I knew that Newt Gingrich reminded me of someone, and now I know who. Gingrich is the Republican Party's Lyndon LaRouche.
His historical theories are about as credible, making it no surprise that he was denied tenure, not in the liberal Northeast that he had fled, but in Georgia, and I mean Georgia as it was then. His moral positions are if anything more liberal than most of LaRouche's, Gingrich having had more wives than children and more affairs than wives.
And he easily matches, or even surpasses, LaRouche's schemes for the colonisation of Mars and for a global network of transoceanic bridges. Newt wants "a mirror system in space [that] could provide the light equivalent of many full moons so that there would be no need for night-time lighting of the highways." Oh, and "a large array of mirrors that could affect the earth's climate", thereby extending the growing season for farmers.
Gingrich has all of LaRouche's lunacy and none of his occasional flashes of brilliance. Mainstream Democrats need to become the party to end the bailouts, restore Glass-Steagall, bring home the troops from Afghanistan, eschew future such adventures, invest in key infrastructure, uphold the traditional definition of marriage, really fight against drugs, introduce single-payer healthcare, resist climate change hysteria, and defend both classical education and working and middle-class access to it. Or the LaRouche Movement will. But, in spite of its history even into the fairly recent past, the Republican Party will not.
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Those "occasional flashes of brilliance" are also your views and LaRouche's general New Dealerism is very similar to your own position. Your increasingly cosy relations with Russia Today, Al Jazeeea and Press TV are not without LaRouche parallels or in the RT case outright equivalents. The same goes for his "openness" to China and even for his chamioning of Platonism.
ReplyDeleteThis is brilliant (the post, not the above comment). Gingrich is what passes among American politicians for an intellectual. The fact not only of his rise in American politics, but that he was somewhat more effective than the norm for American politicians, is an indicator of just how unhealthy the system has been for the past couple of decades.
ReplyDelete"Gingrich has all of LaRouche's lunacy and none of his occasional flashes of brilliance."
ReplyDeleteGreat point. In my own experience, the worst elements of the GOP base tend to gravitate toward Gingrich. They disagree with Ron Paul on foreign policy and civil liberties, Romney is too left-wing on economics, and the various candidates who run mostly on social issues are considered silly.
Gingrich is the worst kind of Beltway politician. I have no idea what people see in him.