Someone has needed to pull a Josey Wales on Newt Gingrich for a very long time. It turns out he can do it just fine himself, thank you very little.
I’ve already said all I cared to say about the insufferable, but always (unintentionally) amusing Newt Gingrich. I half-excitedly have kept my powder dry, in the hope that he somehow would weasel his way to the top of the unimpressive roster of Republican nitwits vying for their chance to get beaten badly by Obama in 2012.
Here is what I said last summer:
Let’s cut to the chase: I would wage considerable sums of money that there is no chance Newt could ever weasel his way into the nomination for 2012. Frankly I don’t think God loves us enough to make that remote possibility a reality. However, few things would provide me more pleasure. It might even be worth praying for.
I have to say, he remains the gift that keeps giving. There is not much I had any interest in saying, since he was doing so much of the heavy lifting this past week to immolate himself (as predicted by anyone not inexplicably in thrall to his con act; that so many in the media still give this snake oil salesman the time of day is bewildering).
But as a person who puts pen to paper on a daily basis, I am compelled to take note of the stink bomb he dropped yesterday. (His staff seems obliged to fall on the sword, but there is little doubt the Newster wrote or at least helped write this ridiculous, embarrassing dreck.)
The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.
That’s not The Onion, folks.
The only thing I can say to that is: Wow.
And, thanks, as always, Newt, for just being you.
Here is the original post from last July:
This just in: Newt gingrich remains the most repugnant and despicable ass-clown in America!
(Narrowly edging out the oleaginous Andrew Breitbart, who may finally have done civilization a favor by making himself impossible to take seriously in any respectable circles.)
In terms of offensiveness, illogic and opportunism, the insufferable one may have outdone himself here:
There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.
And lest anyone think I’m shooting a pale, bloated and loquacious fish in a barrel, let it be known that I’m actually offering Gingrich more than a little benefit of the doubt. I am inclined to believe that he knows better and says most of the things he says (trying to be incendiary, ending up being insidious) to stir the sluggish pot of ditto-heads, “Don’t Tread On Me” types, and the no-taxes troglodytes who invariably live in counties most reliant upon the largesse of government and well-paid (and heavily taxed) liberal elite socialist sorts. Indeed, I have no choice but to conclude he knows better, because the irony (and idiocy) would be too unbearable if this bozo, who constantly invokes his authority on founding fathers (always wrongly, such as his demonstrably incorrect insistence that men like Jefferson and Washington were devout Christians and, more, designed the new country to be a “Christian nation”—which is literally the opposite of the very documents they created) actually believed the garbage he so often spews.
Check it out: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Pretty hard to misinterpret or spin, no? Not unless your audience consists of the willfully illiterate and mouth-breathing masses who turn to Fox news for a quick fix for what (Roger) ails them. Any serious thinker who hopes to be taken seriously does everything in his power to avoid leaning on the ever-reliable George Orwell, but sometimes no other analogy will do. In the intellectual wasteland that passes for the Republican party these days, down truly is up and night really is day. Only in this contemporary dystopia on the Right could anyone with the ability to reason (or read) fail to understand the difference between what the founding fathers wrote and fearful bigots fantasize about.
It became increasingly obvious (and unnerving) during the aftermath of 9/11 and the run-up to the ’04 election that nothing would please the religious right lunatic fringe more than to essentially become honky Taliban. Of course they would be aghast at such an offensive characterization. But think about it: these are the same sociopaths who endorse an oligarchic state (a bathtub-sized government run by the untaxed and unregulated wealthy), covet the conversion of all to Christianity (not, incidentally, the type espoused by Christ but the type reformulated by white, often closeted gay men lashing out against their own uncontainable impulses), and openly proselytize the possibility of a single preferred religion. (The peripheral analogies include the behavior and attitudes toward women, the dispossessed and impoverished, the zeal for censorship, the defense of government spying and the embrace of anti-intellectualism. As Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens have pointed out without hyperbole, these are all genuine hallmarks of Fascistic ideologies.)
Bottom line: equating the tolerance of a Muslim learning center with “submission” and an indication of the “timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites” (in addition to being a profound case of transparent projection), is a craven and fallacious misnomer that needs to be forcefully called out, and rejected. Indeed, if this disgusting sentiment was translated into another language and placed in a thought bubble above any ayatollah, it would seem like the ranting of an intolerant dime-store despot. Which is exactly what it is.
It almost makes you want to sardonically cheer Newt on and see how the dots connect, down the road, with the hard lines he endorses and how their implementation would affect ordinary Americans. Why stop at establishing (or rewriting history to assert there was) an official religion, let’s begin slicing off thieves’ hands with scimitars; let’s make certain types of artistic expression illegal; let’s throw rocks at adulterers…oops! See what happens, Newt? When you crawl out from under your rock and use it as a soapbox, you are eventually and inevitably hoisted by your own petard. And Newt, as much as any self-righteous offender, is serially petarded.
Of course the other, egregious fallacy of Newt’s outburst is the notion that the world is (or ever was) split into “us and them” (certainly it is if you are indifferent to and frightened of the “Other” and seek to divide susceptible citizens for naked political gain); Americans are Americans (presumably white Christians, natch) and Muslims are Muslims (presumably dark-skinned jihadists). This willfully ignores the fact that Muslims, as well as myriad other religions, cultures and creeds, all exist peacefully and democratically in the United States of America. Your average second grader is capable of understanding this, but not your average Tea Partier—which is exactly what Gingrich, with the subtlety of a raccoon in a trashcan, is relying on. But this underscores the always-ugly underpinning of the contemporary conservative mind (which is not terribly evolved from the historical conservative mind): the facile (and fictional) formulation that our great nation—a nation comprised of and built by immigrants—has a preferred demographic. Not so ironically, the only time this explicitly was the case happened to be (mostly in the south) during the sordid spectacle of slavery. Implicitly, that bias still extends to women, as well as non-whites, but in virtually all legal and moral respects, that type of race-baiting bigotry is discredited on arrival. In today’s right-wing sprint to the bottom of the tea-pot, this is the fuel that drives the cause. But like that other cause so fondly (and wrongly) reminisced about in certain quarters, it is a lost one and tends to spoil when exposed to the direct light of reality.
Let’s cut to the chase: I would wage considerable sums of money that there is no chance Newt could ever weasel his way into the nomination for 2012. Frankly I don’t think God loves us enough to make that remote possibility a reality. However, few things would provide me more pleasure. It might even be worth praying for.
