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Thursday, December 21. 2006
The Most Dangerous Man in America
The most dangerous man in America today isn’t the president, although with the power he wields, he certainly ranks right up there; no, not the president, but the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, the former Georgia congressman who wrested the House and Senate away from the control of the Democrats in 1994 … only to be ousted himself four years later — by his own political party.
He’s dangerous because he will be running for president in 2008. He claimed, on Meet the Press Sunday (Transcript From the Show), he wouldn’t announce until Labor Day next year whether or not he would run, waiting to see if McCain or Romney or Giuliani had the Republican primary season won. Which is interesting because September 3rd is still six months before anyone either casts a vote or caucuses in the primaries. He’s gonna run.
But, on that issue — of when to announce his candidacy — he made some intelligent and logical points: that declaring now, 16 months before any primaries, is too early. He brought up John Kennedy not declaring his candidacy until January, 1960 as a good example.
He’s dangerous because he talks about Iraq with the confidence of a man who declared the president’s policies in Iraq wrong from almost the start, even though he was on the Defense Policy Board when the decisions to invade Iraq were made.
The first question Tim Russert asked Gingrich was about Iraq and Gingrich’s statement that it was a “failure.”
His answer: “Well, the war’s a failure in part because the strategy, as I told you on this show in December of ‘03, has been wrong consistently, it’s been a strategy that was far too American.”
Gingrich is like that, he’s an amiable guy who knows how to co-opt the views of his opponents and meld them into his own views, in other words, he talks about consensus building like a man who knows how to do it. He says what people want to hear, and more importantly, he sincerely believes what he says.
He cited his political agreements with Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY), his comments towards the senator and her husband, President Bill Clinton, were in fact quite laudatory. “Hillary Clinton is one of the hardest working professionals I know. I mean, she is serious, she is married to the smartest politician in the country, they have an enormous network of fund-raising. No one has made any money betting against the Clintons since 1980.”
As proof he knows this, in 1995 Gingrich and the Republicans controlling Congress tried to one-up the president over the budget, declaring the Republican Congress would “shut down” the federal government if Clinton didn’t bow their demands. Clinton won that challenge, because Clinton was able to frame the debate to his point of view.
Can Senator Clinton win the presidency? “[O]f course she could win. And anybody who thinks she can’t win must have been living on a different planet, I mean this — I watch Bill and Hillary with deep professional admiration.”
He had high praise for Barack Obama: “I actually think Barack Obama’s having as good as run as anyone could hope for, and he’s doing it by being positive, by being engaging, and by being above all the negative Washington-based, you know, this morning’s hotline nasty attack, you know, e-mail kind of stuff.”
Newt Gingrich changed the face of Congress and his face became the identity for the Republican Party in 1994.
I have a pet theory, one I’ve been ruminating over for the past ten years: Part of the reason Senator Bob Dole (R-KA) didn’t win the 1996 presidential election was that his name, his face, wasn’t the picture of the Republican Party the voters were familiar with. It was Newt Gingrich. Had Dole been the face and voice of Congress when the Republicans took control in 1994, I would bet — in 20-20 hindsight — Senator Dole would have become President Dole.
With the top three contenders on the Republican side of the ledger, Mit Romney (R-MA), Rudy Giuliani (R-NY) and John McCain (R-AZ), looking more like punching bags than candidates right now, Newt stands a real good chance of being the party’s nominee in August, 2008.
Romney, who for his entire political life until yesterday, claimed he was more protective of a woman’s right to choose and more effective at providing and protecting the civil liberties of gays and lesbians than Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) … has changed his spots to fall in line with the party line. In 1994 Romney proudly extolled his family’s history of support for abortion rights, today he advocates overturning Roe-v-Wade.
Rudy Giuliani, the hero of 9/11 … he’s pro gun control, pro-abortion rights and pro-gay and lesbian rights. That ain’t going anywhere with the conservative base of the Republican Party.
John McCain: His undying support of the president’s no-plan strategy for Iraq will put him out of the race the day after New Hampshire. He may not drop out that day, but it will be clear his candidacy is dead.
