in the full Esquire profile -- click here to read it all.

 

[thoughtone]

Are these crackers delusional or can they actual defeat the President?

 

[Gunner]

Re: Does Haley Barbour Or Newt Gingrich Have Any Chance Of Winning Against Obama?

Neither can but Newt's past would haunt him.

 

[Upgrade Dave]

Re: Does Haley Barbour Or Newt Gingrich Have Any Chance Of Winning Against Obama?

Neither of those two stand a chance and they both know it, that's why neither has formally announced or is even on pace to. Barbour would have had a hard time anyway, being from Mississippi and having that deep, deep Southern accent. But his "race relations weren't that bad in my hometown" comment and his revisionist remembering of his hometown White Citizens' Council killed any hopes he had.
Gingrich is a non-starter but he makes a ton of money pretending he might run, same as Sarah Palin.

 

[Upgrade Dave]

Re: Does Haley Barbour Or Newt Gingrich Have Any Chance Of Winning Against Obama?

In a Republican primary, Newt's sorted past hurts him more than Barbour's comments do him.

 

[QueEx]

It takes one (crook) to know one (crook)



Jack Abramoff accuses Newt
Gingrich of 'corruption.' Really.

Remember Jack Abramoff, the fedora-sporting former lobbyist whose name tends
to be synonymous with a certain type of corruption scandal ??? He accuses Newt
Gingrich of being just that - - "Corrupt" - - in an interview with David Gregory for the
"Meet The Press" webshow "PRESS Pass." In case you don't know or remember
Jack Abramoff, please see thread, Jack Abramoff pleads !!


What did Newt do ???

In about a week, we've gone from Newt Gingrich saying during a debate that he was paid $300,000 to dispense wisdom to Freddie Mac "as a historian" -- to his firm being paid nearly $2 million by the mortgage-financing giant for the former House speaker to provide "strategic advice." There's no telling what added details another week might bring.


<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/KU1md17DKgE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>


Reporters are now closely examining the Gingrich-Freddie Mac connection. That's largely because of Gingrich's ascent in the GOP presidential preference polls. Scrutiny increases when a candidate surges to the front of the field.

But, according to NPR, it's also because you didn't have to be an award-winning investigative reporter to suspect that Freddie Mac didn't hire Gingrich, the former college professor, to lead history seminars at its headquarters in the Washington suburbs.

Gingrich has said that he didn't lobby for Freddie Mac and sources cited in NPR and Bloomberg News reports confirm that.

But as NPR's Peter Overby reported on Wednesday's All Things Considered, in the nation's capital there's a way of being involved in lobbying without technically being a lobbyist.

"To decipher the Washington Code, "strategic adviser" is the job title of choice for former members of Congress who tell lobbyists what to do but want to avoid the public disclosure required for registered lobbyists.

Ginchrich also gave a phone interview to conservative radio hosts Laura Ingraham. He said he helped Freddie Mac shape its public image as a government-sponsored enterprise."​

Abramoff Says Newt Corrupt

In the interview below with David Gregory, Abramoff - who finished a jail stint over a year ago on influence-peddling charges and has been promoting his recently-published book - was asked about the strategic counseling fee of over $1 million that was paid to Newt Gingrich by housing giant Freddie Mac.

"What do you make of all that?" Gregory asked.

Abramoff replied, "This is exactly what I'm talking about. <SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">People who come to Washington who have public service and they cash in on it. And they use their public service and their access to make money</span>, and unfortunatley <SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">Newt Gingrich is one of them who have done it</span>. But far too many of them do it and one of the reforms I propose in my book is to close permanently the door, the revolving door, betweeen public service and cashing in as a lobbyist."

He added after another question, "I don't know if he'll survive this, to be honest with you, this is a very big thing."

"Why?" Gregory asked.

"Because he <SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">[Abramoff] is doing, and engaging in the exact kind of corruption that America disdains.</span> The very things that anger the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement and everybody who is not in a movement and watches washington and says why are these guys getting all this money, why do they all become so rich, why do they have these advantages? Unfortunately Newt seems to play right into it."

