Tuesday Newt Nonsense From "The Old Gray Lady"

It was really stunning, I must admit, to read the profile of Baby Newton Leroy Gingrich by Matt Bai in the New York Times Magazine last Sunday.

I suppose it is news that Gingrich’s self-serving tome “Real Change” spent 11 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. And I guess it’s an accomplishment that he was able to con some of our more gullible brethren (a million, more or less) into signing a petition to “drill here, drill now, pay less” (of course, domestic drilling for oil would only have a marginal effect on prices, one which would not be realized for years if it were realized at all, as noted here).

However, since we’re talking about Newt, trivialities like facts should not apply, I realize (with the entire Republican Party pretty much “through the looking glass” anyway), particularly concerning the following proposal from a guy identified by Repug Congressman Paul Ryan (a man with his own issues, as noted here near the bottom) as an “idea factory”…

“(Gingrich) will have 10 ideas in an hour (Ryan said). Six of them will be brilliant, two of them are in the stratosphere and two of them I’ll just flat-out disagree with. And then you’ll get 10 more ideas in the next hour.”

A lot of (Gingrich’s) e-mail messages are deeply wonkish, written in single-sentence paragraphs without punctuation or capital letters. It’s almost as if you can see Gingrich twittering away at a Starbucks while doing calculations on a wrinkled napkin. On Thanksgiving Day, for instance, in an e-mail message one recipient shared with me, Gingrich fired off a riff on an idea by Louie Gohmert, a Republican congressman from Texas, who had suggested that, instead of a stimulus bill, the party propose a payroll-tax holiday. “FICA and personal income tax combined are about $160 billion a month (you might want to check my math),” Gingrich wrote to a group of Congressional allies. “So if Pelosi proposes a $700 billion stimulus spending package in January, we could propose a 4-month tax holiday as the alternative.” In a separate e-mail message to his own aides, he wrote: “Think of no personal or corporate income tax and no fica tax for a year as a stimulus package. Am I nuts in rome or is the contrast startling.”

I don’t know about “the contrast in Rome” (???), Newt baby, but yeah; you’re nuts – as noted here…

…As with any tax holiday, the benefits expire after a brief time…and thus will most likely fail to change personal incentives to either spend or save. The government loses revenue (which will have to be made up somewhere…because we all know that spending will not be reduced by the same amount of the tax break…and that means more borrowing now, higher taxes later, or both at some point).

And Ryan isn’t the only member of the supposed “next generation” of conservatives influenced by Gingrich, as Bai tells us…

A few days after the inauguration, I met Eric Cantor at a bench outside the House chamber, and we walked — jogged, actually — across the street to the Rayburn Building, where the Ways and Means Committee was marking up the Democratic stimulus bill. Cantor is just two years younger than Obama, and you can see how he might emerge in the years ahead as the president’s generational opposite, in the same way that Gingrich and Bill Clinton often seemed to bring out in each other their long-dormant high school personas.

Kind of a silly bit of revealing pop psychology by Bai there; it seems that most politics to our corporate media is a matter of reliving some kind of long-gone trauma of dorkiness, if you will, projected by the correspondent onto the figures in question; in this case, Clinton is just “too cool for school” as far as Bai is concerned, so in the process of elevating Gingrich to the level of a president for comparison’s sake, Bai is implying that Gingrich is Clinton’s equal intellectually and in other ways, which is A) ludicrous, and B) has nothing to do with the factual content of the story (the “actual reporting” about which Bai is supposedly proficient, or else he wouldn’t be writing for the New York Times Sunday Magazine in the first place).

Continuing…

Where Obama sweeps through a room, effortless and aloof, the wiry Cantor emits a kind of nerdy intensity, like an actuary who really loves his work. Cantor says “frankly” a lot, usually just before he says something that’s highly calibrated.

See?

I asked Cantor whether Gingrich was giving him useful advice for how to navigate the current moment.

“Every day, every day,” he told me. “You want specifics?”

I nodded.

“Well, generally, he is very quick to see the historic election of President Obama and the potential for his support to last, and what that means for Congress, and how we compare the success of Barack Obama to, frankly, the difficulties that Speaker Pelosi and Leader Reid are having with the American public right now,” Cantor said. “You know, Congressional Democrats are nowhere near where this president is right now in terms of public opinion.”

