Another Planet Discovered Within The Unoverse Of Reasons Why We Might Not Survive A Gingrich Presidency
At last night’s debate, Gingo got into a pis*ing match with Mitt Romney over Israel/Palestine policy. Who is more macho. Who has courage? Who is timid. Gingrich’s utterly unearned sense of his own bravery, his own singular judgment, in the face of complex international issues is literally frightening. We’ve known this for a long time, but he’s rarely given us a better example of unrestrained, and ultimatel galactically irresponsible hubris.
Here’s what he said:
I think sometimes it is helpful to have a president of the United States with the courage to tell the truth, just as was Ronald Reagan who went around his entire national security apparatus to call the Soviet Union an evil empire and who overruled his entire State Department in order to say, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Reagan believed the power of truth restated the world and reframed the world. I am a Reaganite, I’m proud to be a Reaganite. I will tell the truth, even if it’s at the risk of causing some confusion sometimes with the timid.
(Recall he said “citizens have th right to ask all the question . . .”)
The perfect example of this is Newt Gingrich. In 1985, he told Jane Mayer of The Wall Street Journal that he still believed that “Vietnam was the right battlefield at the right time.” Why didn’t he go? “Given everything I believe in, a large part of me thinks I should have gone over,” he allowed. But, recovering, he added, “Part of the question I had to ask myself was what difference I would have made.”
