Back in March I wrote about “
The Newt-ster” and ended by saying, “I like the Newt-ster. I just don’t want him to run.” I still don’t.
As Speaker of the House and since, Newt’s legislative record has been all over the political spectrum. He has long been known to have various enthusiasms that he later abandons.
Though Newt did get welfare reform, then-President Clinton played him like a fiddle, getting him blamed for shutting down the government. Then the House Democrats finished him off with a plethora of ethics charges, most of which were dismissed, but he ended up paying a fine for one and resigning.
He has been ethically challenged in both his political and personal life. That kind of behavior rarely changes.
His main claim to fame was engineering the return to power in Congress by Republicans after forty years of Democrat rule. He co-authored a Contract with America, organized the Republicans in Congress to get behind it, and power switched hands in 1994. President Reagan who held office throughout the 1980s demonstrated how much can be accomplished by real leadership even with a Democrat-controlled Congress.
I have a major warning to offer regarding Newt Gingrich and I say it as someone who has studied history and witnessed a big chunk of it. Whenever the U.S. has elected an intellectual, it has suffered.
The most notable example is Woodrow Wilson, a former New Jersey Governor and president of Princeton University. His legacy includes the implementation of the income tax and establishment of the Federal Reserve. He wanted the U.S. to ratify the League of Nations, but the Senate rejected it for the same reason it should have rejected the United Nations.
Before him, Teddy Roosevelt, a man of action as well as intellect, was a progressive whose own party would not nominate him and who formed a third party which the voters rejected. This is not to say men of superior intellect have not been President, but the office calls for both leadership and the pragmatic capacity to understand “the real world” as opposed to the world of the mind. It also requires real courage.
Throughout history, men of intellect have concocted some of the worst systems to control the human population which they generally regarded with contempt. Karl Marx comes to mind. Generally speaking, intellectuals distrust the common sense of a humanity unencumbered by idiotic laws. These days the process of control is referred to as “social engineering.”
Obamacare is an example of social engineering and all the wasted billions on Green or renewable energy is another. The pathetic efforts to stamp out the use of the word “terrorism” from government pronouncements as well as the idiotic “Fast and Furious” gun-running program to undermine the Second Amendment are two more. So far as the federal government is concerned, there is no aspect of our lives in which it does not want to interfere or require obedience. Incandescent light bulbs anyone? The volume of water in a toilet? Nutritional standards? It is endless!
Gingrich began his career as a professor of history and his present rhetoric reveals his penchant for lecturing audiences while demonstrating his intellectual prowess. He is an engaging speaker, but behind it is a life spent being on both sides of most issues and often on the wrong side. Since leaving Congress he has been a well-paid “consultant” to anyone seeking to eat from the federal trough.
A glaring example of his willingness to embrace really bad ideas was his book, “A Contract with the Earth” which espoused all the usual environmental claptrap that assists and underwrites the horrid Green legislative agenda to limit carbon dioxide emissions for the real purpose of harming economic growth.
A Wikipedia synopsis describes the book thusly: “’A Contract with the Earth’ is, broadly, a manifesto that challenges those on the right to provide a strategy for repairing the planet and calls on government to embrace the concept that a healthy environment is required for a healthy democracy and economy. This approach, alternately branded mainstream and entrepreneurial environmentalism by the authors, requires that companies should lead the way in environmental issues while governments provide them with incentives to reduce their carbon footprint.” (Emphasis added)
Carbon footprints are an absurd concept conjured up by the same crowd that tried to impose the Kyoto Protocols on nations in 1997. As of the recent UN conference on climate change, most nations have signaled they will, having signed on, ignore it, along with China which was exempted along with India. Canada will drop out. And the Protocols will be consigned to the dustbin of history along with “global warming.”
Newt has never found some absurd intellectual notion that he would not embrace, short of Communism. He was dismissive of the congressional Republican proposals to reduce spending as “right wing social engineering” when many understand that they represent the best way to extricate ourselves from the enormous debt the Obama administration has imposed on the nation and the necessity of restructuring Medicare.
In short, he could just as easily run as a Democrat as a Republican and, if nominated, would be utterly destroyed by Barack Obama and the Democrat machine in the same way Obama dismembered Hillary Clinton’s bid in 2008.
A December 15 poll by Rasmussen Reports found that Gingrich “now trails President Obama by double digits, his second straight weekly decline since becoming the GOP frontrunner.”
If, by now, you have concluded that I distrust intellectuals and most of the ivory tower academicians, you are right. Since the 1960s many of left-wing ideologues---protesters---found their way onto the faculties of the nation’s colleges and universities, and it is why the teacher’s unions have done everything in their power to eliminate the truth about American history from the curriculum.
No Newt now or ever is my slogan and I hope he is rejected by sensible Republicans in the forthcoming primaries.
© Alan Caruba, 2011