When Gregory pressed on the "corruption" language and noted it's "a heavy charge," Abramoff stayed with it, saying, "Yes it is. It is corruption. At the end of the day, I say in the book, I believe now, although I didn't believe then unfortunatley, that any provision of favor or any provision of anything to members of Congress and their staff is bribery. And any cashing in on it by them coming out later is corruption."
​

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1111/68547.html

​

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[thoughtone]

Re: Abramoff: Newt is Corrupt

It takes one (crook) to know one (crook)



Jack Abramoff accuses Newt
Gingrich of 'corruption.' Really.

 

[muckraker10021]

Re: Abramoff: Newt is Corrupt


Jack Abramoff sure knows corruption, bribery, & theft, at the multimillion dollar $$$$$$$$$$$$$$ level. If you missed the hollywood movie about his Washington DC bribery & graft operation, make sure you see it, the movie shows how corrupt most of congress was during the BuShit time. He served only three years? - for all the shit he did? Wow!! If he was a Black guy they would of given him at least 10 years. Abramoff who was recently released from jail says that little has changed since he was in the <s>lobbyist</s> Bribery business, in fact it is worse than ever due to SCOTUS citizens united ruling. Unlimited cash, even secret cash can now be used to bribe congress members



<embed src="http://trailers.apple.com/movies/independent/casinojack/casinojack-tlr2_r640s.mov" Pluginspage="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/" width="640" height="272" CONTROLLER="true" LOOP="false" AUTOPLAY="false" name="Casino Jack"></embed>

If you didn't see the Jack Abramoff movie "Casino Jack" in my opinion it is a must see to understand congress during the BuShit era. The movie download link is below

https://rapidshare.com/files/1385952637/Casino.Jack.2010.DVDRip.XVID.AC3.HQ.Hive-CM8.avi

 

[Upgrade Dave]

I have in the past voted for Republicans locally and I'm sure I will again. Party is secondary when considering who's the better candidate to me.
That said, national Republicans and members of the talk show wing of their party have proven to be morally inconsistent and dangerous to the development of this country.
The latest example, and the one that got under my skin enough to make a thread about it, is how they fight to the death to protect any type of tax increase on upper earners but seem eager to raise taxes on working class people at every opportunity, with them wanting to end the payroll tax holiday as the most recent example.
They're just indefensible. They fully deserve Newt Gingrich to be their nominee. He's the prototype for what they represent and what that party has become: a bloated, arrogant whore.

 

[actinanass]

Re: Republicans are soulless, evil trolls and will destroy everyone to get to Obama

This is why Republicans need to not try to work with the democrats unless it's in their favor.

When it comes to taxes, the conservative stance is to have a simple tax system that would promote economic growth, and generate the most revenue they can with less strain on the economic system.

BTW, who you think is going to be blame for raising taxes on the Middle Class? The Tea Party? Really?

Another thing, people keep talking about Newt will get crushed by Obama. If that's the case, why not say you like Newt? Why so worried about who the republicans bring out? I mean the republican field is so stupid anyway. You should be happy that Obama will get a second term because the dumb, "soulless" republicans are just that stupid.

 

[hsm2448]

Re: Republicans are soulless, evil trolls and will destroy everyone to get to Obama

This is why Republicans need to not try to work with the democrats unless it's in their favor.

When it comes to taxes, the conservative stance is to have a simple tax system that would promote economic growth, and generate the most revenue they can with less strain on the economic system.

BTW, who you think is going to be blame for raising taxes on the Middle Class? The Tea Party? Really?

Another thing, people keep talking about Newt will get crushed by Obama. If that's the case, why not say you like Newt? Why so worried about who the republicans bring out? I mean the republican field is so stupid anyway. You should be happy that Obama will get a second term because the dumb, "soulless" republicans are just that stupid.

