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I Nominate Newt Gingrich
Okay, so I won’t be attending the nominating convention and I haven’t even paid my membership dues to the GOP, but, darn it, there’s just no getting away from the fact that Newt Gingrich is the best qualified man to lead the battle to retain the White House in 2008. I write this even before anyone knows the outcome of the November 2006 elections. And I write this while dining on my own words as of August 4, 2005 when I referenced a previous May commentary titled "Is Newt Gingrich Too Smart to Be President?" At that time I referred to "the megalomania that drives men like Newt who want to be president." Well, yes, I still think you need to be a mixture of very smart and very nuts to want the job, but that is hardly a disqualifier. In fairness to myself (and who else will be fair, eh?) I also noted that, "Others with sizeable IQ’s have held the job" mentioning Teddy Roosevelt, one of the greatest intellects, statesmen, and wily politicians to have been President. I also mentioned Woodrow Wilson, but only by way of contrast because Wilson was an arrogant academic whose notions of how nations relate to one another had nothing to do with reality and everything to do with a misguided idealism and a huge dose of naiveté. Consider just two examples; Teddy Roosevelt gave us the Panama Canal. Wilson gave us the League of Nations, the failed forerunner of the United Nations. Need it be said that the President who gave up the Panama Canal was the idiot Jimmy Carter? People are beginning to take notice of Newt, particularly those of us who earn our stripes by predicting the future without resorting to crystal balls, chicken bones, and messages from the spirit world. In June, Juliet Epstein of The Washington Post penned an article headlined "Gingrich May Run in 2008 If No Front-Runner Emerges." Well, duh! Reporting on a talk he gave to a luncheon group of scholars and reporters at the Brookings Institute, she noted that, "Gingrich’s entry would shake up a Republican presidential field that now includes Sen. George Allen (Va.), Bill Frist (Tenn.) and John McCain (Ariz.)" For my part, Allen has a very engaging smile and I have yet to have heard him stake out a position on anything. Frist likes to engage in long distance, astral medical diagnosis and is suffering a horrible case of schizophrenia as he tries to push Bush’s agenda through the Senate while not being seen in the same photo op with him. And McCain is all over the map seeking the magic "middle ground" that will get him votes from Rev. Jerry Falwell and Maureen O’Dowd. So why am I nominating Gingrich for President? Because he is just intellectually head and shoulders above any other candidate the Republicans could offer, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who daily seems to be sinking deeper and deeper into the quicksand of Foggy Bottom. Of course, if she accepted the nomination for Vice President, it would be one of the most extraordinary tickets in the history of the nation. The thing about Gingrich that I value most is that he is a seasoned politician who knows how Congress works and, more importantly, he has a real platform of ideas to apply to a federal government grown too large and too fiscally intemperate to survive without some major surgery. However, there is something more specific that will bring him victory. It is his position on immigration. To my mind, that is going to be the key issue in 2008—barring another attack on the American homeland by Islamofascists. In his book, "Winning the Future", Gingrich stakes his claim. "No serious nation in the age of terror can afford to have wide-open borders with millions of illegal aliens crossing at will." Suffice it to say he knows that the Islamic Revolution is the primary global threat. A historian, he knows what went wrong with past immigration reform. He understands the role immigration has played as probably no other candidate could hope to comprehend. He is about real reform. He also is an unabashed patriot. Like Newt, I hope the Democrats will nominate Hillary Clinton. He will slice and dice her failed socialism and give everyone a history lesson in the process. A couple of weeks into a Clinton versus Gingrich campaign and Americans would be reaching for the TV remote, pushing the mute button to avoid hearing more of Hillary’s strident screeching. For now I would settle for a Republican Party that will return to its former conservatism and prudence in time for the 2008 elections because, if it keeps up its present domestic agenda, desperate Americans may well vote for anyone who is not a Republican.