What scares me and many people about Newt Gingrich is not so much his bipartisan attitude for getting things accomplished in Washington — let’s face it, if he could demonstrate he can actually do it, that would make him the front-runner above all others of both parties — it’s that he still harbors some of the attitudes that made us loathe him 12 years ago.
Of his brushes with congressional ethics, he swept them aside with a curt admission he signed a paper he shouldn’t have. Of his extramarital affairs, one of which was going on while he was hammering President Clinton over the Monica Lewinski affair, he didn’t even respond to that, emphasizing, as if it were true, it was about Clinton lying under oath during a deposition.
Gingrich lying to his wife, which is essentially what a person does when they are having an affair, is acceptable, as long as the spouse doesn’t swear you under oath in a court of law.
What makes Gingrich so dangerous is his attack on the First Amendment, in particular free speech. While Gingrich conceded we of the ACLU are “…Americans and patriots …” he called us “suicidal” in our efforts to protect the most fundamental of our civil liberties. Specifically, Gingrich thinks the federal government should close down Jihadist websites and arrest and prosecute the operators of those sites.
Gingrich offered the case of a U.S. citizen in Illinois as an example, but it also shows the fallacy of his argument: “… the FBI now reports that this Jihadist almost certainly became a Jihadist — he’s an American living in Illinois, and he’s getting on the Internet and he’s reading hate and he’s reading recruitment and he’s reading how to be a Jihadist. Now, why would you tolerate that? I mean, in a free society that’s trying to survive?”
Well Newt, as you said, it’s a free society. That’s how we tolerate it, just as we tolerate web sites for the Aryan Nation, Stormfront and many other neo-Nazi, white supremacy groups.
One thing Russert didn’t ask was: how do you prosecute someone who is operating such a site from Pakistan or Bahrain? Kuwait even, which has its share of Al Qaa’ida supporters?
If Gingrich is willing to curtail our freedom of speech, where does he stand on the infringements of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments that now stand due to the Patriot Acts? Is he ready to curtail our freedoms in those amendments as well?
Newt Gingrich is the most dangerous man in America because I like him when he speaks and it sounds like he’s making sense. Unlike the current occupant of the White House, Gingrich is intellectually curious, he does read, he does absorb knowledge and he can speak in clear sentences; in a debate he wouldn’t need someone feeding him answers from a not-so-hidden ear piece. He can speak extemporaneously, as he proves every time he sits for an interview, and he can deliver a well-crafted, well-performed speech.
If a guy like me, lefty to the core, can find something to like in Newt Gingrich, it’s a sure bet everyone to the right of me will find him appealing. And that makes him dangerous.
Newt Gingrich on Meet the Press
But, on that issue — of when to announce his candidacy — he made some intelligent and logical points: that declaring now, 16 months before any primaries, is too early. He brought up John Kennedy not declaring his candidacy until January, 1960 as a good example.
He’s dangerous because he talks about Iraq with the confidence of a man who declared the president’s policies in Iraq wrong from almost the start, even though he was on the Defense Policy Board when the decisions to invade Iraq were made.
The first question Tim Russert asked Gingrich was about Iraq and Gingrich’s statement that it was a “failure.”
His answer: “Well, the war’s a failure in part because the strategy, as I told you on this show in December of ‘03, has been wrong consistently, it’s been a strategy that was far too American.”
On the cover of Time in 1995
He cited his political agreements with Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY), his comments towards the senator and her husband, President Bill Clinton, were in fact quite laudatory. “Hillary Clinton is one of the hardest working professionals I know. I mean, she is serious, she is married to the smartest politician in the country, they have an enormous network of fund-raising. No one has made any money betting against the Clintons since 1980.”
As proof he knows this, in 1995 Gingrich and the Republicans controlling Congress tried to one-up the president over the budget, declaring the Republican Congress would “shut down” the federal government if Clinton didn’t bow their demands. Clinton won that challenge, because Clinton was able to frame the debate to his point of view.
Can Senator Clinton win the presidency? “[O]f course she could win. And anybody who thinks she can’t win must have been living on a different planet, I mean this — I watch Bill and Hillary with deep professional admiration.”
