Modern Newt

Since bloggers (Mark, Kevin, Matt) are talking about Newt Gingrich today, here are some highlights from GQ's spread on the guy. Newt, while bright and ideologically consistent, is also batshit crazy, a real radical. Like lots of young liberals weaned on the current Bush administration's deceptiveness, I have a certain affection for Gingrich's essential honesty in advocating rightwing nuttery as a governing platform. But that doesn't make him a better president than the others, just more respectable (and defeatable). Some of these quotes will explain why. The first shows why Newt is the candidate of crazy conservative comic-book artists. He echoes their powerlessness and amplifies it, giving it volume and a rationale. He takes their paranoia and tells them it's principle. Newt, you have to realize, perfected the "whine of the oppressed white-man" long before it was on Thomas Frank's radar. It's how he won Congress in 1994:

Didn't the 2004 election demonstrate that the secular lefties are on the ropes?

"No, they're not on the ropes," Newt says. "They're out of power, but they're not out of control. They control the unversities. They have control of the Senate, the staffs of bureaucracies. They have control of the language we use.

Uh, isn't the majority party in the Senate...Republican?

"You can't pass anything genuinely radical. You can't get it through the Senate."

So there's your first tip on Newt. He's a radical. A committed one. Even now, at the pinnacle of right-wing ascendance, he thinks, or at least argues, that the left is in control. We control the language(???), the colleges, the staff. Reality would ask, Who cares? So some English professors vote Kerry? So some nameless bureaucrats who get ignored by the high-value donors Bush appoints to be their boss want gay marriage? That trumps control of the courts, the congress, and the White House? And if we control the language, why do we let Gingrich talk like that? Whichever inefficient government bureaucrats we appointed to the position should be summarily fired! If only we hadn't given them that union...

Newt on the Clintons:

"Total admiration," Newt says of Hillary. "You have to respect her. This is a first-class professional. And if Bill is first spouse, it'll be one of the great moments. A new TV show! The East Wing!

The Clintons are never far from Newt's mind. They're like the Kennedys were to Nixon: glamorous, charismatic, brazen power-grabbing elitist amoral lying dream killers. Wrong on health care, wrong on the budget, wrong on them military...and so damned clever! Newt's class of 94 had seen it time and again: every time Speaker Gingrich galloped into the Oval Office with his musket loaded for Slick Willie, he shuffled out holding his gonads. "It got to the point where Republican freshmen were afraid to send him in there alone," remembers Newt's archivist and friend, Mel Stelley. "By the time Newt would get back to his office, Clinton's press secretary had already announced the opposite of what they'd agreed on. I'd say, 'Newt, how'd you get suckered in? ' And he'd say, 'Clinton would come up from behind his desk, put his arm around me, and say "Newt, you're absolutely right." Just charm the pants right off of you.'"

Newt's military advisor on torture:

I slide Bill the front section of today's Times and ask him what he thinks of the lead story, about USA torture policies in Iraq.

The man who briefs Newt Gingrich on national-security matters shrugs and says with a grin, "Hey, if it works, it works."

The guy may be funnier, smart, wonkier than the modern GOP, but that doesn't make him better. Newt's Republican Revolution created the Bush Congress. If not for Gingrich's single-minded pursuit of Clinton's sexual indiscretions, saying they were:

the most systematic, deliberate obstruction of justice, cover-up, and effort to avoid the truth we have ever seen in American history...never again, as long as I am speaker, [will I] make a speech without commenting on this topic.

He was a more honest GOP. Just as vile, radical, heartless, and ruthless as the modern group, but not as cunning or deceptive. Granted, there's value in honesty, but what Newt's lack of artifice reveals isn't moral, it's what created much of what's poisonous in today's political world. The GOP relies on deception because Newt proved Americans won't stand for their agenda. The GOP can get away with deception because Newt, he of multiple divorces, relentlessly attacked Clinton's character, prosecuted Democrats, and elected a radical Congress through sheer force of invective. Don't thank the guy. Bury him. And all those he's created.