Gingrich and Romney, Two Tuf Rows to Hoe. Newt Gingrich is riding high in the polls of the announced Republican candidates for President, but he has major liabilities that seem likely to doom his candidacy.
+
For one, his marital misbehavior and extramarital affair/hypocrisy mark him out a detestable human being unfit to be the champion of the "family values" crowd that is so large a part of the (ostensible) Republican electorate.
+
Gingrich is notorious for having pushed his first wife on divorce issues while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery. Not only that, but he might have been involved in public, salacious conduct with women not his wife. Apparently the fact of the hospital encounter is beyond doubt. Gingrich merely characterizes it differently. He does not deny that he had a confrontation with his first wife while she was in a hospital room recovering from cancer surgery. What kind of "family values" voter is going to forgive that?
+
Moreover, Gingrich is on his THIRD wife, with whom he had an adulterous relationship while he was married to his SECOND wife — at the same time as he was attacking Bill Clinton for adulterous behavior in the White House! So add hypocrisy of the most outrageous sort to Gingrich's marital infidelity and serial monogamy, and it has to be IMPOSSIBLE for the "family values" part of the Republican Party to embrace him — that is, if they are sincere, and not just a bunch of hypocrites themselves, willing to overlook 'failings' or 'weaknesses' in a member of their own tribe that they would condemn in high dudgeon on the part of a member of the other tribe.
+
That, at end, is what most of the Republican Party is today: a tribalist bunch of hypocrites who have one set of standards for "Us" and quite another for "Them". But what are they to do when the leader of "Them", Barack Obama, is (apparently) the very model of a faithful husband and loving father?
+
Gingrich has also come out for amnesty for illegal aliens, and his attempts to claim he is NOT for amnesty must fail, because there is no other interpretation possible. Moreover, the amnesty he wants would NOT provide a path to citizenship, but accept the permanent presence in this country of an alien horde of 11 million and more permanent aliens, a cultural cancer in our body politic. That is not the American way. Naturalization is the American way.
+
Mitt Romney — "Newt" and "Mitt"; what interesting four-letter words they are — has a different problem: flipflopping and misrepresenting and backtracking and trying to extricate himself from a tangle of lies about where he stands on the issues. In regard to amnesty, Romney is trying to recast his statements favoring amnesty as not any such thing, but they are, and he cannot talk his way out of his prior stance by claiming it didn't mean what it plainly did. He could, of course, say, "I was wrong, and I've spoken to people who showed me a better way. Now, having had time to reconsider, I have decided that the best way to proceed is ...". But politicians have a very hard time admitting to mistakes or to having learned better and reconsidered, to come up with a better plan. You'd think that admitting mistakes and fixing them would be regarded as a strength, but it's not, at least not in the Republican Party. No, you're supposed to be right the first time, and defend any mistake, compound it, rather than right it.
+
Given that Romney is also the author of "Romneycare", a state-level program with the unconstitutional "individual mandate" that most people in this country reject in "Obamacare", he cannot very well lead the charge against Obamacare.
+
Government is not entitled to tell people how they must spend their after-tax income — not in any regard whatsoever, not as to one dollar or even one cent. If Government can tell people they have to buy health insurance, then Government can equally tell them they have to buy life insurance, a house, a car, a college education, and anything and everything else that Government proclaims is good for them, whether they like it or not. Thus there is not one cent of our income that we will have any right to control. We will have NO "discretionary income", nor even "disposable income" (after taxes), but can be told what to do with every single dollar we make, any time Government chooses to tell us what to do. Plainly, the Framers of the Constitution and leaders of the American Revolution never intended us to have any such totalitarian Government. And if the Supreme Court approves this grab of our after-tax income, we must rise in a new American Revolution to destroy that tyranny.
+
If Government wishes to do something, it must do it thru taxes and fees. It cannot simply commandeer private individuals' after-tax income.
+
Mitt Romney is also a Mormon, which means, in the view of many Christians, that he is not a Christian, because "Christianity" entails a belief in the Trinity, a godhead of three parts, but Mormons don't believe in the Christian Trinity, one of several key differences between Mormonism and Biblical Christianity. Indeed, Mormonism permits of many gods, so is not even monotheistic. The Book of Mormon is given equality with the accepted canon of Biblical Scriptures, which is not accepted by Christian faiths.
+
Will the Christian bulk of the Republican electorate accept a non-Christian as their candidate for President? How is a tribe that regards Christianity as a key qualification for membership in the tribe, supposed to accept a non-Christian head of the tribe? It's a very serious question.
+
The Republican Party would seem to have several impossible choices, and no good choice, from among the current crop of candidates for President. And there is no time to bring in others. So if the convention is bound by the result of a host of conflicting primary results, and cannot just draft somebody in convention, there seems very little chance of the Republican electorate's holding together to challenge the Democrat. If that Democrat will be Barack Obama, as now seems almost certain — unfortunately, since he is a terrible disappointment to Liberals and all principled people — it is very hard to see any of the present Republican candidates as having any chance whatsoever of defeating him.
+
Consider:

• By the time the election rolls around in early November 2012, the U.S. will long since have withdrawn from Iraq, as Obama promised.
• Obama (supposedly) killed bin Laden and Al-Awlaki.
• Gasoline prices are down from the $4 region.
• Consumer spending is up.
• "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is long gone.
• The novelty of a black President is over, and the hysteria about "taking back our country" will have been largely vitiated by time.
• Obama is a (mainline-)Christian family man, married only once, and never involved in any adulterous funny business.

Who among the Republican candidates can defeat him? I don't see a one.
+
The question then becomes, what of Congress? Will the obstructionist Republicans win their gamble that if they just prevent the Democrats from doing anything, they can take their place in majorities in both houses? Or are the voters not so stupid as not to understand that the Republicans are wholly and solely responsible for the gridlock on all issues that has made Congress an enemy of economic recovery?
+
Will the Tea Party's hatred of that black man in the White House suffice to maintain Republican unity in the face of terribly deficient candidates for President, and lead to a unified vote for Congress even if Republicans cannot bring themselves to vote for immoral and hypocritical candidates for President? That depends on how stupid, and how divided, the Democrats are. Will Rogers' comment remains telling today: "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat."
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,483 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:34 PM