Newt #11

Every day, I say to myself: No more Newt posts. Enough. The guy's not worth it. And then he does it again, and I can't help myself. He's like the Energizer Bunny. He just keeps on going . . . even when he hasn't got a leg to stand on, he does this verbal razzle-dazzle and hopes it will fool the people. I think it's not working anymore. Otherwise he wouldn't have to invent a new tap dance every day.

Newt's attempts to deny he had flipflopped didnt' fly, so today, speaking at a meeting of conservatives in Iowa, Newt admitted that he had said contradicting things about Obama and Libya. So now his explanation de jour is that . . . are you ready for it? . . . .

IT WAS OBAMA'S FAULT ! ! ! !

It's really simple. Obama kept changing his position, and Newt was commenting on the position of the day. And he illustrated it with this analogy:

"If you had asked me, ‘Should we jump in the lake?’ I would have said no. Once we jumped in the lake, I said swim as fast as we can. It’s not a contradiction between saying, ‘Let’s stay dry' [and] 'Swim as fast as you can,’ if the intervening moment is you’re in the lake."

And he used to be a college professor???

Balderdash !!! Newt's just trying to wiggle out of his own mess. When Obama said "Gaddafi has to go," to Newt that was everybody jumping in the lake -- and that changes everything and allows Newt to flip his flop.

It doesn't ever stand up to simple scrutiny. Why would he suddenly say "ok, we have to jump in the lake, because the president said so"? That's so unlike Newt -- loyalty to Obama??? Why wouldn't he stay on the bank, yelling, "You shouldn't have jumped in the lake," if that's what he believed -- and would have done any other time, if he thought it would score points.

But he's also absolutely right. If you deconstruct his explanation, he actually reveals the true principle behind his statements: Whatever Obama does, he's against it. There's no other principle. So it takes a nimble mind like Newt's to keep inventing new dance steps.

It would all just be funny, if he were not a dangerous man -- and a lot of people think he's just what we need to lead the country.

Ralph

Newt #10

Let's see: first he "dithered," now he's "floundering."

That's what Newt said about Obama's handling of the Libya crisis. Obama position is "nonsense," and the situation is "a mess," he said.

But actually those words describe Newt's own bloviating nonsense.

First, he dithered: said we should attack like right now; then he said he wouldn't have done it at all.

Now, when someone challenged his flipflop, he's desperately trying to create some underlying principle that can encompass both -- so he doesn't look like the jackass that he is, whose only principle is opposing anything Obama does.

It's not going so well. Newt is just plain floundering in his mess. And he has so little self-awareness that he can't see it.

Still, he's polling 4th among the expected GOP hopefuls.

We're not done with him yet, I'm afraid.

Ralph

Newt #9

If I seem obsessed with exposing Newt's exploitative dishonesty and lack of integrity -- and if you're tired of reading about it -- that's OK. Just skip over my rants.

But I'm not alone in thinking that Newt is the most dangerous of the possible GOP nominees for President, as well as the one with the least integrity. The AJC's Jay Bookman, the local columnist that I most admire wrote his whole column about it today:

I've written about politics for most of my career now. Over that time, the single politician I've criticized most harshly was probably President George W. Bush. I thought -- and still think -- that he was a poor president who made disastrously bad decisions for the country. But through all of that, I never lost respect for Bush as a person. He had a moral compass, inaccurate though I thought it was, and he was doing what he honestly thought was right.

I can't say that about Gingrich, who has long struck me as an amoral man of no true conviction or character. . . . He has no inner core. . . .

Consider, for example, Gingrich's recent statements on U.S. policy in Libya. Earlier this month . . . . Gingrich was pressing the case for an immediate imposition of a no-fly zone. . . .

"The United States doesn't need anybody's permission. We don't need to have NATO, who frankly, won't bring much to the fight. We don't need to have the United Nations. All we have to say is that we think that slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable," he told Greta van Susteren on Fox.

"This is a moment to get rid of him. Do it. Get it over with." And he said that with the absolute, deadpan conviction that is the Gingrich trademark.