Newt will get crushed. He is enjoying the same bit of luck for a few weeks that Bachmann, Perry, and Cain received. At the end of the day a man who has lived a life of pure hypocrisy in every aspect of his professional and even personal life is not going to be elected president.

With that being said, the Republican party of the time period since Obama was elected, and this is coming from someone who has been as hard on Obama as any Democrat on BGOL, has essentially been a sort of fifth column. The underlying motivation behind many of their policies, whereby they are actively seeking for the weakening of the US in the hopes that the people will blame Obama and hopefully vote them back into the White House, is fundamentally treasonous.

 

[QueEx]

.........

 

[QueEx]

Newt Gingrich - a portrait of a complicated politician




McClatchy Newspapers
By William Douglas
ay, December 5, 2011



WASHINGTON — Just who is Newt Gingrich anyway?

Is he the big thinking rhetorical bomb-thrower who led Republicans to power in the House of Representatives in 1994 for the first time in four decades, only to have his troops rebel against him four years later?

Is he the undisciplined, self-absorbed House speaker who admitted that a 1995 shutdown of the federal government was prompted in part by what he perceived as a cold shoulder and shabby treatment by President Bill Clinton during a long Air Force One flight?

Is Gingrich the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do leader who pushed for Clinton's impeachment in 1998 stemming from his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky even while having an affair of his own with a congressional aide?

Or is he the professorial, adult in the room, elder statesman seen on TV during this year's Republican presidential debates — a forum that's helped catapult him from the bottom tier to the top rank of GOP White House hopefuls. Gingrich now leads in national and early-primary-state polls and is increasingly viewed as the top conservative alternative to the other front-runner, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.


"Anybody who looks at me as a 68-year-old grandfather and says, 'All right, has he grown wiser, has he learned from his experiences, is he somebody that I would trust to lead the American people?'" Gingrich said recently on Fox News' "Fox & Friends." "They've got to come to their own judgment about that."

As he seeks the Republican presidential nomination, even Gingrich concedes that choice could be a difficult call for voters, as his life — both political and personal — has been a rollercoaster ride of soaring highs and messy lows.

"My tenure as Speaker has been marked by both unprecedented accomplishment and unprecedented conflict," Gingrich penned in the liner notes to "Lessons Learned the Hard Way," his 1998 mea culpa book. "I have learned some difficult lessons that will shape my outlook forever."

Gingrich has been hailed for being a brilliant political strategist who authored the "Contract with America," a 10-point conservative legislative agenda that served as the cornerstone for the GOP takeover of the House in 1994.

As speaker, Gingrich played a significant role, along with the Clinton White House, in revamping the nation's welfare system and balancing the federal budget, his supporters say.

"He focused on those things," said former Rep. Robert Walker, R-Pa., a Gingrich friend and campaign surrogate. "Newt does spin out ideas like every minute because he thinks that way. Sometimes it comes off that he's not focused, but he is, and has accomplishments to prove it."

But his tenure in Congress was also controversial: He earned a reputation as a hyper-partisan, polarizing figure from his sharp attacks on Speaker Jim Wright, D-Texas, which produced an ethics investigation into Wright and led to his resignation in 1989.

Gingrich later went through a rigorous ethics probe into his own activities that in January 1997 resulted in him becoming the first speaker to be reprimanded by the House. He was forced to pay a record $300,000 fine for violating tax law and lying about it to the House Ethics Committee.

Gingrich's ethics woes, concerns that he was a political albatross that dragged House Republicans to a disappointing performance in the 1998 elections, and fears that he was going soft on the Clinton White House were too much for some House GOP lawmakers.

A few of his lieutenants engineered a failed coup against Gingrich in late 1997. By the end of 1998, a battle-weary Gingrich had had enough. He quit as speaker and didn't seek re-election to Congress, saying of his Republican caucus, "I'm willing to lead, but I'm not willing to preside over people who are cannibals."

