in the Boston Phoenix, adds up Newt Gingrich's strengths and weaknesses as a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination. It can safely be skipped, you've read it already in many many other places.
Ah...but Gingrich for President is an in-teresting notion within the context of the hard right's perpetual audition for ever newer men on horseback to save movement conservatism from an administration composed of movement conservatives.
Think of Newt as the GOP's own William Jennings Bryan, blustery and absurdly wrong about nearly everything. Gingrich has long been lauded by the credulous likes of Chris Matthews as a "man of ideas", most of those selfsame ideas being either puerile or simply bad.
Newt presents himself as an intellectual, he claims to be well-read, but like most sci-fi fans he hasn't revised his opinion about anything since he was sixteen years old.
In truth, he is the last of the bawling boob-bumpers, an invariable booster of naive solutions and crowd-tested nonsense, a fervent believer in every idiot nostrum out there from a balanced budget amendment to the US Constitution to a space based missile defense shield.
The man is fond of quotation, but entirely bereft of sense.
Reporters and pundits, who always set a low bar for so-called thinkers in politics, love Gingrich for his baby-boomer credentials and his yappy college room-mate persona.
As President though, he'd be a perfect catastrophe, taxes might go down but the public debt will incur a national going out of business fire sale.
Hell,the cost alone of extending secret service protection to his ex-wives and mistresses would be prohibitive, irrespective of whether or not the nation is ready for a lecherous puritanical gargoyle as president.
For all Gingrich's alleged brains, he will be even more wrong headed than Bush and will no doubt stumble into a serious show down with a democratic congress within six months of his inaugural, landslide or not, count on that. Confrontation at first serious and then increasingly petulant and inane was a hallmark of his Speakership, nothing in his subsequent record indicates he has changed his modus operandi one whit.
Alas though, the GOP has fallen heir to an unbelievable succession of disasters all of their own making. They have unfailingly all of the great issues of the day in a pinched ideological fashion, with no recourse to the facts defining any situation no matter how complicated or perilous.
Their zeal resembles that of a gaggle of tenderfoot boy scouts building their first camp-fire only to end up burning down the campsite and much of the forest beyond...a catastrophe they feebly attempt to blame on John Kerry and the Dixie Chicks.
Ah but the GOP is desperate for a charlatan any charlatan who can make all this mishaugas disappear and save them from themselves. Hell they need Newt Gingrich, who else can they count on to believe in the face of so many setbacks and embarrassment?
Me? I doubt he is electable, like Guiliani he is an apocalyptic gaffe waiting to happen. Moreover, when he was Speaker of the US House, he was routinely dope-slapped by Bill Clinton with an offhanded glee. Senator Hillary Clinton must be slavering at the thought of running against a tried and true punk-ass b*tch like Speaker Newt.
But these are matters of fact and history, in other words just the sort of thing Newt will happily ignore when the moment of truth arrives.
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