Eye of newt, and toe of…big government
My knowledge of Newt Gingrich is limited, for the most, to the following interview by Ali G:
Really, I have a faint memory of Newt and, like most people, associate the Contract with America with him but that’s about it. It’s a memory with positive undertones though. Like the Ali G video articulated, there was welfare reform. And term limits. A balanced budget. All of which I consider good legislation…and Newt was leading it!
However, in the last week, I’ve randomly come across some items-articles, blogs-that dispute this positive association.
Big ups to Subtle as a Sledgehammer for sending me this link, an NPR article with an excellent excerpt from Ron Paul’s bestselling The Revolution: A Manifesto (which I will in turn pathetically excerpt) in which he briefly critiques the ‘Contract’:
a toothless, soporific agenda called the Contract with America that was boldly touted as a major overhaul of the federal government. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The Contract with America was typical of what I have just described: no fundamental questions are ever raised, and even supposedly radical and revolutionary measures turn out to be modest and safe. In fact, the Brookings Institution in effect said that if this is what conservatives consider revolutionary, then they have basically conceded defeat.
I know, not much substance but I thought I’d link to it anyway.
Tennessee Cottonmouth gets more into it, giving Newt a scathing indictment based on his reaction to Bob Barr’s presidential announcement here (copied below):
Look at the former House Speaker presuming to lecture Bob Barr on the danger a robust Libertarian Party presidential candidacy poses for Freedom and Pursuit of Happiness in America.
“Bob Barr will make it marginally easier for Barack Obama to become president. That outcome threatens every libertarian value Barr professes to champion,” jabbered Gingrich a couple days ago in the Washington Times upon recieving word that the former Republican Barr is officially pursuing the LP nomination in Denver next week, and if successful will likely be kicking John McCain square in the musty folds of his crotch all summer long.
Let’s be clear: Newt Gingrich has never been an ally of anything or anyone remotely libertarian, and for him to even mouth an understanding of what motivates adherents of the Freedom Philosophy to believe the way they do is an act of stark profanation capable of inducing waves of emises. Newt Gingrich is a quintessential right-wing progressive interventionist who’s got a fundamental ax to grind — like the left-wing progressive interventionists he loathes culturally and admires ethically — against all things pro-individualist and anti-statist. Newt’s ideological rallying yawp, like that of John McCain and, indeed, the Democrats, is “Subordinate Your Life and Happiness to Patriotism, Collectivism and Government’s Divination of the ‘Common Good.’”
Newt, of course, is one of the chief Republican nitwits responsible a decade or so ago for purposefully derailing the party’s mildly libertarian-leaning “Contract With America” — the electorate’s November 1994 embrace of which helped the Stupid Party roll back Democrats into the congressional minority for the first time in roughly an eon.
But as was well documented in Cato Institute budget analyst Stephen Slivinski’s “Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government,” Gingrich and his rabid band of nationalist-socialists endeavored to bring about a new millennium of Big-Government Love. For a pat on the head, a kiss on the cheek and a few pieces of political silver from fellow adultery addict Bill Clinton, Gingrich sold out, discontinued, decommissioned and dismantled the Republican Revolution — and it’s been all about expanding the abusive scope and power of federal leviathan for the GOP ever since.
To explain the title, link here…it may be a metaphorical stretch. I haven’t decided.
