[Vision2020] Mr. Gingrich’s Intolerant History

[Joe Campbell]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>
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May 11, 2011
Mr. Gingrich’s Intolerant History

Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and latest entrant in the Republican
presidential field, has money, experience and name recognition. His
introductory
video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRSz21Vedxc> is all serenity and hope,
a deceptively calm way for many voters to meet a splenetic politician with a
long history of slashing divisiveness and intolerance.

He refers to himself as a historian, but apparently his personal study of
history has primarily taught him about the effectiveness of demagogy. Donald
Trump, fiddling with birth certificates, is an amateur compared with Mr.
Gingrich at sliming the Obama administration — as well as Democrats,
Muslims, blacks and gay men and lesbians.

The Democrats who won in 2008, including President Obama, are “left-wing
radicals” who lead a “secular socialist machine,” he wrote in his 2010
book<http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/37194394/ns/today-books/t/gingrich-left-redefining-american/>,
“To Save America.” He accused them of producing “the greatest political
corruption ever seen in modern America.” And then the inevitable historical
coup de grâce: “The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat
to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.”

The slurs don’t stop there. He compared the Muslims who wanted to open an
Islamic center in Lower Manhattan to the German Reich,
saying<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/us/politics/15reaction.html>it
“would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum.” He
is
promoting the fringe idea that “jihadis” are intent on imposing Islamic law
on every American village and farm.

Last year, he called for a federal
law<http://www.aei.org/docLib/Address%20by%20Newt%20Gingrich07292010.pdf>to
stop the (nonexistent) onslaught of Sharia on American jurisprudence
and
accused the left of refusing to acknowledge its “mortal threat to the
survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it.”
This nuanced grasp of world affairs was reinforced when he said that Mr.
Obama<http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/246302/gingrich-obama-s-kenyan-anti-colonial-worldview-robert-costa>displayed
“Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.”

In his world, advocates for gay rights are imposing a “gay and secular
fascism” using violence and harassment, blacks have little entrepreneurial
tradition<http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19950616&slug=2126720>,
and Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the Supreme Court is a “Latina woman
racist<http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/SoniaSotomayor/story?id=7685284>.”
(He kind of took back that last slur.)

Despite all this, not to mention the ethics
violation<http://partners.nytimes.com/library/politics/1222gingrich-ethics.html?scp=1&sq=gingrich%20ethics&st=cse>when
he was speaker, Mr. Gingrich’s real liability among the conservative
and fundamentalist groups that dominate the Republican primaries is his
personal history of
infidelity<http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=2937633&page=1>that
led to two sordid divorces. (Much of which took place while he was
denouncing President Bill Clinton for moral transgressions.) That may
explain his endless calls to restore Judeo-Christian
values<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703916004576271263380723514.html>.


It is sometimes difficult to know what some Republican candidates stand for,
as they pander to the far right without alienating the center. It is not
difficult to know what Newt Gingrich stands for, and to find it repellent.
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