Newt Gingrich is a dangerous man

Sarah Palin is a phenomenon and a rabble rouser, but Newt Geingrich is a dangerous man.

Sarah Palin can say nutty things, and some people love it and whoop it up, and others who know she is full of baloney will just dismiss her as dumb or misinformed and not really take her seriously.

Gingrich, on the other hand, is obviously very smart; and he speaks with such confidence and so articulately that he sounds like he knows what he is talking about, even when he is distorting facts deliberately and shamelessly. Sarah stirs the emotions mindlessly; but for many, Gingrich both convinces the mind and stirs the emotions.

Jumping ahead of the right-wing parade of paranoia and fanning the flames of anti-Muslim sentiment in opposition to the building of a mosque near ground zero in Manhattan, Gingrich said: “There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.”

His message is that we are not taking seriously the threat of radical Islam, and he is doing what one commentator called "blustery, pugnacious nationalism." So Newt's solution is to model ourselves on the least democratic nation in the modern world -- and, further, they have to go first in demonstrating religious freedom?

Even conservative interviewer on FoxNews, Greta van Susteren, challenged his assertions and pointed out that both Mayor Blumberg and NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo are supporting the mosque building on the basis of democracy and religious freedom.

Here is Blumberg's response to Sarah Palin's opposition:

What is great about America and particularly New York is we welcome everybody, and if we are so afraid of something like this, what does that say about us? Democracy is stronger than this. You know the ability to practice your religion was one of the real reasons America was founded. And for us to just say no is just, I think, not appropriate is a nice way to phrase it.

But Newt's presidential ambitions know no bounds.

Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday, Gingrich went further and rattled more sabers than even Dick Cheney ever did. Saying that we need to finish what President Bush started when he identified the Axis of Evil in 2002, here are his words, excerpted from an hour long speech:

I believe he was right but in fact could not operationalize what he said. That is, there was an Axis of Evil, Iran, Iraq, North Korea. Well we’re one out of three. And people ought to think about that. If Bush was right in January of 2002 — and by the way virtually the entire Congress gave him a standing ovation when he said it — then why is it that the other two parts of the Axis of Evil are still visibly, cheerfully making nuclear weapons? And it’s because we’ve stood at the brink, looked over and thought, “Too big a problem.”

If Harry Truman had done that, the world today would be communist. If Franklin Roosevelt had done that in ‘41, either the Japanese or the Germans would have won.

Even George Bush and Dick Cheney never even hinted that they wanted us to attack Iran and North Korea -- maybe Iran, yes, but they backed off that. So his implication that Bush planned to take out all three of the evil ones, and that the Democrats have fallen down on the job, is just plain bull.

Newt didn't exactly advocate in so many words that we should fight four wars, but his rhetoric is carefully designed to stop just short of it, so that headline writers naturally supply the missing implied line. HuffPost did write: "Gingrich Calls on U.S. to Attack Iran and North Korea."

Writing about Gingrich’s recent "tirades" and "unhinged opposition" to building the mosque, the Wonk Room's Matt Druss noted that “Gingrich obviously wants to be president very badly. But he really needs to think hard about the sort of rhetorical tactics he’s embracing, and the sort of sentiments he’s cultivating, and the sort of company he’s joining in order to achieve that.”

Are there enough wise heads left in the Republican party with enough power to stave off both of these people? In a way, it might be a good thing for them to nominate the pair of them to run together, based on the idea that they would be so extreme that people would come to their senses and vote for Obama in 2012. But what of the absolutely awful possibility that they might win? All it would take would be a major terrorist attack in this country two weeks before the election. That's too big a chance to risk.

Ralph