However, once Obama decided to commit U. S. firepower to impose a no-fly zone, Gingrich suddenly reversed his position, condemning the policy he once advocated.

[On the "Today Show" he said:] "I would not have intervened. I think there were a lot of other ways to affect Gadhafi. I think there were a lot of allies in the region that we could have worked with. I would not have used American or European forces, bombing an Arab country."

And that, too, was uttered with typical Gingrichian certainty. No politician I've ever encountered -- and no one I've encountered in private life -- could put on such a performance without showing at least a tinge of shame. But that's our Newt.

In an earlier column on March 9th, Bookman had quoted Gingrich's own statement about qualities we need in a president, which Bookman summarized:

A unifier. Somebody who’s stable, with good judgment. A doer, not just a talker. None of that applies to Gingrich. The fact that the above statement comes from Gingrich himself . . . demonstrates just how little self-awareness the man possesses.

Meanwhile, as Bookman points out, Nathan Deal, Sonny Perdue, and an array of Georgia politicians are saying he would make a great president. Bookman adds:

"Personally I can't fathom the disconnect that allows a person to utter such words with a straight face."

Me neither.

Ralph

Newt #8

There's a new comedian on TV -- it's Newt's new stand up routine in which, as Jason Linkins of HuffPost puts it, "Newt Gingrich Switches Position on Position-Switching."

Today, Newt is getting even more tangled up in himself than he was yesterday. Yesterday, he was trying to explain the contradiction between his March 7th statement on FoxNews about Libya:

Exercise a no-fly zone this evening. ... We don't need to have the United Nations. All we have to say is that we think that slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable and that we're intervening.

. . . with his statement yesterday on the Today Show:

The standard [Obama] has fallen back to of humanitarian intervention could apply to Sudan, to North Korea, to Zimbabwe, to Syria this week, to Yemen, to Bahrain. . . . We could get engaged by this standard in all sorts of places. I would not have intervened. . . . I would not have used American and European forces.

So today, he tried to explain his obvious flip-flop by writing on his Facebook some gibberish about Obama should have done it the day Newt told him to do it "by this evening;" but, since he didn't, now it's too late and "there were a lot of other ways to affect Gaddafi . . . I would not have used American and European forces." But since Obama said "Gaddafi must go," he took these other (unnamed) options off the table; and so we shouldn't have done what we did when we did.

That about as much clarity as I can bring to what Newt actually wrote. But, you see, Obama "took those other options off the table" on March 3rd; and it was March 7th that Newt said "do it before this evening." So, the conditions he now says mitigate against intervening were also present before Newt's March 7th "cowboy moment."

The problem for Newt is that, when you don't tell the truth, you have to remember what you have said before.

Especially in the age of Google and Facebook. There is now a cottage industry active on the internet combing through Newt's previously stated positions and compiling a list of those on which he has flip-flopped -- like his saying in 2004 of John Kerry that his flipflop on the Iraq war funding disqualified him from being president: "You can't flipflop and be commander-in-chief."

Hang it up, Newt. You've disqualified yourself, by your own definition.

Ralph

Elizabeth Taylor 1932-2011

When Elizabeth Taylor was 17 and I was 16, I thought I was in love with her, captivated by her porcelain beauty, her perfect features, and her impossibly beautiful violet eyes. I think I was just in love with the idea and the aesthetic pleasure of beauty.

She had quite a life -- both over-rated and, occasionally, under-rated as an actress. A few fine jobs of acting out of about 60 films in a long career that gleaned her two Oscars for Best Actress (Butterfield 8 and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). But her film characters were no more colorful than her life. At 18, married and divorced in the same year to young Conrad Hilton, then married Michael Wilding at 19, which lasted 4 yrs and bore two sons. Divorced him and married Michael Todd, who was killed in a plane crash; then married his best friend Eddie Fischer, who was at the time married to Debbie Reynolds. Then she and Richard Burton made beautiful scandal together while making Cleopatra, and they married and divorced twice. Then a future senator, and finally a construction worker whom she met while at the Betty Ford Rehab Center. Life imitates art?