Cantor listed some of the more extreme liberal forces — he mentioned Code Pink, the women’s antiwar group, and the “radical environmental movement,” which were about the most provocative examples he could come up with off the top of his head — that seemed, in his view, to hold sway among Democrats in Congress but whom Obama, with his centrist outlook, might need to defy. “If you watch where he’s going, since he’s been elected he’s sort of rejected some of the campaign rhetoric and said we have to deliberate, we have to be thoughtful,” Cantor went on. “He understands the burdens of the office and at the same time understands that this is a center-right country. We’re closer to that, frankly, than the majority in the House.”

Uh…somehow I doubt seriously that President Obama has a “Code Pink” strategy in his foreign policy pronouncements (oy).

Also, Cantor says that Obama understands that this is a “center-right” country; it’s pretty dumb for Cantor to resurrect that supposed argument since he’s bound to lose it based on this (and speaking of dumb ideas, Gingrich didn't tell Cantor to steal Aerosmith’s song in making a promotional video for the House Republicans, as noted here, did he?).

And in Bai’s story, Gingrich is allowed to circulate the rather spectacular lie that he “(doesn’t) actually build oppositions” (I’ll merely link to this and let you, dear reader, discover how laughable that is – have to scroll down a bit).

Bai also tells us the following concerning the stimulus…

House Democrats, however, still recalling the way Republicans treated them during their years in the minority, designed their bill as if all the Republicans had just been carted away to Guantánamo Bay. Whatever actual resolve Republicans may have had to work across party lines seemed to dissolve overnight, and they reverted to the more familiar stance of reflexive opposition.

That’s a rather interesting interpretation, given that, as noted here, Obama said the following....

"Now, in fact, when we announced the bill, you remember -- this is only about, what, two weeks ago (mid January)? When we announced the framework -- and we were complimented by Republicans, saying, boy, this is a balanced package, we're pleasantly surprised. And suddenly, what was a balanced package needs to be put out of balance?"

Bai also tells us that…

In the end, House Republican leaders demanded that their members vote unanimously against the bill, and in the Senate, even after the package was trimmed in a concession to centrists from both parties, only the remaining dinosaurs from the party’s Northeastern establishment crossed the aisle.

At this point, allow me to point out the following (and I’m not just saying this because he voted for the stimulus)…

As anyone who has even casually read this site knows, I don’t like Arlen Specter. For all of the times that he’s voted in what I consider to be good conscience, he has more than negated that with his awful party line support of Bushco and its minions.

However, classifying him as a “dinosaur” is inaccurate and, further, a cheap shot. If he weren’t as formidable as he is, I wouldn’t spend so much time following what he does and commenting on it.

So (I ask rhetorically), did Newt and his pals lick their collective wounds over the passage of the stimulus? Need I even ask?...

The night after lodging their protest against the bill on the House floor, Republican congressmen arrived at a retreat in Virginia feeling jubilant for the first time since before the presidential campaign. Waiting for them there was the evening’s keynote speaker — Gingrich, of course. Having seen his engage-and-divide strategy founder almost immediately when it came to the stimulus, Gingrich seemed to have changed his mind about Obama and resorted to his more instinctual, more confrontational cast. No longer did he talk of Obama as the kind of centrist guy you could get your arms around. In the coming days, in fact, he would deride the president’s “left-wing policies” while at the same time accuse him of “Nixonian” abuses of power.

On this night, Gingrich congratulated his troops on standing united and inspired them with stories about Charles de Gaulle’s heroism and George Washington at Valley Forge, as well as the football legends Joe Paterno and Vince Lombardi.

On second thought, maybe Newt gave Cantor the idea for the Aerosmith song after all...

Now was the time for Republicans to rediscover their principles, Gingrich told the congressmen. At one point, he likened himself, lightheartedly, to Moses. He’d help them cross the Red Sea once again, Gingrich vowed, but only if they promised, this time, to stay on the other side.

No shame at all with these people (kind of reminded me of this moment when, while the Iraq insurgency started to take its lethal shape, Rummy’s functionary – one of them – Steve Herbits got Newt together with Paul Wolfowitz at a swanky Washington-area restaurant to figure out what to do, and all Newt and Wolfie did was, “quot(e) poetry, studies, historians, Greeks, the moderns,” according to Bob Woodward in “State of Denial,” and basically come up with nothing of any substance; Gingrich’s congratulating the House Repugs over the stimulus stonewalling also reminded me of this, when the former speaker predicted that the 1993 Clinton budget “would lead to a recession”).

I’ll have more to say about Bai’s story later.