Sallow
The Big Bad Wolf.
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 Waltons and Ray Krocs creations of Wal-Mart and McDonalds, two of Americas largest private-sector employers. There is almost artistic vulgarity in Gingrichs 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 Washingtons 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 societys 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.