Newt Gingrich’s week old campaign for President is tanking because he bad mouthed Cong. Paul Ryan’s budget plan for turning Medicare into a voucher program. The line I heard Newt use was the title of this post and I thought to myself, “Hallelujah” Newt’s got this right. Then I thought to myself, Newt has just declared war on every Republican congressman who voted for the Ryan Plan. He’s toast. At the moment he’s being toasted but not with champaign.
One of the critics of Newt is the right wing pundit Charles Krauthammer whose commentaries occasionally get reprinted in the Trib. Charlie rightly noted in criticizing Newt that saintly Ronald Reagan lived by the “Eleventh Commandment” Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.
I had to chuckle at that because these same ideologues that hide behind the “11th” commandment when Newt badmouths them, blissfully ignored the commandment over and over again as they drummed RINO’s (moderates) out of the Republican Party. In Minnesota for instance it was once the RINO’s that ran the party. I love telling conservatives how the Republican Party voted at the Minnesota Republican state convention to make abortion legal at my first convention in 1972. Hell, Reagan himself signed a bill legalizing abortion in California at about the same time.
Now that Reagan’s soul has been turned into horcruxes and locked inside various right wing leaders, Rush Limbaugh, James Dobson, Grover Norquist, Roger Ailes, the various parts of his ideology have become fossilized. No moderates (a dirty word meaning someone without any convictions) can be permitted to reside in the party. Its now a black and white world where the ideologues rule.
Today I heard the GOP leaders of the Minnesota legislators explain that they have indeed compromised on the Minnesota State Budget with Governor Dayton. Why golly, their initial position was to cut state spending and now they have agreed to keep it flat. Keeping it flat will require a 15% reduction in the state work force and lead to the end of local government aid for cities that elect democrats to the legislature. That’s big of them.
Newt is a motor mouth who shamelessly admits to being a jerk in his personal life but only because he loves America so much. Still, he’s given credit for his occasional brilliant ideas which you can occasionally pick up out from among the wads of crumpled up paper in his idea wastebasket.
I think one such gem is his call to stop “right wing social engineering.”
