Why Gingrich is Bad (and Romney is Awesome): A Politico Megathread Spectacular

[BigSkyBob]

Here's one: what if Bill Clinton hadn't wasted time/resources on Monica Lewinsky? What if he had said, "Yes, we were in the room alone togeather. Yes, we had sex?"

[BigSkyBob]

Here's one: what if Bill Clinton hadn't wasted time/resources on Monica Lewinsky? What if he had said, "Yes, we were in the room alone togeather. Yes, we had sex?"

Clinton is not completely innocent in this ordeal. With that said, the distraction was the circus Gingrich and Co. created, not a few minutes every now and then between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky (It's not like Hillary was putting out; who are we kidding?)

Please, Clinton was the chief law enforcement officier in the land while he was going to extraordinary lengths to obstruct justice. That's not a minor detail.

[BigSkyBob]

Here's one: what if Bill Clinton hadn't wasted time/resources on Monica Lewinsky? What if he had said, "Yes, we were in the room alone together. Yes, we had sex?"

Clinton is not completely innocent in this ordeal. With that said, the distraction was the circus Gingrich and Co. created, not a few minutes every now and then between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky (It's not like Hillary was putting out; who are we kidding?)

Please, Clinton was the chief law enforcement officier in the land while he was going to extraordinary lengths to obstruct justice. That's not a minor detail.

He never should have been asked questions about Lewinsky. It had nothing to do with his job. We have no idea what kind of arrangement he had with Hillary Clinton.

I might very well not matter what "arrangement" Bill Clinton had with his wife, but, it sure as Hell matters what "arrangement" he had with voters. He went on 60 Minutes and presented himself to the electorate a person whom "had caused pain in his marriage" for which he was deeply sorry, and vowed never to do it again.


Yes, the electorate had every right to judge his character, including his fidelity to his wife. Bill and Hillary Clinton had every right to go on 60 Minutes and declare that their sex life wasn't anyone business but their own, that they had an open marriage, and that they weren't going to discuss the matter any further. They chose to take the stance that polled best for them, knowing full well it was a fraud upon the American people. What they did isn't okay.

Further, he was the chief law enforcement officer of the land. For him to obstruct justice was simply unacceptable.

[BigSkyBob]

I still don't see the point of these Newt threads.

Newt essentially coming out in favor of ObamaCare-style federal policy in 2005 is not worthy of discussion now that Gingrich is seemingly relevant?

Wait, you are off by nearly a decade. In the days of Hilliary Care, Newt was applying the example of the formation of AT&T to the health care system. One of principles articulated by the founder of the national phone network Newt mentioned was that it had to be universal.

Of course, universal care is only one part of the analogy. AT&T was a quasi-public regulated monopoly. Apparently, that, too, is Gingrich's vision for health care in America.

[BigSkyBob]

Aiming for 100% coverage is not what most people have against Obamacare.

Actually, providing even more expansive health care for illegal aliens would be even more of a magnet than the free emergency room care they exploit now.

Even Obama was careful enough to claim that it was a "lie" to say illegals would be included in Obamacare.

[BigSkyBob]

The various forms of amnesty he has proposed. In particular, his attempt to "Newter" the e-verification system by making it optional.

[BigSkyBob]

Yeah, I wonder what Paul thinks about Romney.

"I believe Romney’s candidacy is well-established. He’s a moderate, northeastern, don’t-rock-the-boat Republican, and I think everyone in the party clearly understands that."

[BigSkyBob]

Or how about the colonization of the moon? Because guess what: Newt Gingrich supports these Big Government initiatives...

Excerpts from David Brooks' latest editorial:

Gingrich loves government more than I do. He has no Hayekian modesty to restrain his faith in statist endeavor. For example, he has called for “a massive new program to build a permanent lunar colony to exploit the Moon’s resources.” He has suggested that “a mirror system in space could provide the light equivalent of many full moons so that there would be no need for nighttime lighting of the highways.”

I’m for national greatness conservatism, but this is a little too great.

Furthermore, he has an unconservative faith in his own innocence. The crossroads where government meets enterprise can be an exciting crossroads. It can also be a corrupt crossroads. It requires moral rectitude to separate public service from private gain. Gingrich was perfectly content to belly up to the Freddie Mac trough and then invent a Hamiltonian rationale to justify his own greed.

