“Probably the worst piece of advice I’ve ever given to myself was when [in 2000] the Confederate flag was flying over the state capitol in South Carolina,” [John McCain] said. “And I decided that I would say it’s not an issue I should be involved in, that it should be decided by the people of the state of South Carolina. I knew it was a symbol that was offensive to so many people. And afterwards, I went back and apologized. But it was needless to say, by saying that I wouldn’t have anything to do with an issue like that was an act of cowardice.”
At an event in South Carolina yesterday, Newt Gingrich was asked by a town hall participant to offer his views regarding the state’s decision to fly the Confederate flag at the statehouse in Columbia. The woman’s question was met with a smattering of boos from the audience.
“I have a very strong opinion,” Gingrich said, prefacing his weak response. “It’s up to the people of South Carolina.” (He then qualified his answer by assuring that he is opposed to segregation and slavery.)
Gingrich elicited a rousing standing ovation and yells of approval from the audience.
Should we assume that sometime in late 2019 or early 2020, we will learn that Gingrich regrets having sacrificed principle for personal ambition?
Is Gingrich capable of true remorse? Will he reverse course tomorrow and suggest that we beam all confederate flags into space where they can be used as a warning against unwanted intruders?
You never know.
Hmm. I wonder if the GOP primary voter has shifted so hard since 2004 that this is actually a win for Gingrich, though of course this position would be a disaster in the general. Have you seen the recent Al Giordano piece on Gingrich? I find it intriguing.
Is anyone having a problem with blogads hanging up the site?
As for Al, I talked to him about the primaries about three weeks ago and he was sounding bullish on Newt. I haven’t read his piece though.
MERRY CHRISTMAS, BOOMAN!
Thanks for a great year of thinking and writing.
No, it will not be a ‘win’ for Newt. It is a clear example that (1) Newt is not capable of organizing a dog fight with angry willing dogs, and (2) he is such a clear narcissist that he can never question himself the way McCain did.
Newt’s inability to organize anything involving a group of people of any size at all is what will prevent him from getting the nomination. It’s just a question of time until the next example pops up. But is inability is based on the fact that he is the most obvious example of someone with a narcissist personality disorder in the US outside the US Senate.
A narcissist is totally protective of his ego. He can never admit a mistake or even question his own judgment, and god forbid that anyone else should attempt to question him or claim he is responsible for a failure. The fear of such judgment is what drives narcissists to the extremes they often display. Newt is driven by that fear in spades.
As a side note, the US Senate seems full of narcissists. I can’t tell if the Senate attracts them or if it creates them once they become Senators, but it may not be an either/or situation. Consider Joe Lieberman. ‘Nuff said.
When I think back on McCain and his personal choice as back-up for that three am call, Sarah P, I am reassured I did the right thing in voting for Obama and refusing to either stay home or vote for some minor party left liberal.
A Green, say.
The least dangerous of the GOP crew is Romney, and yet he is quite bad enough to amply justify a strategic vote for the lesser evil in the White House.
And what a reminder of the shameless pandering and flip-flopping to be expected from the disease of ambition that afflicts these guys!
In that respect, the “moderate, independent” Romney is like the “moderate, independent” McCain.
Unsurprisingly, websites supportive of Obama in 2012 seem to have been highlighting the GOP primaries and what they reveal of the candidates and the party faithful, showing us how important a dime’s worth of difference can be.
Websites that have opposed Obama from the left have downplayed the lunacy of the GOP and dwelt instead on the disappointments of the Democrats, minimizing the difference between the parties and between Obama on the one side and any eventual Republican opponent on the other.
A man with no principles in this environment is far worse than a right winger with them. Romney will sign anything that Congress passes.
Yes, I’ve seen that crap all over FDL. It’s expected over at Distant Ocean or Ian Welsh (well, not so much saying how Romney “wouldn’t be sooo bad,” but downplaying Obama’s importance), but FDL? It’s gotten ridiculous. I see people over there actively not caring who the Republican nominee is, just so long as Obama loses.
As we saw recently with the EPA measures, the executive matters regardless of what passes through Congress…
Welsh, in particular, has gone way ’round the bend, if you ask me.
Romney is an evil piece of shit, who put thousands and thousands out of work and killed pensions for them. He should roast in hell, preferably right away.
Ah. The New South.
Actually, it’s not the New South, it’s the “new Newt”.
Sherman was an optimist…
Even though it gives him more room to move right from the center, I have to admit that I can’t, in good conscience, vote for anyone but Obama. Usually I wait to decide after they pick their veep (or get picked by them, in Bush’s case), but there’s literally no other sane, if not entirely happy, option.
When you look at how easily Congress passed the two month extension once the radical Republicans were shown to be endangered by its failure to pass, the entire Obama administration becomes clear. It’s not that he is a right-winger. It’s that he is a President trying to run the country and facing unprecedented obstruction. That obstruction must be destroyed. Obama’s nature is unimportant compared to that need. He is not the problem. The radical anti-American obstructionists and their financiers are the problem.
We all have to vote for Obama. That’s a given. But what we also have to do is defeat the radical Republicans and replace them with progressive. That’s where our biggest effort needs to go this coming year.
And whatever we do, it will not be enough. We have a court system that has destroyed its own legitimacy and is continuing to dig the pit they dug to get to the Hell they want to create. We have a federal government filled with Bush/Cheney appointees who must be rooted out and replace with competent workers. We have a union system that much be rebuilt.
And all of this needs to be done while digging out of the Bush/Cheney created Great Recession and while preparing to defend the world from the rapidly growing climate change.
Obama’s Plan B interference is unacceptable. He has to be forced to change that. But that is low priority and can be done along with the rest of the things progressives need to be doing.
In Newt’s case, he’s not renouncing principle.
One never was clear where John McCain stood on anything.
The South in general irritates me. You wonder who won the Civil War when you see how much the South gets from the federal government. You would think that they must be giving much more in income taxes but in general they get a much greater return and bitch about it continually.
The flag waving and bible thumping is ironic given the fact that all of our ancestors came from the same place…but that is way beyond the common attitude of “I’ve got mine, what’s the problem?” Maybe Lincoln should have let them go….It has always been thought as a slam dunk fighting a civil war to keep the country together…maybe it wasn’t such a great idea after all. I really thought that way after my visit to Gettysburg, seeing all the southern monuments new and polished while the union monuments were fading away. But what got me more than anything was seeing so many soldiers with my surname in the Ohio burials. Did they die for this, the stars and bars waving in our country?
You would think confederate uniforms and confederate symbols, the flags included, would have been suppressed during Reconstruction.
Many abolitionists would have been happy with letting the South go out of the Union to form a slave empire right on our border.
But Lincoln was one of those who thought differently.
He said it at Gettysburg.
He thought successful Southern secession and formation of that slave empire might be fatal to democracy in the North, as well.
He said, after all, simply and grimly, that it was a fight to settle whether government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth.