Tag Archives: Newt Gingrich

Andrew Breitbart, RIP

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As readers of this blog know, I have somewhat of a following among the libertarian right.  I don’t really understand it except that there is a deep part of me that distrusts centralization, whether in academic bureaucracies, corporate headquarters or in government institutions. So I guess I was not surprised when a couple of people wrote me this week and asked me to say something about the death of Andrew Breitbart. I know my liberal friends are going to be angry with this post, but so be it.

I had met Andrew for the first time two months ago over dinner in a Santa Monica steakhouse. I had come at the invitation of a conservative friend who wanted me to see that Breitbart was not the demon that I had depicted him as, during the Shirley Sherrod fiasco. When I left the restaurant after a large meal and multiple bottles of red wine I had a couple of impressions that stayed with me. First was that Andrew was a somewhat charming provocateur, much in the spirit of Abby Hoffman. Like Hoffman, I was never sure Breitbart really believed half the shit that came out of his mouth, but his main purpose seemed to be a social irritant.

The second impression from the dinner was that Andrew was sick at heart about the prospects of beating Obama in 2012. He called the current Republican field “pygmies” and I actually believe he felt that Sarah Palin would have been a far better candidate. I laughed at that. He truly despised Obama, and in some weird way I think he felt that the election of 2008 had been the culmination of an era of political correctness, which he considered to be the main source of evil in the modern world. Just why Barack became the focus of his anger, I couldn’t fathom, but I came to see this loathing as something that was not connected to a rational process, but rather something more from his “reptilian brain”. This kind of anger is not kind to your heart.

So how ironic that the day of Andrew’s passing that Rush Limbaugh, a far less charming angry man of the right, chose once again to dive into the deep pool of misogyny that has defined his career since he first used the term “Feminazi”.  Limbaugh’s assertion about Susan Fluke being a “prostitute and a slut” are so unhinged that one can only believe he is back on the “hillbilly heroin” (OxyContin) again. So Limbaugh may be just a drug-addled “entertainer”, but what is Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich’s excuse for that same attitude— believing we have been on the road to damnation as a country since the pill was introduced and Rock and Roll eclipsed Frank Sinatra? In my book, Outlaw Blues, I quote Sinatra in 1956 saying that Rock was filled with “sly, lewd and dirty lyrics”, performed by “cretinous goons”. Of course Frank was pissed off at Elvis, but why is Rick Santorum still angry about the sexual revolution fifty years later?

In some weird way I hope that Rick Santorum does become the standard bearer for the Republican Party. I have said from the beginning of this campaign that I would really like a showdown between President Obama and a Tea Party Conservative. If Romney wins the nomination, he will weasel back to the center so fast it will make your head spin. The fact that Romney is unwilling to denounce Limbaugh proves what a spineless toad he is.

But not Rick. With him as the candidate it will be “a choice not an echo” and in my view will be a total repeat of Goldwater’s 1964 drubbing. The country will come to the realization that we are not a hard right society and that the Tea Party is a minority cult. And then maybe, with some real breathing room after an epic victory, the Democrats might reexamine some of the ideas of subsidiarity and decentralization that might realign some of the anti-war libertarians and the true liberals in a new progressivism.

Which brings me back to Breitbart. He wanted a choice election too, but not the choice of “pygmies” like Romney, Santorum or Gingrich. Although he liked Limbaugh, he despised Glenn Beck. Over the course of the dinner I kept saying that I was a classic Liberal. I believed in liberty and equality of opportunity. And he kept saying that he believed in those things too, but that “liberalism” had been demeaned by the Left. If we had had time, we might have come to some meeting ground. But it was not to be.

Bad Choices for the GOP

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Historians of Barack Obama’s political career have always noted that he’s been pretty lucky when it comes to his opponents. 2012 certainly will not change that narrative. It seems to me that the Republicans are now faced with a bad choice between Romney and Gingrich-either one will lead to self destruction.

The Republican establishment clearly is scared witless by the prospect of Gingrich being their standard bearer. Last night Matt Drudge brought the full weight of his huge reach to try to destroy Gingrich. His banner , “Insider: Gingrich repeatedly insulted Reagan” linked to NeoCon kingpin Eliot Abrams National Review takedown of Gingrich’s pretension to carrying the Reagan mantle. In another lead link, Drudge links to Emmet Tyrrell (Bill Clinton’s nemesis) who writes of William Jefferson Gingrich.

Newt and Bill are 1960s generation narcissists, and they share the same problems: waywardness and deviancy. Newt, like Bill, has a proclivity for girl hopping. It is not as egregious as Bill’s, but then Newt is not as drop-dead beautiful. His public record is already besmeared with tawdry divorces, and there are private encounters with the fair sex that doubtless will come out.

It may be that the combined weight of Drudge, the National Review, George Will and Anne Coulter trashing Newt may influence the vote in Florida, but if Newt is smart in tonights debate, he will continue his line that “the elites” (right and left) hate him, and he is proud of that.

But if the GOP establishment attacks work, then the party is left with Romney as the candidate. And that would be equally disastrous. Romney releasing last year’s tax returns will not be enough for the Democrats. Because at some basic level the average American says, “why did he need Swiss and Cayman Island offshore accounts if he wasn’t trying to hide something?” Gingrich previewed the Democratic attack line yesterday.

“You have to live in a world of Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts, and making $20 million for no work, to have some fantasy this far from reality,” Mr. Gingrich said when asked about Mr. Romney’s suggestion that illegal immigrants could be persuaded to “self-deport” from the United States.

But that’s just the start. Already good investigative reporters are starting to ask very pointed questions.

In the wake of news reports last week that presidential contender Mitt Romney owns an individual retirement account worth as much as $101 million, questions are growing over how it could have gotten so big when contribution limits are capped at $5,000 or $6,000 a year.

As one wag pointed out, Romney would have to be 3000 years old to accumulate that much in an IRA if he had played by the rules. Of course by undervaluing assets he put into his Cayman Island IRA, he could escape the tax burden, but in the world of Presidential politics, this is too clever by half.

As for the President, he is on a roll. The economy is improving and since he was inaugurated the Dow has almost doubled, moving from 6469 to 12,791. Moreover he has realized that he must fight a populist campaign for the soul of America. Having Romney as his opponent is the perfect foil and he laid out the electoral challenge in his State of the Union.

We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share and everyone plays by the same set of rules.

I think the President’s chances of reelection get better every day.

 

Delicious Irony

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Two years ago Citizens United financed a documentary by Newt & Callista Gingrich called America at Risk. It was the typical Gingrich over the top Global War on Islam screed and par for the course for the production company most famous for the Supreme Court decision that unleashed unlimited corporate funds into the 2012 election cycle.

So what a delicious irony that Newt’s campaign has been brought to earth by the very force of Citizens United and the Super Pacs it spawned which are dumping endless negative ads on Gingrich.

The involvement of such groups can be especially damaging for candidates like Mr. Gingrich who have not raised enough money to be able to counter negative attacks with an advertising blitz of their own. Nor does Mr. Gingrich have a well-financed super PAC working on his behalf.

“The problem is the super PACs come in and spend $1 million a week blasting a candidate,” said Tim Albrecht, a senior aide to Gov. Terry E. Branstad of Iowa, a Republican. “And Newt has not been able to put an apparatus like that together.”

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Put a Stake In It

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The reports of the death of the Neo-Conservative Movement have been greatly exaggerated. Dick Cheney has become a cheerleader for Newt Gingrich whose sole intention seems to be to continue The Long War ad infinitum. On a day when we finally ended the most disastrous strategy of the Neo-Cons, the Iraq War, Gingrich is doubling down on the next war–In Iran.

He painted a chain of events in which an Israeli prime minister asked an American president for help with a conventional military invasion of Iran so that Israel would not have to use its nuclear arsenal to defend itself. Mr. Gingrich implied that he would go along. “What I won’t do is allow Israel to be threatened with another Holocaust,” he said. “This is a not-very-far-down-the-road decision.”

A joint US-Israeli invasion of Iran! Unfuckingbelievable. These people are counting on the collective amnesia of Americans.

