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...
