First let me say, I like Newt Gingrich, or at least, I’ve tried to like him as he’s morphed into a political chameleon who talks out of both sides of his mouth. Gingrich is articulate and shrewd, but the author of To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine might want to go back and read himself, because lately he’s sounding a lot like Richard Lugar.
Initially, there was Gingrich’s Hispanic “outreach” in which he warmed to amnesty on the Laura Ingraham Show and seemed taken aback by her
argument against it. Laura knows the difference between “legal” and “illegal” and is perhaps the first person Newt has encountered who put a sock in his blow-horn. Gingrich, who espouses Puerto Rican
statehood, seems to want it both ways, fantasizing that if only we make citizens of law-breakers, they’ll join the Tea Party.
But his “principles” are in question. The old GOP paradigm that political expedience trumps conviction finds a taker in Newt, and the more he speaks, the more paradoxical he becomes, equivocating as he straddles a rickety fence.
Now he’s praising the man on whom he’s feasted and who revived his career. Tucson solved everything—the healing words, the steady voice. Newt, on Good Morning America,
parroted the choir re-exalting Obama as the second coming of Lincoln. Every president plays Comforter-in-Chief, and it’s good politics, but the trouble is that Newt, in adopting a civil tone, is accepting what he rejected: hypocrisy.
It was Obama who said, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” “get in their faces,” “punish your enemies,” and whose boot fell to “the neck” of B.P. as flailing bureaucrats exacerbated the oil spill. Pivoting from the Secular-Socialist mantra to praise its inspiration, Gingrich turned the color of his chair, defining “phony” for the audience, while agreeing that Obama’s high
approval-rating is “deserved.”
But what about ObamaCare? The soaring debt? Surely, Gingrich doesn’t believe that the president was transformed by speech. No, Newt is playing to the public, softening his tone secondary to violence and a nation in-tune to “vitriol” on the air. Angry Newt is less so when anger isn’t popular.
And, of course, there’s “Green Newt.” At the peak of hysteria on global warming, when Cap-and-Trade seemed a certainty, Gingrich embraced what was then “settled science.” In fact, he made a
video with Nancy Pelosi, urging the U.S. to “act fast.” The author of To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine said that “Everyone agrees, we must address climate change,” though failed to point out that it’s Marxist at its core.
All of which points to Gingrich, the actor. True conservatism doesn’t test the wind. It doesn’t re-do itself. And it’s not a chameleon. Gingrich’s talent is his eloquent tongue, but the more it flutters, the greater the confusion, and the harder it is to believe in its noise.