Then there is his rhetorical style. He seems to have understood that a moderate Republican like himself can win so long as he adopts a bombastic style when taking on the liberal elites. Most people just want somebody who can articulate their hatreds, and Gingrich is demagogically happy to play the role.

Most important, there is temperament and character.

In the two main Republican contenders, we have one man, Romney, who seems to have walked straight out of the 1950s, and another, Gingrich, who seems to have walked straight out of the 1960s. He has every negative character trait that conservatives associate with ’60s excess: narcissism, self-righteousness, self-indulgence and intemperance. He just has those traits in Republican form.

As nearly everyone who has ever worked with him knows, he would severely damage conservatism and the Republican Party if nominated. He would severely damage the Hamilton-Theodore Roosevelt strain in American life.

It’s really too bad. We could have had a great debate about the progressive-conservative tradition. President Obama is now embracing Roosevelt. Gingrich has tried to modernize this tendency.

But how you believe something is as important as what you believe. It doesn’t matter if a person shares your overall philosophy. If that person doesn’t have the right temperament and character, stay away.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/opinion/brooks-the-gingrich-tragedy.html?_r=2&hp

The notion that David Brooks could be a spokesman for "conservatism," let alone "national greatness conservatism" is so absurd that only the NYT could take it seriously. I do not.

[BigSkyBob]

quoting from the NYT only serves to make the jmfcsts point for them

True enough. Gingrich should not receive the nomination because he is a moderate. That said, pretending that David Brooks is in an any way conservative, or that the NYT should take seriously as a source of political journalism is not the way to do it.

[BigSkyBob]

quoting from the NYT only serves to make the jmfcsts point for them

True enough. Gingrich should not receive the nomination because he is a moderate. That said, pretending that David Brooks is in an any way conservative, or that the NYT should take seriously as a source of political journalism is not the way to do it.

Someone said he was conservative?

David Brooks: "I’m for national greatness conservatism."

[BigSkyBob]

Jim, "We learned from Reagan not that amnesty doesn't work, but, you can't call it amnesty" Talent and John Sununu are hardly representative of "conservatism."

In a conference call today, former White House chief of staff John Sununu and ex-senator Jim Talent rapped the former House speaker as "anti-conservative" and "unreliable" as they defended the credentials of their guy, Romney.

"The speaker is running as a reliable and trusted conservative leader, and what we're here to say, with reluctance ... he's not a reliable and trusted conservative leader because he's not a reliable or trustworthy leader," said Talent, a Missouri senator from 2002 to 2007 and former House member.

On the call and in an e-mail, Romney's team hit on Gingrich's comments in the spring calling House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan's Medicare plan "right-wing social engineering."

The comment was widely criticized by conservatives as undermining Ryan and nearly derailed Gingrich's campaign just as it began. Gingrich apologized.

Sununu, chief of staff to President George H.W. Bush and an influential voice in New Hampshire politics, says the Gingrich remark was "self-serving."

"For Newt Gingrich, in an effort of self-aggrandizing, to come out and throw a clever phrase that had no other purpose than to try and make himself a little smarter than the conservative Republican leadership, to undercut Paul Ryan is the most self-serving, anti-conservative thing one can imagine happening," Sununu said.

Source: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/onpolitics/post/2011/12/mitt-romney-newt-gingrich-attacks-john-sununu/1?csp=34news

[BigSkyBob]

I'm still having trouble believing Mitt is dumb enough to have Sununu craw out from under his rock.

the fear of a repeat of the Bush41/Sununu administration is EXACTLY why the jmfcsts are against Romney...so why roll out Sununu?!

it's as if Mitt doesn't even understand why he never had a path to the nomination to being with...and he's just compounding his problem with this error

the guy is tone deaf

I'm 100% against Gingrich, and jmfcst is 100% right about this.

[BigSkyBob]

I'm still having trouble believing Mitt is dumb enough to have Sununu craw out from under his rock.

the fear of a repeat of the Bush41/Sununu administration is EXACTLY why the jmfcsts are against Romney...so why roll out Sununu?!

it's as if Mitt doesn't even understand why he never had a path to the nomination to being with...and he's just compounding his problem with this error

the guy is tone deaf

Other than raising taxes, something Romney will never do, Bush 41 wasn't so bad. It certainly beats Bush 43, not to mention eight years of Obama.

Let me get this straight.

Cheating on your most solemn vow to the electorate doesn't show a disqualifying lack of character, but, cheating on your spouse does?

Forchristsake man don't you remember David Souter!

