Moldy oldies

[Political Waves]

"Newt Gingrich is a human hand grenade who walks around with his hand on the pin, saying, 'Watch this!' ""

~ Righty pundit Peggy Noonan

The Donald, Bachmann, Perry, Cain -- none could keep the love of the base for too long, and now ... with time short ... it looks like Newt is kicking Mitt to the curb. Both are full of crap, politically, but either could get the nod and do a credible job in a run [all things being relative, and all the political relatives of this crew jumped out of a clown car.] Not that I think the nation swings their way, any more ... but still.

It's amazing how early in this season Hell froze over, but it would seem to have, as I'm not only posting Maureen Dowd, I'm quoting [gasp] Peggy Noonan! With both these dames on my Pffffft! List, that's not something you'll see every day, here on Political Waves; but as long as both go after Gingrich for the crusty old toad he is, they're my [temporary] BFF's.

Meanwhile, there's a lot of police action, bluster and bluff out there. Massive deaths reported overseas. This early Pluto in Capricorn business is intriguing. Obviously, we are witnessing authority showing its true colors (and because it's obvious, we can project the stumbles ahead.) In Krugman's latest piece on finance you can get a sense of authority trying to do what it's always done ... which is strangle anything that defies it. I don't think that's gonna work, this time around, but we shall see.

Meanwhile, the Supreme's -- America's erstwhile "respected authority" -- have jumped right in the middle of the mess, this session. They're taking on "Obamacare" and now it appears they'll also rule on Arizona's immigration law [Justice Kagan recusing herself, putting the possibility of an even split on the table.] Sniff the air for the smell of cordite, straight ahead!!

Snarky reads today, because that's what Newt deserves. Last piece is a warning worth noting -- a President Newt would guarantee hard times for us all -- INCLUDING our kids -- and a honking big war with Iran! Moldy oldies for 2012?

 

I think not.

Jude

Fire and Ice
MAUREEN DOWD, NYT
December 10, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/opinion/sunday/dowd-fire-and-ice.html

IT'S probably not wise for a man who had a weepy boy crush on the last Democratic president to threaten to stalk the current one around the country.

But more than anything in his Icarus flight toward the White House, Newt Gingrich seems infatuated with the idea of recreating the seven three-hour Lincoln-Douglas debates with President Obama.

"I will concede in advance that he can use a teleprompter," Gingrich said at a Republican Jewish Coalition forum here on Wednesday.

The president idolizes Lincoln, but now Newt wants to ape Abe.

Wherever Stephen Douglas went, Gingrich said, "Lincoln would show up one day later. And presently, Douglas began to figure out, the news coverage was always Lincoln's rebuttal."

Just so, Gingrich says, if he gets the nomination, he'll let the White House be his "scheduler."

"Wherever the president goes, I will show up four hours later," he vowed. In a rare moment of self-deprecation, Gingrich asked: How does the Harvard Law Review star "look in the mirror and say he's afraid to debate some guy who taught at West Georgia College?"

A match between Gingrich and Obama would be fascinating: two men who grew up without their hot-tempered, hard-drinking fathers, vying to be the nation's patriarch.

The Drama Queen versus No Drama Obama. The apocalyptic prophet versus the ambiguous president.

One hot, one cold. One struggles to stop setting fires as the other struggles to get fiery. One who's always veering out of control, one who's too tightly controlled. One reining it in, one letting it rip. One tamping down his pugilistic side, the other ramping it up. One channeling Ronald Reagan to seem more genial; the other channeling Harry Truman to have more spine.

One pretending to be a populist when he can't drag himself out of Tiffany's; the other pretending to be a populist when he'd like to be at Davos with Jamie Dimon.

Obama is a foul-weather populist and Gingrich is a fair-weather normal guy. Neither is a convincing populist for the 99 percent who crave one, but it would be fun to watch the Hand Grenade take on Cool Hand Luke.

Whereas Obama usually faded away on stage during his primary debates in 2008, Gingrich revived a fading campaign this fall with his confident debate performances against pitiful foes.

Where Gingrich is vesuvian

Like Obama, Gingrich loves to give seminars. But Gingrich, unlike Obama, has a talent for the visceral. Often, however, his rhetoric goes off a cliff.

In an interview with The Jewish Channel, Gingrich shrugged off Palestinian statehood with this incendiary blast: "I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places." The Palestinian Authority, he averred, has "an enormous desire to destroy Israel."

Nutty Newt is dancing a fandango on Mitt Romney's head even though not a single hair has gone askew. As Michael Steele, the former Republican National Committee chief, so eloquently summed up the Romney free fall on MSNBC, "I don't care how you cut it, the brother just can't bake the cake."

Republicans still seem a bit dazed by Newt's dizzying rise from the ashes.

Peggy Noonan calls him "a trouble magnet" and "a human hand grenade who walks around with his hand on the pin, saying, 'Watch this!' "

Joe Scarborough, one of the House plotters against Speaker Gingrich back in 1997, quipped, "Let me just say, if Newt Gingrich is the smartest guy in the room, leave that room."

Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who was in the House when Gingrich was speaker, told Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday" that he would have a hard time supporting Newt because his leadership was "lacking oftentimes."

Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, who worked with Newt in the House, noted, "He's a guy of 1,000 ideas and the attention span of a 1-year-old."

Congressman Peter King of New York told CNN's Erin Burnett that Newt's "inflammatory" statements, his "erratic" and "self-centered" behavior, and his "Armageddon language" wear people out.

The Gingrich grandiosity was on display, King asserted, when the new frontrunner "compared his wife to Jacqueline Kennedy and Laura Bush and Nancy Reagan."

King said that because Newt "puts himself at the center of everything," and because he can't "stick with a game plan," Bill Clinton was constantly able to outmaneuver him.

If Newt doesn't fly into the sun but instead lands in sunny Tampa, Obama should use the Clinton playbook: Make him get a crush on you. Then crush him. ++


The Underminey Backlash Against Newt, Starring Peggy Noonan

Ari Melber, The Nation via HuffPo
12/12/11
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ari-melber/the-underminey-backlash-a_b_1143270.html

 

So I love it when Peggy Noonan writes columns like this sweet and vicious contemplation of Newt Gingrich. We learn that Gingrich is detested most by those who worked with him -- a powerful list of Republicans who are now "burning up the phone lines in Washington" to protest his recent surgelet -- and that while there are two ways to view Gingrich, he is, in the end, his own greatest foe: "a human hand grenade who walks around with his hand on
the pin, saying, 'Watch this!'"

Noonan is an influential conservative, of course, a former Reagan scribe who is the closest thing the Wall Street Journal has to Maureen Dowd -- a zeitgeist-chasing free-associater who gets some big things right, even if annoyance is the cost of admission. So it's striking to watch Noonan tick off Gingrich's accomplishments in the voice of a long-lost underminey friend:

One way to view [Gingrich] is that he is so rich and varied as a character, as geniuses often are, that he contains worlds, multitudes. Another way to look at it: In a long career, one will shift views, adapt to circumstances, tack this way and that. Another way: He's philosophically unanchored, an unstable element. There are too many storms within him, and he seeks out external storms in order to equalize his own atmosphere. He's a trouble magnet, a starter of fights that need not be fought. He is the first modern potential president about whom there is too much information.

 

So many ways to look at it! And bonus points for the TMI reference! But still, what comes through here, and in the growing chorus of influential Newt critics, is that Gingrich's personal qualities make him not only hard to be near but impossible to rely on. (As one former chief of staff in a Republican White House recently said, "Listen to just about anyone who worked alongside Gingrich and you will hear that he's inconsistent, erratic, untrustworthy and unprincipled.") Noonan's armchair analysis of what drives Gingrich's unstable tics is interesting. although who knows if it's true. New Yorkers used to say that Rudy Giuliani was strong during crises, but if there were none for him to tackle, he'd just create his own. Whatever the motivation, does Newt's instability hold him back?

Noonan doesn't claim to have interviewed many Republican voters, and she's not burdened by the need to substantiate her imaginary sense of their views. But that doesn't mean she's wrong, either. Take these feelings projected on the Republican electorate:

Republicans on the ground who view Mr. Gingrich from afar, who neither know nor have worked with him, are more likely to see him this way: "Who was the last person to actually cut government? Who was the last person who actually led a movement that balanced the federal budget? . The last time there was true welfare reform, the last time government was cut, Gingrich did it."

 

This is speculation, but it is somewhat testable. The idea is that Republicans see Gingrich as more serious, and ready to lead, than his carnival of rivals in this weird primary. Well, in Iowa, Gingrich is not only drawing some anti-Romney voters who simply left Cain and Perry. He has also convinced an even larger swath of Republicans that he has the best experience to be president. A whopping 42 percent of Iowa Republicans say that about Gingrich -- more than double the number who think that of Romney. (The rest of the field near single digits.) Or to put it another way, at least 9 percent of Iowa Republicans who are currently backing another candidate still think Gingrich has the best experience to be in the White House.

