George Will: Newt Gingrich a 'rental politician ... not a historian'

[Sallow]

More George Will:


Gingrich, however, embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive. And there is his anti-conservative confidence that he has a comprehensive explanation of, and plan to perfect, everything.

Granted, his grandiose rhetoric celebrating his “transformative” self is entertaining: Recently he compared his revival of his campaign to Sam Walton’s and Ray Kroc’s creations of Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, two of America’s largest private-sector employers. There is almost artistic vulgarity in Gingrich’s unrepented role as a hired larynx for interests profiting from such government follies as ethanol and cheap mortgages. His Olympian sense of exemption from standards and logic allowed him, fresh from pocketing $1.6 million from Freddie Mac (for services as a “historian”), to say, “If you want to put people in jail,” look at “the politicians who profited from” Washington’s environment.

His temperament — intellectual hubris distilled — makes him blown about by gusts of enthusiasm for intellectual fads, from 1990s futurism to “Lean Six Sigma” today. On Election Eve 1994, he said a disturbed South Carolina mother drowning her children “vividly reminds” Americans “how sick the society is getting, and how much we need to change things. . . . The only way you get change is to vote Republican.” Compare this grotesque opportunism — tarted up as sociology — with his devious recasting of it in a letter to the Nov. 18, 1994, Wall Street Journal (http://bit.ly/vFbjAk). And remember his recent swoon over the theory that “Kenyan, anti-colonial” thinking explains Barack Obama.

Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how. Conservatism, in contrast, is both cause and effect of modesty about understanding society’s complexities, controlling its trajectory and improving upon its spontaneous order. Conservatism inoculates against the hubristic volatility that Gingrich exemplifies and Genesis deplores: “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.”

Wow. Guess Will ain't getting a Christmas card from Gingrich this year.

 

[Sallow]

Even Tom Coburn, senator from OK, can't stand Newt. He blasted Newt on Meet the Propagandists today. I still say Newt wants to sell more books and then bail-out of the race. Only Mitt has a shot at beating BO.

No, only Huntsman has a shot at beating Obama. But he can't get traction from the wingnuts.

I agree. Huntsman has a shot at beating obama, he's just not very popular and not a lot of republicans will vote for him. Other than that, yeah he has a great chance at beating obama

He would do very well in the General. Very attractive to independents and democrats fed up with Obama.

 

[Sallow]

Are we SUPPOSE to care what George Will says?

Will is a conservative.

 

[dblack]

Are we SUPPOSE to care what George Will says?

Will is a conservative.

But he's not a neo-conservative, which - despite the embarrassment of the Bush administration - remains the calling card of establishment Republicans.

 

[Sallow]

Are we SUPPOSE to care what George Will says?

Will is a conservative.

But he's not a neo-conservative, which - despite the embarrassment of the Bush administration - remains the calling card of establishment Republicans.

True.

And I suppose if he writes yet another oped critical of Obama..he will get in the good graces of the right wing around here, again.

 

[Synthaholic]

Even Tom Coburn, senator from OK, can't stand Newt. He blasted Newt on Meet the Propagandists today. I still say Newt wants to sell more books and then bail-out of the race. Only Mitt has a shot at beating BO.

No, only Huntsman has a shot at beating Obama. But he can't get traction from the wingnuts.

Honestly, guy, where do you even think that?

Huntsman? Really?

Maybe you need to escape your worldview and apply a little rationality.


Because Moderates don't win elections, enthusiasm does.

Huntsman has the most conservative record of all the candidates except perhaps Ron Paul. That's a fact. I know that his religion will keep many people from voting for him, but you cannot make an argument against him based on record or ideology. Especially while endorsing one of the others from this clown car.

This is a center right country.

That's a bullshit rightwing talking point. When you ask people if they are more conservative or liberal, they say conservative. But if you start asking about each individual issue, their responses tell a completely different story.

That's why the Democrats win when they run centrists, but Republicans win when they run true conservatives. Obama hid what he was, but people know now.

As a rule, when the GOP nominates real conservatives, they win. When they nominate moderates, they lose.

That's completely false. They win in conservative districts, that's all. Neither Bush was a conservative, and they won. And the Right insisted that Clinton and Obama were flaming Liberals, yet they both won. Remember the "Obama is the most Liberal member of the Senate" lie? You cannot claim that message was not repeated practically on a loop on FOX, Hannity, Limbaugh, and every other wingnut outlet. And he won in a landslide.

