Wes Pruden: Off to the moon with randy Newt

When I got this in my Friday morning email, I couldn't quit laughing as Wes Pruden has tapped into what so many of us have thought about Gingrich.  The last two debates have solidified what I remembered about his grandiose ideas being off the wall.  In today's environment we need cuts in Government not growth.  Gingrich was NEVER a small government Conservative.  If you don't believe me, ask the members of the House who served with him.  Even his trying to join himself at the hip with President Reagan has failed miserably.  Guess he figured that no one was going to do the research.

That was another miscalculation just like we now find out that Gingrich told John King he would provide friends to ABC to back him up against his second wife but then told the voters of SC he never said that.  Yesterday it was admitted that he did say that he would provide friends to ABC to back up his side.  So we have a candidate in order to score points with the electorate takes on John King, the CNN Moderator, and lies.  Not smart at all for the person who touts himself as the smartest man in the room.

Gingrich finally met his match with Wolf Blitzer as he tried the same crap he did with John King but Blitzer wasn't budging and continued to ask the question.  Gingrich came across as petty.  He tried to use the media as his whipping post to get conservatives to his side who detest the mainstream media.  Blitzer has been around too long and is too savvy to bite.

Wes Pruden has done an excellent job of covering Newt Gingrich and his grandiose ideas like a "Moon Colony" that could become a state if they had enough people.  Think there are probably a lot of other countries who would object to the moon becoming a state.  Cannot believe I am even writing that.

Off to the moon with randy Newt   By Wesley Pruden The great entertainers of our time turn out to be presidents and the men who would be president, and this week most of them are in Florida. This is as good as vaudeville ever was. Newt Gingrich, under siege by ex-wives and trying hard to keep track of the various versions of an autobiography-in-progress, nevertheless soldiers on in his mission to restore family values and “morality” to the nation. Ever the deep thinker of big thoughts, Newt may be looking for a getaway as critics retrieve highlights of his checkered past. He recalled this week in Cocoa Beach how he had once introduced something called the Northwest Ordinance for Space, the “weirdest thing” he had ever done. But he stands by what it called for, though accounts of his remarks sound like satire. With Newt, you never know. “Why do people take such an instant dislike to me?” Gingrich once asked former Sen. Majority Leader Bob Dole. “I think the number is 13,000—when we have 13,000 Americans living on the moon, they can petition to become a state. ... By the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American. We will have commercial near-Earth activities that include science, tourism and manufacturing. “I accept the charge that I am an American and Americans are instinctively grandiose because we believe in a bigger future. ... I want you to help me both in Florida and across the country so that you can someday say you were here the day it was announced that of course we’d have commercial space and near space. Of course we’d have a manned colony on the moon that flew an American flag.” Back on the ground in Florida, Newt continues to try to put to bed his reputation with his wives, if not the wives themselves. Just when he thought he was in a friendly forum in Miami, another pesky television correspondent asked him why he led the Republican campaign to impeach Bill Clinton for zipper disease when he was losing a struggle with his own zipper. Soon he and the interviewer, Jorge Ramos of Univision, were sparring over something that sounded a lot like what the meaning of ‘is’ is. “No, I criticized President Clinton for lying under oath in front of a federal judge,” Newt said, “[for] committing perjury, which is a felony for which normal people go to jail.” The interviewer cut him off, never easy for someone talking to Newt: “However, at the same time you were doing the same thing.” “No, I wasn’t. You didn’t hear my answer. Look, I have been through two divorces—“ “I understand,” the interviewer said. “But people think that’s hypocritical to criticize President Clinton for doing the same thing that you were doing at the same time.” That was then, and Newt had rather talk about how he and Ronald Reagan worked miracles of statecraft. Reprising in Florida his earlier remarks at the Reagan library in California—in a digression from a boast that he had helped the Gipper “create millions of jobs while he was president”—he bragged that he also “helped defeat the Soviet empire. “I’ve done a movie on Ronald Reagan . ... Callista and I did. We’ve done a book on Ronald Reagan. You know I campaigned with Reagan. I first met Reagan in ‘74. I’ve very happy to talk about Ronald Reagan.” But Newt’s war stories about soldiering with the Gipper are more romantic fiction than remembered actual fact. On the eve of the Gipper’s summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, Newt called it “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with [Neville] Chamberlain at Munich in 1938,” and he later said the Reagan administration had failed to meet the Soviet challenge and “the burden of failure frankly must be place first upon President Reagan.” Newt was not, as the record demonstrates, someone a president could “go to the wall with.” Newt, like Ron Paul, is most popular with young voters. They have no personal remembrance of his history, of his performance in the events that shaped his reputation. He has a sharp tongue that delivers clever one-liners, a talent never prized in presidents. Newt does not wear well. Two years after he was Time magazine’s Man of the Year one public-opinion poll found that only 14 percent of the voters still liked him. Columnist Mark Shields tells of an exchange—perhaps apocryphal, like so much of Newt—between Newt and Bob Dole, who had the sharpest tongue in town. “Why do people take such an instant dislike to me?” Newt asked. The senator replied: “It saves them time.” Wesley Pruden is the editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Some of the comments I have gotten back from sending out this article go right along with my chuckling.  As I have been surveying people I have known for years, there is not one who would eagerly vote for Gingrich for President.  Most are afraid if he got the nomination that Democrats would turn out in big numbers costing Republicans the House and a chance to take back the Senate after the way he treated Clinton and then was forced to resign as Speaker himself for lack of ethics and morals.  Most people think he is splitting hairs on Clinton and see him as carrying on a six-year affair with a Congressional staffer while going after Clinton.

