Newt Is Not a Slobbering Idiot; Why Is He Playing One on TV?

         I am no fan of Newt Gingrich. I think he is arrogant, ambitious, reckless, solipsistic, and utterly devoid of a moral center. I do not, however, believe that he is stupid. Nor do I consider him insane. Why, then, has he taken one of the stupidest, craziest public positions of any serious presidential candidate in recent history?

         I refer, of course to his statement in last week’s debate that sitting judges should be hauled before Congress to justify their legal opinions, his follow-up opinion that the president and congress should be free to ignore court decisions that they don’t like, and yesterday’s promise that he would send Federal officials—U.S. Capital Police or U.S. Marshals—to arrest members of the judiciary whose opinions he disagreed with.

Gingrich’s attack on the federal judiciary is so far out of the mainstream that it was labeled “outrageous” by Ann Coulter and “frightening” by Bill O’Reilly. Let me say that again: Ann Coulter called Newt Gingrich outrageous. Could this possibly get weirder?

So what’s up? Is a former speaker of the house with a doctorate in history from an actual college really suggesting that America start arresting judges for exercising their judgment? Would he really be willing to risk the biggest Constitutional crisis since the Civil War in order to protect the “right” of religious Texans to say a meaningless, non-denominational prayer once a year at graduation ceremonies? Could he possibly be that stupid or that crazy?

I don't think so. That Gingrich has turned to such rhetoric, I think, tells us a lot about how he views his position in the Republican field. He has a large lead now, but it is the same large lead once held by Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Donald Trump—and this is simply the result of a cause in search of a rebel. To beat the better-funded, better-organized, and more-respected Mitt Romney for real, he absolutely has to consolidate this 35% or so of the Republican electorate behind him. And many of these voters really are crazy.

One of the things that they are the craziest about is the Supreme Court. A brief tour through the la-la land of far-right Constitutional history—via books such as Mark Levin’s Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America (2006) and Andrew Napolitano’s The Constitution in Exile (2007)—can show us exactly what the people who control Gingrich’s fate have been taught to believe. They think that

·       the Supreme Court seized the power of judicial review in a “counter-revolution” led by Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall, making every subsequent judgment on a law’s constitutionality an illegal act on the court’s part.

·      the Supreme Court has no legitimate power over state laws at all, only over conflicts between states or between the states and the federal government.

·      the court has used the “commerce clause” of Article I to invade—intentionally and with malice aforethought—the civil liberties of all Americans.

·      the entire federal judiciary is made up of atheists who hate God and religion and have eliminated any trace of religion in the public square.

·        since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, the Supreme Court has been the declared enemy of the American way of life and is now the most powerful of the three branches of government.

I am not making this stuff up. A substantial portion of the extreme right believes everything on this list (responding to the historical and Constitutional flaws in these books constitutes the penultimate chapter of my forthcoming book That’s Not What They Said!). And while I strongly suspect that these are not the voters that Gingrich would like to be courting right now, they happen to be the only niche not currently being filled by a more attractive, less historically adulterous candidate.

To understand why Newt Gingrich, who is not an idiot, is sounding so much like an idiot, we have to consider the race that he is running right now. He is not yet positioned to run against Barack Obama, or even against Mitt Romney. Those are later games in the series. Right now, he has to finish off Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, Ron Paul, and Rick Santorum to become the only viable “Not Mitt Romney” in the race. 

And in that particular four-way contest, there is simply no such thing as too much crazy. 

Dear Liberals: It's Time to Cut the "Obama Betrayed Us" Crap

Dear Lefties,

I am not quite one of you. I am, rather, a creature of the political center, and sometimes you drive me nuts. However, for the last twelve years or so we have been fellow travelers, as the Democratic Party has been the only safe place for people like me—centrists who view with trepidation the increasing radicalization of the Republican party. So, I speak to you as an ally if not as a soul mate.

            That said: it’s time to stop all of the “I’m-not-ever-voting-for-Obama-again” stuff. It’s just getting silly. Yes, I suppose he has done some things to disappoint you. He has done some things to disappoint me as well. One of the big downsides of a two-party system in a functioning Republic is that nobody ever quite represents anybody’s ideology. This is just how the system works. Get over it.

            Politics is a pragmatic business, and the situation is like this: one of three people is going to be elected president next year. Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, or Newt Gingrich will be sworn in at the beginning of 2013, and, for the next four years, will control the reins of government. This person will appoint thousands of like-minded people to executive and judicial offices, including, perhaps, one or more Supreme Court justice. If you are absolutely neutral in this, then go off and support the Peace and Love Party or whatever. But if you even suspect that there might be a difference between a Gingrich government and an Obama government, then, really, it’s time to get behind the one who probably won’t drive the country off a cliff.

            Some time soon, the three candidates will become two candidates, Obama and “the other guy.” At that point, anything that you do to hurt Obama will automatically benefit the other guy. Please don’t equivocate on this. Remember that, had Ralph Nader not been in the 2000 race, Al Gore would have won a few hundred more votes in Florida and become president. Spend a few minutes thinking about how different the world would have been then.

            And then admit to yourselves that you are going to vote for Obama in the end because, whatever you dislike about him, he will be better than the other guy. The sooner you admit this to yourselves, the better chance Obama will have to be re-elected. If you haven’t noticed, his poll numbers are pretty bad. The economy still pretty much sucks, and people are unhappy. The only things that Obama has going for him are 1) the weakness of the Republican field; 2) the fact that he does not have a significant primary challenger; and 3) the absence of any Naderesque third-party general election candidate. If you keep whining, #2 and #3 could disappear.

            So please, I am begging you, let’s end this now. I get that you would like a more ideologically pure liberal, but it isn’t going to happen. And such a candidate would virtually guarantee that the other guy would be President anyway. And if your grousing about a few concessions to conservatives helps that happen, I will probably never forgive you.