NEWT: SPEAK BOMBASTICALLY AND CARRY A TINY STICK
December 14, 2011
Fellow right-wingers: Is our objective to taunt Obama by accusing him of "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior," of being "authentically dishonest" and a "wonderful con" -- and then lose the election -- or is it to defeat Obama, repeal Obamacare, secure the borders, enforce e-verify, reform entitlement programs, reduce the size of government and save the country?
If all you want is to lob rhetorical bombs at Obama and then lose, Newt Gingrich -- like recent favorite Donald Trump -- is your candidate. But if you want to save the country, Newt's not your guy.
Gingrich makes plenty of bombastic statements, but these never seem to translate into actual policy changes.
After becoming the first Republican speaker of the House in nearly half a century, for example, Newt promptly proposed orphanages and janitorial jobs for children on welfare.
It was true that welfare had destroyed generations of families shorn of the work ethic and led to soaring illegitimacy rates, child abuse and neglect. Maybe orphanages and child labor would have been better.
But we didn't get any orphanages. We didn't get jobs for children in families where no one works.
What we got was the cartoonish image of Republicans as hard-hearted brutes who hated poor kids.
Ronald Reagan was also accused of waging a war on the poor. But that was on account of his implementing historic tax cuts that produced not only record revenues for the government, but decades of prosperity for the entire nation.
With Newt, you get all the heat, blowback and acrimony, but you don't get the policy changes.
To the contrary, his pointless bloviating about orphanages and child janitors harmed the chances for welfare reform, despite the fact that the American people, the Republican Congress and the Democratic president (publicly, at least), supported it.
Indeed, when it came time to make vital changes to welfare policy, such as work requirements and anti-illegitimacy provisions, Gingrich tried to scuttle them. He denounced such provisions -- the very heart of welfare reform -- as, yes, "social engineering of the right" (e.g., Republican Governors Conference, Williamsburg, Va., Nov. 22, 1994). Read More »
