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The reality that Newt Gingrich appears to be topping some national polls tracking the race for the 2012 GOP Presidential nomination is threatening to make my head explode. I mean, Republicans have gone from scraping the bottom of the barrel to…well, I’m not certain what’s below that.
Gingrich has managed to turn his campaign- if that’s what his quest can be called- into an extended book tour/self-promotion extravaganza. At some point in virtually every single speech/appearance/photo op, Gingrich plugs his books and documentaries as well as those of his wife. He may not be elected President, and at some level it may not even be about that. What it all definitely seems to be about is profit…and feeding Gingrich’s considerable ego and messiah complex. As difficult as it is to believe, Republicans seem willing to tolerate Gingrich’s campaign/book tour/ego stroking circle jerk. As near as I can tell, Gingrich hasn’t put forward an actual program or platform or even solid ideas for how he’d bring America back. All he really seems committed to is using his campaign to inflate his bank account and his already over-pumped ego and considerably overblown messiah complex.
As with Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, and the rest of the caricatures passing themselves of as candidates for the GOP nomination, Newt Gingrich is more parody than a legitimate alternative to Barack Obama.
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I think he’s not a flip-flopper; I think he’s a gyrator. He just never stops spinning and twirling; he plays musical chairs with himself. And then…he gets caught in these lies. I mean, Mitt Romney flip-flops; he goes from one position to the next and he comes up with bogus justifications for it, but he lands where he lands. Newt Gingrich can’t get his story straight because he’s always, always spinning it, and I think we saw that whether it’s policy or Freddie Mac. You know, “I’m a historian!”…”No, I give strategic advice!”…”I got $300,000!”…”No, I got $1.6 million!” “I didn’t lobby, but I told them, I warned them not to do what they were doing!”…. Any time he’s met by a challenge, whether it’s about his personal behavior, his political behavior, his professional behavior, he just becomes a whirling dervish of whatever he thinks will get him through that moment. It’s exhausting watching him. I don’ know what it would be like to live that life, and I think this is all becoming a piece…even Republican primary voters, they want to feel that the person they’re voting for is to some degree real.
- David Corn
Newt Gingrich is the closest thing the American polity has to a Nigerian prince. If you’ve received an email purporting to be from a Nigerian prince looking for your help in finding a place to park his considerable wealth, you know what a “419 scam” is. Gingrich taken that concept and perfected it. Prior to him, who would have thought that a Presidential campaign could be a for-profit enterprise? Who would have thought that running for President was the ultimate in free advertising? If you think about it (and I really try hard not to), it’s brilliant in concept and execution…if not in ethics.
And yet Gingrich appears to be the current front-runner among GOP primary voters, which only really proves one thing: GOP primary voters have no standards, no decency, and could care less about facts- among Republicans. If this was Barack Obama we were talking about, the hue and cry, the weeping and gnashing of teeth over his moral and ethical shortcomings would be heard from media outlet to shining media outlet. This is a Republican we’re talking about, so of course any discussion of ethics, honesty, or morality will be met with…crickets.
Remember, kids; being a Republican means never having to say you’re sorry…or having to worry about being held to account for your ethical or moral shortcomings.
Don’cha just LOVE America??
