I had a difficult time believing my eyes when I saw the headline: Gingrich wins. My shock grew even larger when I read that the margin of victory was in the double digits.
I had presumed that Mitt Romney had the South Carolina primary all wrapped up. Perhaps his margin of victory wouldn’t be so large as he had hoped, but I didn’t think it possible that Romney would lose.
The truly astonishing thing for me was who defeated Romney. Newt Gingrich. Gingrich? Seriously?
I am no fan of Mitt Romney. I am disturbed by Romney’s arrogant disregard of the practical economic realities facing working Americans. Romney’s willingness to reverse his positions on vital issues according to the prevailing wind is astonishing.
When Mitt Romney insults working people, however, at least he doesn’t sneer. Newt Gingrich appears to find glee in being mean.
Gingrich has shown himself to be so selfish and cruel that he seems like a cartoon, a caricature of Republican ideology. From the moment I heard that Gingrich was considering a presidential campaign, I found it impossible to take him seriously. I could not believe that any large number of voters would support him in any state.
I couldn’t believe that voters would support a man who had shut down the U.S. government. I couldn’t believe that voters would support a politician who admits to having an extramarital affair at the same time that he was attempting to impeach the President for having an extramarital affair. I couldn’t believe that voters would support a candidate who asserts that the bad economy is the fault of impoverished Americans who are too lazy to get a job.
South Carolina has proven me wrong. Furthermore, though Gingrich’s angry, snide, hateful attitude makes him an inconceivable choice from my perspective, it seems to be this very same nasty extremism that appealed to South Carolina voters. Gina Smith of the McClatchy Newspapers quotes one Gingrich supporter in South Carolina as saying, “It’s time for a bulldog president… Grab ‘em by the pants leg and don’t let go until you draw blood.”
When a politician rises to the top based on the support of voters who say they want to see blood, it’s a sign of a very dangerous mood in the nation.
It’s an understatement to say that the thought of a Gingrich presidency worries me. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about what it would mean to have Newt Gingrich in the White House, and those thoughts won’t let me go back to sleep.
Was there ever any doubt how low these people have sunk after GW? They’ve “Jerry Springerized” political discourse, gotten the corporate agenda permanently out in the open for all to see and feel (Citizens United), couldn’t even keep their Contract With America (it should have been more accurately named the Republican “Contract ON America” – like a mob hit), are repeatedly embroiled in scandals of all kinds, and are dragging down the quality of life for the rest of us through their “values”. Now the Democrats are following suit.
Best article i’ve read in a while about what’s going on:
http://www.johnpilger.com/articles/the-world-war-on-democracy
(from this article)
“Since the Second World War, the US has:
- Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically-elected.
- Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.
- Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
- Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
- Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.
In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The “enemy” changes in name – from communism to Islamism — but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of western power or a society occupying strategically useful territory, deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.
The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the west, despite the presence of the world’s most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism and most admired academy. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – western terrorism – are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of western policy (“Operation Cyclone”) is known to specialists but otherwise suppressed.
While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second World War in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion. Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed “our man” by Thatcher, more than a million people were slaughtered. Described by the CIA as “the worst mass murder of the second half of the 20th century”, the estimate does not include a third of the population of East Timor who were starved or murdered with western connivance, British fighter-bombers and machine guns.
These true stories are told in declassified files in the Public Record Office, yet represent an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of power excluded from public consideration. This has been achieved by a regime of un-coercive information control, from the evangelical mantra of consumer advertising to sound-bites on BBC news and now the ephemera of social media.
It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a sociopathic zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped. Witness the stampede of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens, a war lover who longed to be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious power. “For almost the first time in two centuries”, wrote Terry Eagleton, “there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life”. No Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a totalitarian society to be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake proffers a vision, no Wilde reminds us that “disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue”. And grievously no Pinter rages at the war machine, as in American Football:
Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things…
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust…
Into shards of fucking dust go all the lives blown there by Barack Obama, the Hopey Changey of western violence. Whenever one of Obama’s drones wipes out an entire family in a faraway tribal region of Pakistan, or Somalia, or Yemen, the American controllers in front of their computer-game screens type in “Bugsplat”. Obama likes drones and has joked about them with journalists. One of his first actions as president was to order a wave of Predator drone attacks on Pakistan that killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands, mostly civilians; drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the lungs of children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.