And then there was the jewelry: flashy, big, and very very expensive. By then she had developed the zaftig figure that could wear such heavy jewels. She even wrote a book titled, "My Love Affair With Jewelry."

Elizabeth Taylor was not pretentious. She liked what she liked, without apologies, even if it was a bit vulgar; and she pursued her passions. She was devotedly loyal to her friends, including Michael Jackson, Montgomery Cliff, and Rock Hudson.

But her crowning contribution, in my opinion, was her early championing of the fight against AIDS, helping to found and for twenty years raise funds for the American Foundation for AIDS Research. She was not just a celebrity lending her name -- she was serious about it, and she did a great good.

Thanks, Liz, for the memories and for your humanitarian spirit, your compassion, and your work to find a cure so that today's young men don't have to endure the fate of your closeted gay pal, Rock Hudson -- that hunk of countless romantic comedies, America's heartthrob, who startled the uncomprehending world by dying of AIDS early on in the epidemic.

RIP

Ralph

Operation "Odyssey Dawn" - Libya #2

Here, according to Gates, is Obama's thinking on "what next?" From the Associated Press:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Sunday that the U.S. expects to turn control of the Libya military mission over to a coalition -- probably headed either by the French and British or by NATO -- "in a matter of days." . . .

Gates said President Barack Obama felt very strongly about limiting America's role in the operation, adding that the president is "more aware than almost anybody of the stress on the military."

"We agreed to use our unique capabilities and the breadth of those capabilities at the front of this process, and then we expected in a matter of days to be able to turn over the primary responsibility to others," Gates told reporters traveling with him to Russia. "We will continue to support the coalition, we will be a member of the coalition, we will have a military role in the coalition, but we will not have the preeminent role."

The two key possibilities, he said, are a combined British-French command or the use of a NATO command. He acknowledged there is "some sensitivity on the part of the Arab League to being seen to be operating under a NATO umbrella."

From a separate AP release: NATO has approved an arms embargo on Libya, but Turkey's opposition to any NATO intervention in Libya stalled the approval of plans to participate in the no-fly patrols.

NATO members France, Britain and the United States have been carrying out strikes on Libyan targets since Saturday. But they have acted as individual nations rather than members of the alliance.

Ralph

Newt #7 -- How long can he stretch it out?

Newt's efforts to summon up a parade that he can jump in front of and call it a mandate must not be doing well. How do I know?

Because he's getting vaguer and vaguer about whether he'll run -- spouting gibberish like this:

"If we find enough volunteer support and enough financial support, we'll almost certainly run. . . . I am contemplating the possibility of thinking about under some circumstances exploring the potential."

In addition, Newt has had a couple of bad weeks. First, he tried to gain some credibility with the Christian base by publically (yet again) confessing his sins of marital infidelity. And it really bombed. Instead of redemption from the right, he got jokes from the late-night comedians.

Second, he loudly accused Obama of dithering on Libya and passively waiting for our European allies to take the lead. Poor, Newt. The timing was bad.

In the same news cycle came news that Obama's cautious, behind the scenes tactics had paid off. With Britain and France taking the lead, with strong behind the scenes U. S. backing, we now have U. N. Security Council authorization for the no-fly zone, plus military air strikes on Gaddafi's military forces. This approach avoided a veto from Russia and China (they abstained instead) and it avoided provoking even more anti-American furor on the Arab Street. In fact the Arab League had earlier asked the UN to authorize a no-fly zone, which helped get that 10-0-5 vote.

So, instead of Newt painting Obama as weak, Obama's maturity and wisdom make Newt look brash and uninformed.

The parade isn't forming, of course. The only question is when will the money dry up and convince Newt's magic mirror that he's not, after all, the fairest/smartest of all?

Once you've backtracked from: "I'm leaning toward running' but won't announce my decision yet; to: "contemplating the possibility of thinking about under some circumstances exploring the potential," you're running on fumes and there's no place to go but "I've decided not to run."

Ralph