Another Nail in Newt's Political Coffin. AOL today hilited a Huffington Post article that points out that he converted to Roman Catholicism in 2009, from Southern Baptist! What was he thinking? Had he (temporarily) lost all aspirations to the Presidency in 2009, so gladly taken that poison pill — or, should I say, poisoned communion wafer?
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Let us be plain: the Republican Radical Right HATES the Catholic Church and everyone who belongs to it. They are not about to consent to have the Republican Party nominate a "papist".
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Moreover, if other parts of the Republican Party ignore the Radical Right, anti-Catholic crowd, and go ahead to nominate a Catholic, they will antagonize a very large part of their base, who will then abstain from voting for President. Many will even stay home entirely, and not even vote in Senate or House contests. It's hard to envision most Republican Protestants voting for Barack Obama because he too is Protestant, but you never know what is most important to the individual voter.
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Republicans are the minority party, and need every possible voter to come out in order to have any chance of winning the Presidency or either house of Congress. The smart people in the party might privately concede that they cannot beat Obama, but they dare not nominate a Presidential candidate who will cause a significant portion of the party's base to sit out, at home, the November 2012 election for Congress.
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Gingrich's choice of the Catholic Church is very, very bizarre, given its disapproval of divorce, in that Gingrich has had TWO divorces. Are voters now to believe that he has committed, of whole heart, to his THIRD wife, "till death"? I don't know the man, but from what I know of his character and past behavior, I find it between difficult and impossible to believe that he will be faithful to a third wife, when he couldn't be to two earlier wives. Whether he will be caut in an affair and his third wife will institute divorce proceedings are two further questions. She might not become aware of any infidelity he does commit. Or she might catch him in a dalliance but choose to tolerate his infidelity for the other benefits of marriage. Or she might NOT tolerate it if she discovers it, or even suspects it.
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But those are questions about Gingrich's personal life. Let's return to his political aspirations. There have now been 43 different men that have served as President (in 44 terms; Grover Cleveland, born in my county (Essex) in NJ, served two nonconsecutive terms, screwing up the count). ONE was Catholic. One. Of 43.
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The last Catholic to run as a major-party candidate was John Kerry (who was also part-Jewish in his ancestry). He lost by 3 million votes. So again I ask, "What was Gingrich thinking when he converted to Catholicism?" Did he really think that the Republican base would admire his act of conscience more than they would object to his embracing papism? I don't.
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(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 @ 2:14 PM