"Newt Gingrich is one of the most complicated public figures of our day," former Rep. Susan Molinari, R-N.Y., wrote in her 1998 book "Representative Mom: Balancing Budgets, Bill and Baby in the U.S. Congress." "Incredibly smart and pragmatic, he is at his best when he is building a team. He is at his worst and most self-destructive when he swells with his own sense of invulnerability and moves to the front and center."

Molinari had a front-row seat to Gingrich's rise and fall. She was the House Republican conference's vice chair and the wife of former Rep. Bill Paxon, R-N.Y., a member of Gingrich's inner circle who was among the leaders of the unsuccessful coup.

Her assessment may have been of the Old Newt circa 1990s, but some current Republicans believe that the 2011 edition is equally problematic.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who served with Gingrich in the House, suggested in May that the former speaker should "keep his mouth shut" after he dismissed House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's Medicare overhaul proposal as "right-wing social engineering."

"You know, he used to have a little deal in his office that said 'listen, learn, and lead,'" Coburn told ABC News in May. "And he rarely followed it. He went the other way. And instead of ready, aim, fire, you got fire, ready, aim."

However, some Gingrich watchers insist that he's a changed man, humbled by his mistakes, tempered by time, and mellowed by devotion to his wife, Callista, and his conversion to Catholicism.

He remains ever the caustic combatant eager to stick it to a Democratic, or Republican, challenger, but he's not the self-imploding leader he once was, they say.

"We all change over time," said former Rep. Nancy Johnson, R-Conn., who chaired the House Ethics Committee that investigated Gingrich. "I think Newt has developed a lot over time. His weakness — his intensity, the way he managed the diversity of opinion he relied on — drained his energy and hurt his marriage. Newt has changed in regard to managing his responsibilities."



Newton Leroy McPherson was born June 17, 1943, in Harrisburg, Pa., the son of a teenage mother and a mechanic father. Their marriage ended in three days, after Newton McPherson, Gingrich's father, struck his wife, Kathleen, as she tried to wake him for work after a long night of drinking and shooting pool.

"We were married on a Saturday and I left him on a Tuesday," Kathleen "Kit" Gingrich told The New York Times in 1994. "I got Newtie in those three days."

Three years later, she married Robert Gingrich, an Army artillery officer who legally adopted young Newt, who took his stepfather's last name.

The relationship between the aloof, demanding and sometimes disapproving stepfather, who died in 1996, and the talkative, gregarious stepson was complex, his mother said in interviews over the years.

That didn't stymie Gingrich's ambition to grow up and do big things. He has said that he declared as early as high school his desire to be speaker of the House.

But he first had to get a job, and following in his stepfather's military footsteps wasn't an option.

"He had bad eyes; he had bad feet," Mel Steeley, a history professor at what was then called West Georgia College, told NPR last month. "And his dad liked the idea of him being a history professor. He thought that was good."

So Gingrich, who holds a bachelor's degree from Atlanta's Emory University and his master's and doctorate from Tulane University in New Orleans, settled in as a history professor at West Georgia College — now called the University of West Georgia — while still longing for elective office.

He ran for a House seat twice and lost. He finally won in 1978 by defeating a Democratic state senator named Virginia Shapard, who planned to commute to Washington and keep her family in Georgia. Gingrich's campaign slogan: "When elected, Newt will keep his family together."

Two years later, Gingrich's 18-year marriage to the Jacqueline Battley — his former high school teacher — ended in divorce. He married Marriane Ginther in 1981, but that union dissolved in 1999 in part because of Gingrich's extramarital affair with Callista Bisek, whom he married in 2000.

Callista Gingrich is a force in Gingrich's life, friends and associates say. She's an active partner in her husband's endeavors, from campaigning to his books and movie projects. He, in turn, actively promotes her works, which include a recently published children's book "Sweet Land of Liberty."

"They have a comfortable relationship personally and professionally," Walker said. "I think his marriage to Callista, the conversion to Catholicism, helped."