The juxtaposition of the Gingrich-Cheney Plan for our future with the New York Times discovery of a cache of Top Secret documents about the Haditha Massacre in Iraq couldn’t have been more poignant .

The stress of combat left some soldiers paralyzed, the testimony shows. Troops, traumatized by the rising violence and feeling constantly under siege, grew increasingly twitchy, killing more and more civilians in accidental encounters. Others became so desensitized and inured to the killing that they fired on Iraqi civilians deliberately while their fellow soldiers snapped pictures, and were court-martialed. The bodies piled up at a time when the war had gone horribly wrong.

As I have said before, this election needs to be fought on two issues: income inequality and cutting the bloated Pentagon and our imperial overreach. Whether President Obama and the Democrats have the guts to fight on those issues will be a test, but strangely enough they might find support among the Ron Paul wing of the Republican party in that fight.

Politics-12/2/11

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I think things are beginning to turn towards the Democrats. Even though Newt Gingrich is dismissive of the Occupy Movement, it has already changed the political conversation for 2012.

But politically, Democrats believe that they have already won this latest skirmish in the message wars. And some exasperated Republicans acknowledge that they are losing the exchange; party leaders have worked this week to bring the rank and file in line behind the tax cut.

Democrats have concluded from the payroll tax debate that Republicans are vulnerable over their opposition to any new taxes on the wealthy in a way they were not when Democrats proposed such taxes for deficit reduction. So they have reprised an old message — that Democrats fight for the middle class, Republicans for the rich — and are likely to sound it through 2012, in hopes of blunting the headwinds they face as unemployment remains high.

“Tonight, Senate Republicans chose to raise taxes on nearly 160 million hard-working Americans because they refused to ask a few hundred thousand millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share,” Mr. Obama said in a statement after the first Senate vote.

You add to this the possibility that the first big wave of Baby Boomer retirements and an improving employment picture might drop the unemployment rate below the 8% level by next summer. We have talked here about the fact that America is no longer a hard goods export economy. This may ironically be an advantage in the next couple of years as Europe struggles and China sees it’s largest export market pull back its purchases. Even more reason for us to concentrate on the American Redoubt.

Which leaves us with the question of Obama’s opponent. Clearly Cain is in free-fall and should be out of the race by Monday. He was a construct of the Koch Brothers and Fox News—a proxy to debunk the notion that the Tea party was a bunch of racist know-nothings. Anthea Butler gave him the “Lawn Jockey of the Year Award”, but now that Cain has served his purpose, Rupert and the Koch’s will drop him like a hot potato.

That seems to leave us with Gingrich and Romney. Some of my die hard Republican friends hold out the hope that these two will fight to a draw over the coming months, with neither of them having enough delegates to lock up the convention on the first ballot. This fantasy then leads to an old fashioned brokered convention where Chris Christie or Mitch Daniels emerges from a brokered convention. Shades of Mark Hanna and the Gilded Age of the Republican Oligarchs. How fitting for these times. Personally I think this is pure fantasy. As the recent Ron Paul Ad shows, Gingrich is such a hypocrite, he could not survive a Presidential Race. However, Conservatives are so wary of Romney that they may overlook Gingrich’s truckload of baggage. What Josh Marshall calls “the Murdoch Primary” is clearly being won by Gingrich, now that they have thrown Cain under the bus. There is a good case to be made that Gingrich could win both Iowa and South Carolina, thereby blunting Romney’s inevitability pitch.

All this must bring a smile to the President.

Oil Crisis and the Conservative Revolution

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I guess if I have to pick one person to blame for our current energy crisis, it would have to be Newt Gingrich. One of his first acts in taking control of Congress after the Conservative Revolution of 1994 was to pass a rider on the Transportation appropriations bills. As the Times reports.

Congressional Republicans made matters worse in 1995, when they attached a rider to a huge appropriations bill forbidding the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from spending any money to raise fuel standards. That law, in effect until 2001, made any change in CAFE standards impossible, says Representativeve Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has pushed for better fuel efficiency.

