Tuesday, February 01, 2011

Newt no more

I used to love Newt. I always thought he was a great thinker and an originator of provocative ideas.

I don't believe I could ever support him for president because he lacks executive experience and we can see where that's got us today. In addition, his marital fidelity issues I believe cast a pall on his character.

Regardless, his blatant arrogant support of ethanol subsidies tells me that he either 1) lacks the intestinal fortitude to tell the truth to power or 2) isn't that smart after all.............

The former Speaker blew through Des Moines last Tuesday for the Renewable Fuels Association summit, and his keynote speech to the ethanol lobby was as pious a tribute to the fuel made from corn and tax dollars as we've ever heard. Mr. Gingrich explained that "the big-city attacks" on ethanol subsidies are really attempts to deny prosperity to rural America, adding that "Obviously big urban newspapers want to kill it because it's working, and you wonder, 'What are their values?'"

Mr. Gingrich traced the roots of these supposed antipathies to the 1880s, an observation that he repeatedly tendered "as an historian." The Ph.D. and star pupil of futurist Alvin Toffler then singled out the Journal's long-held anti-ethanol views as "just plain flat intellectually wrong."

Mr. Gingrich is right that ethanol poses an intellectual problem, but it has nothing to do with a culture war between Des Moines and New York City. The real fight is between the House Republicans now trying to rationalize the federal fisc and the kind of corporate welfare that President Obama advanced in his State of the Union. We'll dwell on this problem not merely because Mr. Gingrich the historian brought it up, but because it and he illustrate so many of the snares facing the modern GOP.


This ranks right up there with Mitt Romney blatantly lying to Michigan voters in the last presidential campaign.

He might have received the support of some Iowa corn farmer somewhere be he definitely lost it with at least one Ohio voter.

More.....

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Newt gave us the republican revolution of '94. But he also presided over the start of the republicans' Great Left Shift that followed. If we want to know where the deficit went off the rails, it started at the moment the republicans blinked in 1995 during the budget standoff. We need people that will articulate and stand by principles that they run on. Newt has not shown that by any measure. And he should not be standing on the "corn platform" that Gore embraced and then abandoned.

Anonymous said...

Its pretty disgusting that to win the iowa caucus one has to promote a stupid idea like growing food for fuel. Especially the republican caucus!!! Serious republican candidates should stand together and abandon the Iowa caucus unless Iowa republican precinct captains promise not to influence the direction of the free world based on whether a couple people can sell a few more kernels to an industry that makes bad environmental choices under a "green" banner.