Gingrich's post-Congress life has been very lucrative. Able to command $60,000 per speech, he earned $2.5 million last year, according to his financial disclosure form. He created a universe of for-profit enterprises that include his consulting business, a historical-documentary production company, a communications firm and a literary agency. The collection of endeavors produced almost $100 million over the last 10 years, according to The Washington Post.



On the campaign trail, Gingrich appears to be the picture of domesticity with wife, children, grandchildren and extended family in tow.

"Robert is one of my two debate coaches," Gingrich recently told a crowd at South Carolina's Furman University, referring to his 10-year-old grandson, who was busily snapping pictures. "His sister, Maggie, who is having ballet lessons today, is the other. ... So when people say I do well in debates, you're seeing one of the people who's guided me to success so far."

Some former campaign aides complained that Callista Gingrich has too much sway over her husband, blaming her for him taking a luxury Mediterranean cruise right after entering the presidential race instead knocking on doors and shaking hands in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The vacation prompted several key campaign staffers to resign in June. Gingrich responded that some of the disgruntled staffers didn't understand that he's a different type of candidate who's running a different type of campaign.

"The idea of the campaign is that we would put tens of thousands of people in touch with the candidate through social media — through Twitter and Facebook," Walker said. "Some of the old (campaign) formulas don't have the same solvency as before."

Gingrich is keenly aware that he has enough baggage to potentially sink his candidacy, and he's making attempts to lighten the load. He added a section on his campaign website dedicated to addressing attacks against him.

It calls a decades-old story that Gingrich asked his first wife for a divorce while she was hospitalized for cancer a "vicious lie" and points to a piece written by conservative columnist Jackie Gingrich Cushman, his daughter, in which she calls the story false.

It defends Gingrich earning between $1.6 million to $1.8 million from Freddie Mac even as he was publicly blasting the mortgage giant that many conservatives hate and blame for the housing bubble, saying he never worked as a lobbyist.

Gingrich considers revisiting various controversies the price of doing business to win the Republican nomination and, eventually, the White House.

"When you go from also-ran to one of the two front-runners, you're inevitably going to get a huge amount of scrutiny," he told USA Today in November. "You have to. It's the presidency. It would be dereliction of duty not to."



(Steven Thomma of the Washington Bureau contributed.)





http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/12/05/132192/newt-gingrich-a-portrait-of-a.html

 

[QueEx]

 

[MASTERBAKER]

SNL's Chris Farley Impersonates Newt Gingrich - 1995

Blast from the past

http://www.bgol.us/board/showthread.php?t=636203

 

[muckraker10021]

Alt-Newt
<font="helvetica, verdana" size="3" color="#000000">
<b>by Hendrik Hertzberg

December 19, 2011</b>

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/12/19/111219taco_talk_hertzberg?printable=true

The branch of fiction known variously as alternate history, alternative history, or, to its geekier fans, alt-hist can be awesome fun. Its defining gimmick—set the wayback machine, tweak something in the historical past, and fantasize about how things might have played out—has proved irresistible to legions of writers, including some good ones. Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” (1962) and Robert Harris’s “Fatherland” (1992) posit an Axis triumph in the Second World War; Kingsley Amis’s “The Alteration” (1976) takes the conceit that Martin Luther became Pope and runs with it; and Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” (2004) has Charles Lindbergh, the famous pilot and anti-Semite, defeating Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 election.

A dizzying descent down the literary ladder eventually brings us face to face with the current front-runner for the Republican nomination for President. Among the many books that carry the Newt Gingrich brand (scholars differ as to the exact number, but it appears to be in the mid twenties), no fewer than six, co-authored with a prolific potboiler producer named William R. Forstchen, are contributions to the alt-hist genre. They make up a pair of loose trilogies, one set in the Civil War (the rebels win more battles than they did in real life, but still lose), the other in the Second World War (same deal with Germany and Japan). Unlike their betters, these books forgo playful speculation about how the present might be different. They’re heavy on gory battle scenes and windy pontification. Reviewing one of them, a Washington Post critic wrote, “It is torture from first to last, downright embarrassing in its clumsy prose and lurching plot.”