[BigSkyBob]

I'm still having trouble believing Mitt is dumb enough to have Sununu craw out from under his rock.

the fear of a repeat of the Bush41/Sununu administration is EXACTLY why the jmfcsts are against Romney...so why roll out Sununu?!

it's as if Mitt doesn't even understand why he never had a path to the nomination to being with...and he's just compounding his problem with this error

the guy is tone deaf

Other than raising taxes, something Romney will never do, Bush 41 wasn't so bad. It certainly beats Bush 43, not to mention eight years of Obama.

yeah, Souter has been the pride and joy of the jmfcsts

What did you expect after the Bork fiasco? Souter was a necessary compromise. Kennedy would not have had it any other way in 1990. While the timing of his retirement is unforgivable, along with some of his votes, we cannot blame Bush 41 and Sununu for unforeseeable events...

Um, Bush 41 used his appointment of David Souter as example of why he believed that he had been unfair criticized for trying to pack the courts with conservative ideologues.

Can we blame him for being unapologetic about appointing Souter?

[BigSkyBob]

I saw her on Rachel Maddow. The last name is actually pronounced Ging-rick (it only started sounding more like -rich when Newt moved from Pennsylvania to Georgia).

That's a funny way of saying that Newt pronounces his last name "Ging-rich" not "Ging-rick."

We could go on at length about how "Murkowski" is really pronounced "Mur koff ski," but, that would serve absolutely no purpose. People Anglicize the pronunciation of their names all the time.

[BigSkyBob]

While space mirrors lighting our highways is a bit impractical, largely because there are good reasons to have darkness most places at night, the idea of orbital solar energy satellites is a fairly standard trope of science fiction, and working to develop such things would certainly be a better use of the NASA budget than the useless boondoggle known as the International Space Station.  From an economic point of view, the main hurdle to such a system is the cost to lift the satellites into orbit.  If we ever do reach the point where it becomes desirable to engage in mega-engineering in space, it would be less costly to build a lunar base that would then build and launch the satellites from Luna than to build them directly from Terra.

Correct, the luna idea is absurdly expensive, while the terra idea is orders of magnitude even more costly.

[BigSkyBob]

I am not saying Gingrich is going to win, but he may win. I admit there is a chance. But I will bet $10,000 on this: If Gingrich does win, people are not going to get what they want. In fact, they're going to deeply regret enabling the return of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. If you thought the original was bad, just wait until you get the sequel. They will shove a tax hike right down your throat immediately in February 2013. And it will ultimately be brought to you by Newt Gingrich's epic loss.

The same could be said of Newt Romney, err, Mitt Romney.

[BigSkyBob]

The scandals surrounding Jack Abramoff, Mark Foley, and Larry Craig exposed the campaign line that Republicans are the "party of values" for the raging hypocrisy it is. Gingrich is perhaps the biggest hypocrite of them all, impeaching Bill Clinton for having an affair with an intern while he himself was carrying on an affair.

Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice, not adultery.

[BigSkyBob]

Or will we be left to wonder if he inherited his mother's manic depression? Will we be left to wonder if mental illness was the reason why he was declared exempt from the draft? To this day, Gingrich has not clarified why he was declared exempt from the draft. Why? Why did he not follow in his father's footsteps by serving in the military like he claims he wish he had?

Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newt/vanityfair1.html

Sooner or later, Gingrich needs to prove that he did not inherit his mother's manic depression. The nation cannot have a sick president who cannot handle the stressful demands of the job.

It must be particularly painful to see your favored candidate lose to a person whom you believe is a nutter.

What are you asking? We sequence his mothers DNA [isn't she dead?], sequence Gingrich's DNA, determine which genes we are debating, and "prove" Gingrich didn't have those particular genes?

First, this is disgusting and pathetic.

Second, even if true, you are merely suggesting that Gingrich shares an attribute with Winston Churchill. Churchill was able to function quite well as head of state in a time of crisis though he suffered from manic depression.

[BigSkyBob]

Has any major presidential nominee of the past thirty years not released their medical records?

Bill Clinton.

[BigSkyBob]

Or will we be left to wonder if he inherited his mother's manic depression? Will we be left to wonder if mental illness was the reason why he was declared exempt from the draft? To this day, Gingrich has not clarified why he was declared exempt from the draft. Why? Why did he not follow in his father's footsteps by serving in the military like he claims he wish he had?

Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newt/vanityfair1.html

Sooner or later, Gingrich needs to prove that he did not inherit his mother's manic depression. The nation cannot have a sick president who cannot handle the stressful demands of the job.

It must be particularly painful to see your favored candidate lose to a person whom you believe is a nutter.

Strom Thurmond Country going to Gingrich is really not much of a surprise to me.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Of course not. If Gingrich has no health problems, he should have no problem releasing his medical records to show he does not have a history of bipolar disorder.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

And Adolf Hitler.

A history of mental illness is now an "attribute" we should look for in our next president? I knew some Republicans were crazy, but I did not think they were crazy enough to believe somebody with mental illness can win the presidency, let alone function properly in the role of the president for four years...

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Now do you realize how inane your argument is?

Have you ever had to associate with people who have bipolar disorder? I do not want that type of person in the Oval Office for obvious reasons.

I see you have chosen to combine the ad hominem fallacy with the ad Hitler fallacy.

Again, Churchill suffered from manic depression. You don't dispute that fact. Again, Churchill was able to govern effectively in a time of crisis in spite of suffering from manic depression. You don't dispute that fact either. Instead, you give some ad hominem tripe about how, "Now do you realize how inane your argument is?"

Do you?

[BigSkyBob]

Or will we be left to wonder if he inherited his mother's manic depression? Will we be left to wonder if mental illness was the reason why he was declared exempt from the draft? To this day, Gingrich has not clarified why he was declared exempt from the draft. Why? Why did he not follow in his father's footsteps by serving in the military like he claims he wish he had?

Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newt/vanityfair1.html

Sooner or later, Gingrich needs to prove that he did not inherit his mother's manic depression. The nation cannot have a sick president who cannot handle the stressful demands of the job.

It must be particularly painful to see your favored candidate lose to a person whom you believe is a nutter.

Strom Thurmond Country going to Gingrich is really not much of a surprise to me.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Of course not. If Gingrich has no health problems, he should have no problem releasing his medical records to show he does not have a history of bipolar disorder.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

And Adolf Hitler.

A history of mental illness is now an "attribute" we should look for in our next president? I knew some Republicans were crazy, but I did not think they were crazy enough to believe somebody with mental illness can win the presidency, let alone function properly in the role of the president for four years...

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Now do you realize how inane your argument is?

Have you ever had to associate with people who have bipolar disorder? I do not want that type of person in the Oval Office for obvious reasons.

I see you have chosen to combine the ad hominem fallacy with the ad Hitler fallacy.

Again, Churchill suffered from manic depression. You don't dispute that fact. Again, Churchill was able to govern effectively in a time of crisis in spite of suffering from manic depression. You don't dispute that fact either. Instead, you give some ad hominem tripe about how, "Now do you realize how inane your argument is?"

Do you?

Bob, Montana is my favorite state, but you are way off base here. Churchill and Hitler both had bipolar disorder. Do you really want to roll the dice on somebody like that? You want to talk about erratic, look no further than Gingrich. Myself, I would rather have a healthy president

Well, Hitler attempt to violently overthrow the German government. That was his track record. Churchill did no such thing. If you don't mind ignoring critical distinctions such as that, I would note that both Hitler and Romney are White males. Do you really want to roll the dice on somebody like that?

Politico, don't you want Romney to win the election? Think for a minute. There are tens of millions of Americans whom are, or have a family member, whom is significantly overweight. There are tens of millions of American whom are, or a have a family member, whom suffers from manic depression.  Your dog isn't hunting, but, it is needlessly alienating millions of voters Romney will need to win both the primary and general election.

I suggest early tomorrow morning you read the new marching orders from the Romney campaign to cease attacks on these lines. I am 100% confident I am right in this prediction, if not tomorrow, in the near future. The only question is whether Romney's campaign "gets it" before it is too late.

[BigSkyBob]

Well, Hitler attempt to violently overthrow the German government. That was his track record. Churchill did no such thing.

I'd say Churchill was actually rather instrumental in violently overthrowing the German government. 

But, he didn't attempt to violently overthrow the British government.

[BigSkyBob]

If Romney wins Florida, and I would bet on it at this point, I think it's safe to say that the threat of Gingrich winning the nomination is finally over.

Didn't Gingrich win South Carolina after losing in Iowa and New Hampshire?

Romney has already collapsed as the frontrunner in favor of Gingrich twice. If Romney regains the lead again, who is to say that he is incapable of folding to Gingrich a third time, fourth, or fifth time?