Skip to main content

Newt Gingrich : Republicans Deserved to Be Fired

Gingrich lays out his view that this was "a performance election, not an ideological election". In short, the erstwhile Republican majority and the Bush administration dropped too many balls on too many fronts not to pay a high political price for 6-8 years of cumulative failures.

He suggests that while Barack Obama may establish a partisan majority for a while, there will be no left-centric ideological majority, especially now that Obama is establishing a centrist administration that is anything but representative of the more extreme left.

Gingrich cites how Obama ran and won an election on the promise of broad-based tax cuts - something Gingrich notes was once-dubbed 'right wing'.

Gingrich's general point highlights how the Obama tax-cut campaign fodder stands in stark contrast to the tax-cuts-are-the-big-bad-boogie-man screaches from the hardcore nanny government crowd, ever-so-loudly obfuscating their flat rejection of the heresy of making broad-based cuts in government spending.

Nevertheless, the point stands : Obama won running on "I will cut the taxes of millions of Americans". Not exactly liberal doctrine.

Gingrich also pretty much endorses Obama's neocon-ish/hawkish national security team. I would dare say Obama hardly ran on that.

My own sense is we will see Obama flip-flop on both the tax-cuts and his relatively-dovish campaign facade.

We will not see any real tax cuts for working people (much less rational spending cuts in government) and the neocon foreign policy will persist.

The worst of both worlds
. But I am sure Newt will be just as happy with neocon Obama, even if he isn't tax cutting neocon Obama.

[Note : the right-left paradigm is how Newt cast his analysis. I am personally trying as much as possible to avoid using this cheap short-hand in present-day contexts, though sometimes it is hard to avoid because so many on both ends of this imaginary "spectrum" themselves embrace it.]

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?