That is the one reason why I kept asking why he was running with all his baggage and am still asking that question.  It makes no sense except as a means to make more money or sell more books.  There is no way he could have thought all of this wouldn't come out unless he is that arrogant to think people wouldn't research or in a lot of our cases, remember.  People who do opposition research leave no stones unturned -- with Gingrich it would have been very easy to discover the facts.

I said openly he had too much baggage to get the nomination several months ago and even questioned why Gov Perry endorsed him recently.  When former House Member Joe Scarborough interviewed former colleague and now Senator, Tom Coburn, about Newt, you knew there was going to be more to come from the band of conservatives that Gingrich tried to silence.  Dr. Coburn discusses in his 2003 book, "Breach of Trust" about how erratic Gingrich was as Speaker and had this to say in his Oklahoman interview:

Coburn was part of the 1994 freshman class that gave Republicans control of the House for the first time in 40 years. According to Coburn, Gingrich ultimately abandoned the principles that drove the Republican resurgence and failed to keep promises to slash spending. 

“From the perspective of many members of the class of 1994, it was Gingrich who had drained the lifeblood from the Republican revolution with some of his political decisions,'' Coburn wrote.
....

Coburn said Gingrich usually made freshmen feel “as if we didn't have much value because we didn't know anything about the political game in Washington. … It would not take long for us to become ‘the conservatives' to him.”

It is not only the members of Congress who served with Newt going after him today but it is the people from the Reagan years that put up with his criticizing Reagan on the floor of the House which is in the Congressional   Record, it is the reporters that he was so short with when he was asked questions, but most importantly it is the American people who remember Gingrich and his arrogance as Speaker when he shut down Government, when he whined that Clinton made him go out the back of Air Force with the other dignitaries flying back from a funeral instead of out the front with Clinton, and when he played nice with House Democrats and tried to shut out the new Conservative Congressmen we had elected.  

Bottom line is that the baggage has finally caught up with Gingrich.  What is he going to do?  Strike out more against the media and other candidates and will he realize the gig is up?  Wouldn't take bets one way or the other.  

When this whole primary season is looked back on there are going to be a lot of people who have to answer for the disaster it has turned into over the months of debates.  Is it possible that once again the Republican Party is going to blow an election for President?  Highly possible unless something changes which unfortunately we don't see on the horizon.

Now the time is fast approaching when the big push shifts to the House and Senate races run by the National  Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and leave the Presidential race to the Republican National Committee (RNC).  We will be highlighting those candidates of the Senate Conservatives Fund and the Young Guns of the House in the weeks ahead.  One interesting race already is the moderate Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin versus the Conservative Mark Neumann in the Republican Senate Primary.  Our bet is on Neumann after doing some research -- he is the type of candidate we need as a Senator to help fight Government waste and abuse.