 

[Synthaholic]

Are we SUPPOSE to care what George Will says?

Only when he says what you want him to say. That's when he is a deep thinker.

When he doesn't echo your wingnut views, he's irrelevant.

 

[uscitizen]

Even Tom Coburn, senator from OK, can't stand Newt. He blasted Newt on Meet the Propagandists today. I still say Newt wants to sell more books and then bail-out of the race. Only Mitt has a shot at beating BO.

No, only Huntsman has a shot at beating Obama. But he can't get traction from the wingnuts.

I agree. Huntsman has a shot at beating obama, he's just not very popular and not a lot of republicans will vote for him. Other than that, yeah he has a great chance at beating obama

 

[Synthaholic]

Fire up the Wayback Machine to 1994!

 

[Dot Com]

That column is pretty withering. Reminds me of Newt's faith in beach volleyball as the future of America. Seriously. Google it.

Anyway, as soon as Newt came out for amnesty, he was done for me.

Yeah. He's pro- amnesty so he can't be all that bad

 

[Synthaholic]

Maureen has such a way with words...


Out of Africa and Into Iowa



NEWT GINGRICH’S mind is in love with itself.

It has persuaded itself that it is brilliant when it is merely promiscuous. This is not a serious mind. Gingrich is not, to put it mildly, a systematic thinker.

His mind is a jumble, an amateurish mess lacking impulse control. He plays air guitar with ideas, producing air ideas. He ejaculates concepts, notions and theories that are as inconsistent as his behavior.

He didn’t get whiplash being a serial adulterer while impeaching another serial adulterer, a lobbyist for Freddie Mac while attacking Freddie Mac, a self-professed fiscal conservative with a whopping Tiffany’s credit line, and an anti-Communist Army brat who supported the Vietnam War but dodged it.

“Part of the question I had to ask myself,” he said in a 1985 Wall Street Journal piece about war wimps, “was what difference I would have made.”

Newt swims easily in a sea of duality and byzantine ideas that don’t add up. As The Washington Post reported on Friday, an America under President Gingrich would have two Social Security systems — “one old, one new, running side by side” — two tax systems and two versions of Medicare.


*snip*


Gingrich, a radical precursor to the modern Tea Party when he staged what conservatives considered the second American Revolution in the House in the ’90s, wrote with delight of London’s shock when Samuel Adams started the original Tea Party.

But while an anticolonial disposition is good if you’re Adams, Washington and Jefferson, it’s bad if you’re Barack Obama’s Kenyan father living under British rule two centuries later.

Gingrich made one of his classic outrageous overreaches last year when he praised a Dinesh D’Souza article in Forbes, saying you could only understand how “fundamentally out of touch” and “outside our comprehension” President Obama is “if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior.”

D’Souza’s absurd ad hominem theory tying Obama to his father goes like this: “This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”

This was a typical Newt mental six-car pileup. The man who espouses Christian values being un-Christian in visiting the alleged sins of the father upon the son; the man who reveres the anticolonialism of the founding fathers ranting against the anticolonialism of the father of America’s first African-American president. How do you rail against the Evil Empire and urge overthrowing Saddam and not celebrate liberation in Africa?


More at the link.

 

[Stephanie]

Are we SUPPOSE to care what George Will says?

Will is a conservative.

Will is a Republican. but it good to see you all embracing a Republican when it fits your agenda

 

[Synthaholic]

Are we SUPPOSE to care what George Will says?

Will is a conservative.

Will is a Republican. but it good to see you all embracing a Republican when it fits your agenda

Are you claiming that George Will is not a conservative????

Why - because he's smart?

 

[Stephanie]

Will is a conservative.

Will is a Republican. but it good to see you all embracing a Republican when it fits your agenda

Are you claiming that George Will is not a conservative????

Why - because he's smart?

Well I will say he is smarter than you. and he has a right to his opinion. That doesn't mean we Republicans unlike you lefties will AGREE OR EAT UP what he has to say.
I could care less, I will make up MY OWN mind who I will support. You all have no CHOICE..

 

[Dot Com]

The Repub party is scraping the bottom of the barrell w/ "this guy"