Remember the tear-stained headlines when Brand Obama was elected: “momentous, spine-tingling”: the Guardian. “The American future,” wrote Simon Schama, “is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed …” The San Francisco Chronicle’s columnist saw a spiritual “lightworker [who can] usher in a new way of being on the planet”. Beyond the drivel, as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war movement into virtual silence, he has given America’s corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. These include the prospect of wars in Africa and opportunities for provocations against China, America’s largest creditor and new “enemy” in Asia. Under Obama, the old source of official paranoia Russia, has been encircled with ballistic missiles and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA assassination teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long planned attacks on Syria and Iran beckon a world war. Israel, the exemplar of US violence and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money of $3bn together with Obama’s permission to steal more Palestinian land.
Obama’s most “historic” achievement is to bring the war on democracy home to America. On New Year’s Eve, he signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a law that grants the Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both foreigners and US citizens and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture, or even kill them. They need only “associate” with those “belligerent” to the United States. There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeus corpus (the right to due process of law) and effectively repeal the Bill of Rights of 1789.
On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only be ready to “secure territory and populations” overseas but to fight in the “homeland” and provide “support to the civil authorities”. In other words, US troops will be deployed on the streets of American cities when the inevitable civil unrest takes hold.
America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a “market” extremism which, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless, incarcerated African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says the Washington Post, will “feature a clash of philosophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy”. This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretence of political choice where there is none. “
lastly, on this point (and i could go on for days on the GOP)
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/12/1054282/-RNC-Decides-to-Finish-Destroying-Democracy?detail=hide
“There are headlines that are so jaw-dropping in their implications that they stop you cold in your tracks. Then, when you try to tell others about them, talking about them doesn’t work. You just have to share them, and wait for the other person to stop cold in their tracks as well.
So, here you go:
Republican National Committee Files Brief Seeking To Allow Corporate Funding of Campaigns
.
Yep — you read that right. The RNC, those wonderful lovers of our form of government, have asked the Supreme Court to EXPAND the Citizens United decision to allow corporations to donate directly to campaigns. And to give as much as they want. With no limits.”
Hi Friend
My name is Kyle, and I’m currently finishing my undergrad at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I love your site, and its about time I give back.
The company I intern for hosts a blog comparison, and I’d enjoy the opportunity to add you to it for free. Your work is great!
http://blog.findthebest.com
Benefits:
2 links to your site
Links to your social media i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Google+
The listing are search engine friendly (please inquire!)
Space to describe your blog and self
The attention of a cross section of our over 3 million users per month
Lastly, I value your opinion and would appreciate it if you gave our “.org” 2012 US Candidates Comparison a look. Keeping up with all the election back and forth is tough business. We are here to insure people fulfill their civic duty quickly and easily!
http://2012-presidential-candidates.findthedata.org
Thanks for having a helpful blog!
-Kyle
Thanks for the compliments, Kyle.
I’m taking a look at that “Find The Data” site, and looking at the presidential candidate profiles.
I see that you have a column (one out of the top 5 columns) that’s devoted to the candidates’ religion. Why does your web site regard that as important? We aren’t electing a Priest-In-Chief.
Also, I’d like to know why Newt Gingrich’s religion is listed as “Christian”, while Rick Santorum’s is listed as “Roman Catholic”. Are Roman Catholics not Christian? Mitt Romney is listed as “Mormon”. Is “Find The Data” of the opinion that Mormons are not Christians?
Also, why do you list Randall Terry, a right winger without a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the Democratic Party nomination, but you don’t list Darcy Richardson (darcy2012.com), a progressive running against Barack Obama?
Why don’t you list Jill Stein, who is in very good standing to receive the Green Party nomination?
Why don’t you list Rocky Anderson, who already has the Justice Party nomination?
Your site claims to have unbiased comparisons. It doesn’t look that way to me.