 

While national polls are less reliable, because they include states that have little exposure to the race so far, the same trend holds with Republicans across the country. (See this CNN poll.)

 

So Noonan's hunch looks right. Republicans take Gingrich this seriously partly for good reason -- he was Speaker of the House, dealing directly with the president -- and partly, I suspect, because of the balming influence of television fame. Unlike, say, former Speaker Tom Foley, Gingrich labored to stay famous long after his stint in the House. He churned out books, movies, white papers and appeared on everything from Fox News to The Daily Show.

 

The thrust of Noonan's column is that there are two crowds for the two views of the two Newts -- an "extraordinary divide in opinion between those who know Gingrich and those who don't."

The essence of fame, of course, is people knowing of you without knowing you. Gingrich's hope, then, is to keep these worlds apart and his fans at a distance. ++

 

Newt Gingrich: If Elected, I'll Convert The State Dept. Into The Ministry Of War, Starting With John Bolton
December 7, 2011
Jack Cluth, Addicting Info
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2011/12/07/newt-gingrich-if-elected-ill-convert-the-state-dept-into-the-ministry-of-war-starting-with-john-bolton/

"If he will accept it, I will ask John Bolton to be Secretary of State. But I will only appoint him if he will agree that his first job is the complete and thorough transformation fo the State Department and the replacement of the current Foreign Service culture with a new entrepreneurial and aggressive culture dedicated to the proposition that defending freedom and defending America is the first business of the State Department, not appeasing opponents."

 

~ Newt Gingrich

There's little that illustrates the difference between Liberals and Conservatives more than Newt Gingrich's announcement that he would ask former UN Ambassador John Bolton to be his Secretary of State. First we'll need to get past the presumptuousness of discussing Cabinet appointees before even winning the GOP nomination, much less the general election, but that's typical Gingrich- over-confident, egomaniacal, and too full of himself by half. True, the odds of Gingrich becoming President are roughly the same as my being elected Queen of England, but Gingrich's speech, and it's reception among the Far Right, provide a glimpse into the reflexive, fear-driven hive-mind of today's GOP.

Republicans are far more comfortable with decisive, destructive military action than diplomacy. Mitt Romney has stated that he would require that one of every five federal dollars be spent on defense. Democrats find themselves wondering what sort of America we'll be living in when killing is a higher priority than education and health care.

Bolton, whom the Senate refused to confirm as UN envoy in 2006, is no one's idea of a diplomat. Pugnacious, undiplomatic, and an unabashed proponent of projecting American military power whenever and wherever he deems appropriate, the prospect of Bolton as our country's top diplomat would be humorous if he wasn't so belligerent. In his defense, Bolton has never made any attempt to camouflage his burning desire for war with Iran.or any other
country he might deem a threat. His "shoot first" diplomatic style bolsters Gingrich's self-image as a firm American exceptionalist who believes that America possesses both the right and the responsibility to protect its interest through military intervention when it's deemed necessary. A Gingrich/Bolton foreign policy would be muscular, robust, and forceful.which leaves little breathing space for diplomatic negotiation and nuance.

As if Bolton's aggressive distaste for diplomacy and negotiation wasn't problem enough, there's also the matter of his association with noted anti-Islam agitators such as Pamela Geller. IF Gingrich is elected, can America afford a chief diplomat with a long-standing reputation for belligerence, bellicosity, and hatred of Islam? Perhaps a better question would be if America could afford a President who would nominate a Secretary of State whose driving philosophy is "Ready. Fire. Aim.".and who views an entire religion as the enemy.

And what of Gingrich's statement that as President he'd charge Bolton with the task of creating within the American diplomatic community a new "aggressive culture dedicated to the proposition that defending freedom and defending America is the first business of the State Department"? What is the international community to make of an America willing, even eager, to bully and intimidate lesser (i.e.- not America) countries?

It's always difficult to know how much of Gingrich's statements are bluster and how much are intended to be taken seriously. In a primary season where no Republican can be too far to the Right, it's possible that Gingrich may be preaching to the choir. To those who believe in the power of and the need for diplomacy, Gingrich's words are chilling, in that they represent his stated intent to make America the unquestioned bully of the international community.

Ready. Fire. Aim ++

 

 

"I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington ... I'm asking you to believe in yours."
~ Barack Obama

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