In times of war, the last person you want in the foxhole with you is a liberal. They are always desperately looking for a white flag to wave. They are always trying to "understand" the enemy and excuse his bad behavior. In late July, Eugene Robinson, a columnist for the Washington Post, penned a column that is quintessential liberalism. Normally I just dismiss such twaddle, but it occurred to me that it serves as a good study guide to liberalism. He expressed himself on the subject of Lebanon and Israel. Let us dissect it. The first two paragraphs were devoted to making fun of President Bush as too dimwitted to understand the world. By the third paragraph, Eugene was already at full throttle. "Bush and his folks haven’t just blundered around and created this dangerous mess. They’ve done it on purpose. And they intend to make it worse." September 11, 2001. President Bush did not create the destruction of the Twin Towers, nor did he create Osama bin Laden, Hezbollah, or Hamas. The attacks on the United States by Jihadists had been going on for decades before he was elected. In 1983, Hezbollah killed 243 U.S. Marines in Beirut to cite just one instance. In 1979, Iran took U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days. To Eugene and his fellow liberals, everything began with and can be blamed upon President Bush. This convenient loss of memory is a common liberal trait. Another liberal trait is to regard any military response to an attack on the United States or one of its allies as wrong. Still ruminating about Lebanon, Eugene describes Israel’s response as "utterly disproportionate" as if victory over those raining rockets down on its cities, filled with civilians, is not the object of war. Eugene deemed Israel’s response to be "seemingly indiscriminate carnage" which he called "counterproductive." War is about killing people and breaking things. Now we get to the most liberal notion of all. "The Israeli campaign is so intense and widespread that it is creating more terrorists than it kills." This is pretty much the same argument made for U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a liberal article of faith that if only the Israelis or Americans would just stop existing, there would not be a problem with Islamic terrorism. No. The misnamed "War on Terror" is, in fact, a war against Islamic fundamentalism and the silent consent of more than a billion Muslims who believe that Islam must rule the world and that the five billion Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and other faiths have no right to exist except as Muslims. The problem is not Israel and is not the United States. The problem is a new world war that must be fought to protect all the freedoms; the scientific and artistic advances of Western civilization. For Eugene, however, the problem is that "Hezbollah’s stature in the Arab world is growing, and its patrons in Damascus and Tehran must be smugly satisfied." Tell that to the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and even Saudi Arabia! They all condemned Hezbollah’s kidnapping of Israeli soldiers and its subsequent rocketing of Israeli cities and towns. "The role of any American president and secretary of state should have been to move quickly to bring hostilities to an end," said Eugene. How do they accomplish this when Hezbollah is not a nation to whom diplomats can be dispatched, but rather an army funded and supplied by two nations, Iran and Syria, with whom we have virtually no diplomatic relations? Isn’t this a job for the United Nations? Wasn’t it created to avert and contain wars, large and small? Eugene makes no mention of it. Perhaps because of the outstanding role it played in containing Saddam Hussein after he waged war on Iran and Kuwait, or the "interim" peacekeeping forces it has had in Lebanon for years? And who can forget its remarkable humanitarian efforts with its "Oil for Food" program? Liberals can and do forget anything that does not fit into their view that dictatorships are a necessary evil and that they need to be understood, not condemned. Instead, Eugene angrily upbraids the President and Secretary of State who "have staked their Mideast policy on a single incontrovertible idea—that terrorism is bad—and it has led them to the mistaken notion that Israel can achieve long-term security by creating a kind of scorched-earth buffer zone in southern Lebanon." Well, Eugene, terrorism is bad. Perhaps you have forgotten—there’s that liberal memory lapse again—about the recent attacks in London, in Madrid, in Russia, and in India? Or the continuing carnage in Baghdad where Islamists are determined that 25 million Iraqis cannot have a democratic government? A foreign policy based on destroying the Islamist movements that threaten Israel, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the entire Middle East, Africa, Europe, Russia, and the Pacific Basin nations seems to many people to be a perfectly reasonable and rational policy. Except for Eugene who opined that "It’s hard to imagine a more unpromising course of action." Finally, for purposes of this examination of liberal idiocy, Eugene concludes that, "Bush, Rice et al. refuse to see that their crusade against terrorism can never be won by military action alone, because a victory in the war of arms can also be a defeat in the war of ideas." It is this fascination with "ideas" versus the ugly facts on the ground that fogs the minds of liberals like Eugene Robinson. Islam will not be defeated by a war of "ideas." It has been around since the seventh century and has laid ruin to every land in which it dominates. It glorifies death in a "holy war" against "the Crusaders and Zionists." Hindus, too, get a special measure of hatred. When not destroying the mosques of competing factions within Islam, it destroys the churches, temples, and the artifacts of all other faiths. It beheads people. "Americans are bogged down in a long-term occupation. This is winning a war on terrorism?" asks Eugene. Short memory again. We waged a Cold War against Soviet Communism, with time out for a couple of hot wars in between, and won that struggle by staying in Europe since 1945 and showing up with guns blazing in Korea and Vietnam. Ironically, we even funded and armed the Islamists in their struggle to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. During all this time, since 1948, Israel has fought its own wars against the Islamists and no amount of concessions—the return of land won in wars against them—has caused their enemies and ours to cease their crusade or changed their mind. Eugene Robinson needs to Google some of the views of the current President of Iran, read a book about Osama bin Laden, and take a longer look at Islam before he whines about Israel’s response to the latest outrages against its people or America’s removal of a homicidal maniac named Saddam Hussein. Libya’s dictator has changed his mind about pursuing terrorism and developing nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia is glad Saddam is gone and worries about Iran. Egypt continues its decades-long internal war against its Islamic terrorists. The Palestinians are the object of ridicule and disdain among their fellow Arabs. I’d call that progress. 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©
2006 Alan Caruba. |
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Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman, I rise to nominate Newt Gingrich, author of the Contract with America, former Representative of the Sixth District of Georgia for twenty years, former Speaker of the House from 1995 to 1999, scholar, author, and Fox News contributor as the Republican Party’s candidate for President of these United States of America.