This morning I read something about Newt Gingrich that rang true:
Newt’s got hubris like some people have halitosis. If your quest is to find the one Republican 2012 candidate who can match the insuperable arrogance of Barack Obama, go with Gingrich.
When I watched the man at the last debate, his smug expressions and general air of superiority reminded me of many a leftist college professor I have encountered over the years. True, he is not a smug leftie as they are, but if you didn’t know who he was and muted the sound, he has the aura down. It’s as if he thinks his audience is very fortunate to have been honored with his presence and privileged just to hear his utterances.
Anyway, yesterday I saw a Newt quote that just seemed too fantastic to be true. So I Googled it, and verified that, yes, he actually did say this:
“People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.”
Are they?
Where was Newt during the last mass slaughter? How about Rwandan Genocide? I don’t remember him doing anything at the time. He was a congressional leader, the Clinton administration was engaged in systematic genocide denial, and if we consider that Gingrich’s doctoral thesis involved Africa (“Belgian education policy in the Congo, 1945-1960“), you’d think this “African expert” might have made more of a stink.
Don’t miss Charles Krauthammer’s discussion.
…Gingrich has a self-regard so immense that it rivals Obama’s — but, unlike Obama’s, is untamed by self-discipline.
Take that ad Gingrich did with Nancy Pelosi on global warming, advocating urgent government action. He laughs it off today with “that is probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years. It is inexplicable.”
This will not do. He was obviously thinking something. What was it? Thinking of himself as a grand world-historical figure, attuned to the latest intellectual trend (preferably one with a tinge of futurism and science, like global warming), demonstrating his own incomparable depth and farsightedness. Made even more profound and fundamental — his favorite adjectives — if done in collaboration with a Nancy Pelosi, Patrick Kennedy or even Al Sharpton, offering yet more evidence of transcendent, trans-partisan uniqueness.
And if you think Krauthammer is being harsh, read this.
MORE: A fundamental concern:
By now, we’ve all become familiar with Newt Gingrich’s habit of using a few choice adverbs to make the things he says sound just a bit more intelligent to his listeners. Profoundly. Deeply. Frankly. But none of them are as vital to the Gingrich lexicon as fundamentally (along with its cousin, the adjective fundamental). While this appears to be Gingrich’s favorite word in the English language, you could also argue that he uses the word so often, and so reflexively, that it’s become virtually meaningless to him. In a single 2008 address to the American Enterprise Institute, he used the words fundamentally or fundamental a total of eighteen times.
The author has compiled an huge list, for those who want to read it all.
And Congressman Pete King says Newt loves to exaggerate:
“He also has this incredible sense of exaggeration. Like, I don’t know how many times he’ll say, ‘This is the most corrupt act in the history of Western Civilization,’ or ‘the most despicable.’ You can only say that so many times. So to me, I just didn’t see him having the sense of discipline or the sense of direction that’s really needed.”
Why, that’s the most outrageously damning thing I have read — since the last most outrageously damning thing I have read!
MORE: And here’s something even more outrageous:
“Gingrich Said Freddie Mac Could Be Good Model for Mars Travel“
What could be up with that? Does Gingrich want to destroy the planet before we get there?
Sheesh.
EVEN MORE: George Will piles it on, as only he can.
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.”
Ouch!
Comments
15 responses to ““People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.””
For me, Newt’s greatest Congressional accomplishment was leading the impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about his marital infidelity, a subject that Newt knew all about. Experience counts!
[…] engineering fundamentally. And he’s got more flip-flop problems than Romney and maybe as much arrogance as Obama. Politifact Statement Score: 6 True / Mostly True vs 8 False / Pants on Fire Abortion: Seems to […]
Why is anyone even considering Gingrich? Like President Obama, he’s an erratic authoritarian.
His congressional career was a train wreck, and I have every reason to believe his presidency would be.
After that, what do you bet he be angling for an appointment to the Supreme Court, for the hat trick?
With this inadequate slate of candidates, it is clear the GOP establishment has no plan to win the Presidency in 2012. They are begging me to return to my third party protest vote.
Why oh why are the ones who actually inspire us, like Sarah, either carrying too much baggage, or self destruck? I’d have to hold my nose so long as to smother to vote for Romney, but it seems I’ll have little choice.
Huntsman has the taint of leftwing support, making him questionable in the extreme.. and the tut tut finger wagging rino’s telling us to shut up and listen to our establishment overlords.. makes me wanna break things.
Mr. Reagan sir,.. was a giant, he inspired, he awed,.. and he ran contrary to the partys finger waggers like the Huntsman Romney banner wavers we see today. There may never be another titan like Ron,..
but I’m sick of the uninspiring, and the better than nothing choices..
I liked Bachman, was enterested in Cain,.. who’s left? or rather, who’s “right” for the job, and can encourage the happy warrior vote like Ron did?
sorry for the typo’s, my vision blurrs a bit.. and I don’t have a spellcheck on IE.
Now you know how we felt in 2004.
It’s so nice to find another voice who thinks Newt is an odious presidential choice.
Digging through the archives, I’m left to wonder who, out of our less than stellar opposition field, has your support. I’d be interested to know who and why.
Jenny, 2004 was a very bad year. As was 2008. 2010 isn’t looking so hot either.
Daphne,
I’m a Palinista all the way. To get my reasons visit:
http://classicalvalues.com/2011/12/reconsider/
Ron Paul as a protest vote in the primary, Romney if he is the nominee in the general election. I refuse to believe Gingrich can get elected. Is the Republican Party that stupid?
https://cumulus.hillsdale.edu/Buckley/
Nuking Newt by WFB 1994
“In assessing Gingrich the goal is totalist—no concessions are made. Well yes, he got a PhD and taught history—but he never got tenure. On the other hand, that is not so unusual, at age 28. In any case, Gingrich is “no great scholar.” That’s right, nor has he ever said that scholarship was his primary interest. (At the time Adlai Stevenson, the intellectuals’ dreamboy, was nominated for President, not one listing under his name appeared in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, where minimal journalistic and scholarly events are recorded.) “He is also reminiscent of the middle-brow thinkers of the nineteenth century who won their fame explaining all in a single volume: Henry George, whose Progress and Poverty led to the single-tax movement . . . ”
“Henry George a middlebrow thinker! What would that make of such as Albert Jay Nock, one of George’s biographers, who deemed George among the seminal minds of the economic renaissance?”
“But you can’t win. Gingrich is a hypocrite, an eccentric, a woozy futurist; he is lacking in wit, given to schematic political constellations . Why, he even makes you-know-who look good! Newt cannot wear the white hat of Ronald Reagan. ‘He wears his black hat proudly and squints, looking back to the future.’”
[…] does Romney, and is about as dependable on conservative issues as was (and still is) John McCain, and worse. Romney, whose private business was legal, but gave Gordon Gekko a run for his (other […]
Man, I loved Sarah before she ever made the national radar, thought she was only reason worth voting for McCain.
In the eighteen months following the election, I came to the depressing conclusion that I had projected too much hopeful enthusiasm on a person who clearly had no interest in governing anything other than a privately lucrative career.
(Which is fine, except when you’re tooling along faithful supporters funding your political PAC)
That dumb reality show finally nailed the coffin for me. The bus tour seriously pissed me off.
Palin was a major let down.
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