Personally I don't think Newt Gingrich is seriously running for President. I think he is seriously selling his new book, um, the name of which I can't recall. I mean, let's face it, the Republican Party's parade of candidates for President in 2012 suggests not a party serious about governing this great county, but of a circus of huge egos demanding attention so they can get rich or richer (Palin, Trump, Bachmann, and the Huckster, who loves his Fox News gig).
Still, for some odd reason the Very Serious People in Washington have always placed Gingrich on a pedistal marked "Intellectual," and I guess I must admit that in the Republican Party, Gingrich probably qualifies, even though in the real world Gingrich is to brilliant as piss is to Champaign. [Sorry, I just had to take a leak.]
Anyway, once he declared as a candidate Gingrich's words became fair game for judging their truthiness. Seems as though Newt's words didn't impress Glenn Kessler, the WaPost's Fact Checker, who gave him a perfect score of four Pinocchios (not just a lie, but a Whopper!). In fact his lies were so egregious that WaPost columnist Richard Cohen couldn't resist piling on. Cohen, on his best days, is a masterful wordsmith and he was certainly on his game today! Examples:
...so many lies, so little newspaper space — [Kessler] wound up awarding him four Pinocchios. For most politicians this would be a titanic embarrassment, but for Gingrich it is not even a personal best.
...[Gingrich] deals in boogeymen — menacing abstractions such as “left-wing radicals,” the “secular socialist machine” and “gay and secular fascism,” all of which (or some of which) represent “as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.” The purplish mixing of homosexuality and fascism is both breathtakingly wrong and breathtakingly tasteless. No one was more anti-gay than the Nazis. They killed ’em.
...[Gingrich] employs the ugly language of demagoguery not because he is oblivious to its history but on account of it. He mimics. He was, however, brilliantly original in explaining to the Christian Broadcasting Network why he had committed adultery. It had to do with “how passionately I felt about this country” — a genuine contribution to the annals of sexual fibbery.
There is more than a little Richard Nixon in Gingrich...the same hallucinatory grievances, the same willingness to lie, exaggerate and smear...
Yup, that's true. But Nixon was genuinely smart, Gingrich is a pretender.
It's obvious Cohen assumes Gingrich is a serious candidate. Yeah, right! Even Republicans hate him. Sure, given the others in the race so far, Newt will probably rise to the top for a bit - Trump did - but once Bachmann wins in Iowa she will take over until someone sillier comes along. Face it America, the Republicans get all the press these days, but maybe that's because they've become a party of clowns.
--Trakker
Gingrich is a serious candidate?
Apologies to whomever I stole this from for lack of citation:
Posted by: horsec | May 18, 2011 at 11:38 AM
Let's ask Newt!
Posted by: Trakker | May 18, 2011 at 12:02 PM