No more lurching, clumsy, and embarrassing, however, than the current Republican primary campaign, whose tortuous course has suddenly and unexpectedly offered Gingrich a nonfictional chance of actually enacting an alternate history more unlikely than any he has conceived for literature. As a futurist, Gingrich has imagined “populism in space,” honeymoons on the Moon, and theme parks with real live dinosaurs. Now, after being written off as an unpleasant relic of the mid-nineties, he can plausibly imagine himself behind a desk in the Oval Office. Can you? Go on. Imagine it.

As the protagonist of the tale, imagine, if you will, a man who, as Speaker of the House, orchestrates the impeachment of a President for an adulterous affair with a White House aide twenty-six years his junior while he himself is conducting an adulterous affair with a congressional aide twenty-two years his junior, having earlier left the first of his three wives while she was hospitalized with cancer. Imagine a man who attributes these behaviors to “how passionately I felt about this country.” Imagine a man who, told he can’t sit in a front section of Air Force One, shuts down the government. Imagine a man who becomes the only House Speaker ever to be disciplined for ethics violations. Imagine a man who, in a country just staggering out of the worst recession of the past fifty years and facing the threat of worldwide economic collapse, proposes to hire small children to work as janitors, mopping floors and cleaning toilets in their schools (or their orphanages, perhaps). Imagine that man as Commander-in-Chief. It’s no stretch for him. His fantasy life is so rich that he has already compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, Charles de Gaulle, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and (for sheer perseverance) Ho Chi Minh. The providential self-destruction of the three previous non-Mitt Romney front-runners, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain, will have done nothing to diminish his sense of himself as a man of destiny.

Neither do the polls. The latest CBS News/New York Times survey of likely Iowa Republican caucus-goers shows Gingrich with nearly double Romney’s support. Among white Christian evangelicals, it’s more than triple, and among Tea Party loyalists it’s well north of four to one. You might think—you might imagine—that “family values” voters would have serious doubts. You might think that Tea Partiers, especially, would recoil from this consummate Beltway operator and frequent ideological apostate: career politician, self-proclaimed “intellectual,” million-dollar purveyor of “advice as a historian” to Freddie Mac, chummy video partner with Nancy Pelosi in decrying global warming, opponent of mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, critic of Paul Ryan’s draconian deficit plan as “right-wing social engineering.” But no.

Gingrich’s sudden rise and special appeal to the emotions of “the base,” one suspects, stem less from his vaunted “big ideas” than from his long-cultivated, unparalleled talent for contempt. In 1990, when he was not yet Speaker, he pressed a memo on Republican candidates for office, instructing them to use certain words when talking about the Democratic enemy: “betray,” “bizarre,” “decay,” “anti-flag,” “anti-family,” “pathetic,” “lie,” “cheat,” “radical,” “sick,” “traitors,” and more. His own vocabulary of contempt has grown only more poisonously flowery. President Obama’s actions cannot be understood except as an expression of “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.” Liberals constitute a “secular-socialist machine” that is “as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.” There is “a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us” and “is prepared to use violence.” In this campaign, Gingrich’s performances in televised debates have been widely deemed effective. But what has won him his most visceral cheers from the audiences in the halls—audiences shaped and coarsened by years of listening to talk radio and watching Fox News—is his sneering attacks on moderators, especially those representing the hated “liberal” media.

In March, at the Cornerstone Church, in San Antonio, Gingrich declared, “I am convinced that, if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America,” his grandchildren will live “in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.” Last spring, this was a kind of right-wing performance art. Now it is the language of the man leading in the Republican polls, a man who—in the real world, not the alt-world—could, not inconceivably, become President of the United States. Imagine that. ♦

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Newt Gingrich on Ron Pauls record: "systemic avoidance of reality"





http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/286703/its-rich-lowry

http://www.therightscoop.com/newt-hits-ron-paul-on-his-systemic-avoidance-of-reality/