In the absence of much real work, the partisan strains are becoming serious. By a two-vote margin last week, the frustrated House Republicans picked Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia to be their new whip, the second-ranking party job. Mr. Gingrich, whose colleagues in both parties call him a partisan bomb thrower, is little known for his legislative skills: One of the few bills he has introduced was to establish procedures for admitting space colonies to statehood.
New York Times, March 26th, 1989 (via @AKaczynski1)
Today, Newt Gingrich did two things. The one you probably heard of is this one:
“By the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American.”
He wasn't kidding (although he was probably also not particularly serious—something in the middle, more likely.) Nor was he kidding about the Mars mission he proposed simultaneously. This is Space Newt, who comes to the fore every once in a while. Space Newt loves science, which is a dangerous thing for a Republican. Space Newt dreams big dreams, and is convinced America can still do great things, both of which are nearly unheard of in his party.
Mind you, this is the same party that says we can't afford to even repave highways, or repair bridges, and we certainly can't dream dreams like "sick people shouldn't die because they can't afford medical care." We've been inundated with rhetoric about how America simply can't do big things anymore, that was all in the past, but now it's time to be austere, to shrink government and finally drown it, and to sell bits of the corpse off to private industry, which is the only legitimate source of authority or common good.
It's a bleak and miserable vision, which makes Space Newt, when he makes a rare appearance, an even more unusual sight. What's this? Science? An ambitious national goal? No, seriously—science? How exactly Space Newt manages to make it through all the conservative litmus tests against science, big spending, NASA support and everything else is unclear. It is probably because Space Newt has no actual power—especially not over regular, non-space Newt, whose feelings over NASA are considerably more subdued. Not once has Space Newt really gotten a damn thing done. And modern Republicans like Eric Cantor would rather disembowel their own mothers than fund something like infrastructure on the moon. We can't even get them to fund infrastructure in their own damn states.
(Idea: claim Muslim extremists are hiding on the moon. Bomb the crap out of the moon. Spend hundreds of billions building new infrastructure on the moon, stuff like a Moon Embassy with Moon Tennis Courts.)
(Alternate idea: bribe one scientist, anywhere on the planet, to claim he's discovered massive amounts of oil on the moon. Watch things go from there.)
So there's the first Newtism of the day. You know what? I actually like Space Newt. Space Newt is the kind of guy I'd want as president, if he could get rid of Regular Newt for once and for all. Since the division is impossible, I always thought Newt Gingrich was (and still is) really best suited to being an evil dictator—of North Korea, perhaps. He would make a wonderful evil dictator, enslaving his people to build a giant space station, or space laser, or space Taco Bell.
Here's the second Newtism:
Today on The Janet Mefferd Show, Newt Gingrich said that an intolerant “elite” made up of “secular judges and religious bigots” are trying to promote “radical Islam over Christianity and Judaism.” Gingrich, who told John Hagee’s church that America may soon be “a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists,” said that there was a conspiracy between the Justice Department and the Organization of Islamic Countries to “begin to enforce censorship against American citizens to protect radical Islam.”
Well, so much for Space Newt. Newt knows his audience, and knows that the Florida Space Coast really wants to hear about ambitious space stuff, but the rest of the base wants some good ol' fashioned fearmongering about Muslims and the imminent possibility of sharia.
I have to ask: on which planet might America soon be "a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists"? By what mechanism? Which radical Islamists would America suddenly be embracing? Where does anyone, least of all a supposedly serious candidate for the presidency of the United States, come up with this stuff?
Space Newt may be a big dreamer, but regular, bigoted, pandering Newt is just plain high. And a rotten person, too. No conservative has ever been able to even passingly explain how "secular judges" or "religious bigots" or any other liberals or atheists or anti-religious monsters will somehow attach themselves to radical conservative Islam. I can't even come up with a conservative fan-fiction premise that would sound anything other than comical, but nonetheless, it has become a staple of conservative conspiracy theories. And you can't be a true Republican, these days, unless you wrap yourself in every half-assed conservative conspiracy theory that comes along, no matter how stupid or ridiculous.
The only thing I can presume is that conservatives are such impossible dunderheads that they really think anything that is not hyper-conservative far-far-right evangelical Christianity is all pretty much the same thing—that "atheism" and "radical Islam" are literally the exact same thing, and that wanting America to not be enslaved to religious law is the precise same thing as wanting it to be enslaved to some other religious law. Does Newt believe any of this? No, because he has enough self-awareness to still be able to walk and breathe at the same time, and to put on pants, and to get massive not-lobbying contracts for doing nothing in particular. He's not that dumb. But the base—that's a different question. And it's the dumb-as-a-post elements of the base, the bigots and the conspiracy mongers and the people quivering over a black (you know, secretly Kenyan) president that are the people Newt is pandering to. If it requires being an outright bigot, so be it. Far be it from the likes of Newt Gingrich to care. He has never shied away from pandering, or demagoguery, or scapegoating wide swaths of other Americans in service to his own career.
There are times when I'd just make fun of these people and be done with it, but somehow it is hard to get in the spirit these days. As ridiculous as it seems to have a Republican proposing an actual moon base when his party can hardly bring themselves to fund far more basic things like air traffic control or a more robust electrical infrastructure, or as comical as the notion might be that America is just around the corner from being a far-right religious nation under sharia, a notion coming from the very same group of people who continually insist that America indeed become more of a far-right religious nation ... yes, it's comical. But it's damn hard to laugh.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2011:
In the wake of the Tucson shooting, as Americans debate the best way to prevent another such tragedy, Arizona State Senator Linda Gray has weighed in with her own special brand of crazy:
Training of people to respect human life. It is ironic that today today is the day 38 years ago that the Supreme Court said we do not have to respect the life of an unborn and we have gone through now more then a generation of people, a large number of people who believe that it is fine to take an infant prior to it being born and to kill it. What type of respect is that for human life? So now we have this generation of people who have that idea and it continues on, that why respect life if we can kill an infant who can’t defend themselves. It goes back to the value in the creation of life and the respect for that life and if your not trained and have that type of character in realizing that all human life deserves respect this is what our country has come to.
Got that? Jared Loughner attempted to assassinate Rep. Gabby Giffords because abortion is legal. Let that one sink in for a minute.
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