Now Gingrich refuses to admit he did anything wrong, because, “our culture favors driving long distances in powerful vehicles and the car as a social expression.” Not that Gingrich is the only brain-dead pseudo-psychologist on Capitol Hill. Here’s John Dingell who has faithfully protected his Auto Company constituents for 30 years.

“The American auto industry has sold the cars people wanted,” he says. “You’re going to blame the auto industry for that or the American consumer? He likes it sitting in his driveway, he likes it big, he likes it safe.”

So all of this head in the sand stupidity will have to change. Our fuel standards will have to climb like the rest of the world (see chart). The simplest way is to charge a gasoline tax like most other developed countries. But that’s not the end of the American way of life, as the head of Shell Oil makes clear.

Consumers overseas might not like higher taxes on gasoline, but they’ve adapted, says Jeroen van derVeer, chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell, the European energy giant. “A society can work, can function and can grow even at higher fuel prices,” he says. “It’s a way of life — you get used to it.”

In Mr. van derVeer’s native Holland, for example, gasoline sells for more than $10 a gallon, with $5.57 of that going to taxes. Even in Britain, which has substantial North Sea production, gasoline sells for $8.71 a gallon.

We will get through this Interregnum. It will be more painful that most politicians are letting on. But the creativity of America should not be doubted. In the meantime we can buy the new energy conservation technology from Japan, who started getting their energy act together 30 years ago.

Downfall of the Conservative Movement

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The New Yorker’s George Packer writes a brilliant piece this week chronicling the downfall of the conservative movement. He talks to all of the major conservative players and his analysis is both cogent and fair. It’s a long piece, but well worth the read. Here are a few key passages.

The fact that the least conservative, least divisive Republican in the 2008 race is the last one standing—despite being despised by significant voices on the right—shows how little life is left in the movement that Goldwater began, Nixon brought into power, Ronald Reagan gave mass appeal, Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces. “The fact that there was no conventional, establishment, old-style conservative candidate was not an accident,” Brooks said. “Mitt Romney pretended to be one for a while, but he wasn’t. Rudy Giuliani sort of pretended, but he wasn’t. McCain is certainly not. It’s not only a lack of political talent—there’s just no driving force, and it will soften up normal Republicans for change.”

*   *   *

Yuval Levin, a former Bush White House official, who is now a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, agrees with Gingrich’s diagnosis. “There’s an intellectual fatigue, even if it hasn’t yet been made clear by defeat at the polls,” he said. “The conservative idea factory is not producing as it did. You hear it from everybody, but nobody agrees what to do about it.”

Pat Buchanan was less polite, paraphrasing the social critic Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

*   *   *

Instead of just limiting government, the Gingrich revolutionaries set out to disable it. Although the legislative reins were in their hands, these Republicans could find no governmental projects to organize their energy around. David Brooks said, “The only thing that held the coalition together was hostility to government.” When the Times Magazine asked William Kristol what ideas he was for—in early 1995, high noon of the Gingrich Revolution—Kristol could think to mention only school choice and “shaping the culture.”

One of the clear lessons of the dialogue on this blog is that the conservatives really don’t have anything they are “for”, except the War in Iraq. Until they begin helping the progressives in this huge reform process ahead of us, they will have nothing to offer the American people.

November's Democratic Blowout

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Even from halfway around the world you can sense a sea change. Hillary’s campaign is running on fumes and she just needs a few days to find a graceful exit. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich warned the Republicans were headed for a November blowout.

Gingrich says the Republican loss in the special election in Louisiana’s sixth congressional district this past weekend should be “a sharp wake up call” for party members.

Gingrich noted President George W. Bushcarried the district by 19 percentage points in winning reelection in 2004. In the end, Democratic State Rep. Donald Cazayoux defeated Republican Woody Jenkins. Republicans tried to cast Cazayoux a liberal by comparing him to Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama, but voters didn’t seem to buy it.

The former Georgia lawmaker also pointed to polls that show Americans now favor Democrats on a host of issues, including taxes and the war on terrorism.

But the real bad news for McCain is that the economic headwinds are getting stronger. Continue reading →