Senators Clinton and Obama
Newt Gingrich changed the face of Congress and his face became the identity for the Republican Party in 1994.
I have a pet theory, one I’ve been ruminating over for the past ten years: Part of the reason Senator Bob Dole (R-KA) didn’t win the 1996 presidential election was that his name, his face, wasn’t the picture of the Republican Party the voters were familiar with. It was Newt Gingrich. Had Dole been the face and voice of Congress when the Republicans took control in 1994, I would bet — in 20-20 hindsight — Senator Dole would have become President Dole.
With the top three contenders on the Republican side of the ledger, Mit Romney (R-MA), Rudy Giuliani (R-NY) and John McCain (R-AZ), looking more like punching bags than candidates right now, Newt stands a real good chance of being the party’s nominee in August, 2008. Romney, who for his entire political life until yesterday, claimed he was more protective of a woman’s right to choose and more effective at providing and protecting the civil liberties of gays and lesbians than Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) … has changed his spots to fall in line with the party line. In 1994 Romney proudly extolled his family’s history of support for abortion rights, today he advocates overturning Roe-v-Wade.
Rudy Giuliani, the hero of 9/11 … he’s pro gun control, pro-abortion rights and pro-gay and lesbian rights. That ain’t going anywhere with the conservative base of the Republican Party.
John McCain: His undying support of the president’s no-plan strategy for Iraq will put him out of the race the day after New Hampshire. He may not drop out that day, but it will be clear his candidacy is dead.
What scares me and many people about Newt Gingrich is not so much his bipartisan attitude for getting things accomplished in Washington — let’s face it, if he could demonstrate he can actually do it, that would make him the front-runner above all others of both parties — it’s that he still harbors some of the attitudes that made us loathe him 12 years ago.
Of his brushes with congressional ethics, he swept them aside with a curt admission he signed a paper he shouldn’t have. Of his extramarital affairs, one of which was going on while he was hammering President Clinton over the Monica Lewinski affair, he didn’t even respond to that, emphasizing, as if it were true, it was about Clinton lying under oath during a deposition.
Gingrich lying to his wife, which is essentially what a person does when they are having an affair, is acceptable, as long as the spouse doesn’t swear you under oath in a court of law.
What makes Gingrich so dangerous is his attack on the First Amendment, in particular free speech. While Gingrich conceded we of the ACLU are “…Americans and patriots …” he called us “suicidal” in our efforts to protect the most fundamental of our civil liberties. Specifically, Gingrich thinks the federal government should close down Jihadist websites and arrest and prosecute the operators of those sites.
Gingrich offered the case of a U.S. citizen in Illinois as an example, but it also shows the fallacy of his argument: “… the FBI now reports that this Jihadist almost certainly became a Jihadist — he’s an American living in Illinois, and he’s getting on the Internet and he’s reading hate and he’s reading recruitment and he’s reading how to be a Jihadist. Now, why would you tolerate that? I mean, in a free society that’s trying to survive?”
Well Newt, as you said, it’s a free society. That’s how we tolerate it, just as we tolerate web sites for the Aryan Nation, Stormfront and many other neo-Nazi, white supremacy groups.
One thing Russert didn’t ask was: how do you prosecute someone who is operating such a site from Pakistan or Bahrain? Kuwait even, which has its share of Al Qaa’ida supporters?
If Gingrich is willing to curtail our freedom of speech, where does he stand on the infringements of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments that now stand due to the Patriot Acts? Is he ready to curtail our freedoms in those amendments as well?
Newt Gingrich is the most dangerous man in America because I like him when he speaks and it sounds like he’s making sense. Unlike the current occupant of the White House, Gingrich is intellectually curious, he does read, he does absorb knowledge and he can speak in clear sentences; in a debate he wouldn’t need someone feeding him answers from a not-so-hidden ear piece. He can speak extemporaneously, as he proves every time he sits for an interview, and he can deliver a well-crafted, well-performed speech.
If a guy like me, lefty to the core, can find something to like in Newt Gingrich, it’s a sure bet everyone to the right of me will find him appealing. And that makes him dangerous.
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