Newt Gingrich: Supposed Republican “Frontrunner,” Totalitarian Social Engineer

Newt Gingrich: Supposed Republican "Frontrunner," Totalitarian Social Engineer
Posted on 28 November 2011 by William Grigg



"Don't say this out loud -- but I'm actually a New Age statist posing as a conservative!"

Republican presidential aspirant Newt Gingrich, the most recent contender embraced by the "Anybody-but-Mitt" constituency, received what many consider an ironic endorsement from former political antagonist Bill Clinton:

 "He's articulate and he tries to think of a conservative version of an idea that will solve a legitimate problem, For example, I watched the national security debate … And Newt said two things that would make an independent voter say, 'Well, I gotta consider that.'"

Gingrich and Clinton are much more compatible than many observers might suspect. In 1993, when then-First Lady Hillary Clinton was promoting a nationalized health care scheme, Gingrich (at the time a Republican Congressman from Georgia) publicly supported the idea of a federally enforced individual health insurance mandate – a much-despised mechanism incorporated into the "Obamacare" program. In a Meet the Press interview earlier this year, Gingrich expressed his support for a "variation" on the Obama-era health insurance mandate.

Under the reign of Bill Clinton – the first president to acknowledge youthful "experimentation" with narcotics, albeit in oddly qualified fashion – the federal War on Drugs escalated dramatically. Gingrich, who likewise spent some of his youth "frolicking in the autumn mist," as it were, also offers unqualified support for the federal anti-drug jihad. As House Speaker in 1996, Gingrich introduced legislation to impose the death penalty on drug smugglers.

Asked about that proposal during a recent interview, Gingrich reiterated his support for capital punishment for drug offenses. He also insisted that "draconian" anti-drug policies imposed by Singapore and other authoritarian countries are compatible with  the "American" view of the citizen's relationship with the government.

"You can either be in the Ron Paul tradition and say there's nothing wrong with heroin and cocaine or you can be in the tradition that says, These kind of addictive drugs are terrible, they deprive you of full citizenship and they lead you to a dependency which is antithetical to being an American," pontificated Gingrich. "If you're serious about the latter view, then we need to think through a strategy that makes it radically less likely that we're going to have drugs in this country."

Gingrich, who has ruined two marriages through adulterous affairs and whose corpulent form is not the physique of someone who practices rigorous self-discipline, is eager to dispense potted homilies of that kind, most of which combine hypocrisy and dishonest history. Rep. Ron Paul, a long-time physician and ardent physical fitness buff who still rides a bicycle 20 miles a day at the age of 76, emphatically opposes drug abuse. He also understands that no government has the moral right or constitutional authority to regulate what adults choose to ingest.

What Gingrich breezily dismisses as "the Ron Paul tradition" – which rejects prohibition in all forms – was actually settled social policy in the United States until the early 20th Century. Our pious, abstemious 19th Century forebears lived in a country in which cocaine was available at the corner apothecary and advertised in family magazines as a topical analgesic for use in treating children's dental pain. Gingrich's authoritarian paternalism is much more in keeping with the "Progressive" movement, which promoted the use of federal power to remake society – through, among other things, the prohibition of alcohol.

Gingrich's itch for social engineering isn't limited to the domestic "War on Drugs." He has long championed a Progressive-style interventionist foreign policy and its necessary coefficient, a domestic police state to deal with the terrorist "blowback" that is inevitably generated by military adventurism abroad.

During the late 1990s, Gingrich helped create the The United States Commission on National Security/21st Century – often referred to as the Hart-Rudman Commission because its co-chairmen were former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman. That Commission helped draft the proposals that were incorporated into the so-called PATRIOT Act; in fact, the blueprint for that legislation was on the president's desk months before the 9-11 attack.  Gingrich's role in creating that measure helps explain the asperity he displayed when it was criticized by Rep. Paul during the recent Republican National Security Debate in Washington, D.C.

Although Gingrich consistently supports radically expanded federal power to protect Americans from terrorism, he has actually suggested – in all seriousness – that the federal government needs to permit an occasional terrorist attack in order to maintain a public "psychology" that will support a more invasive government.

During a visit to a Long Island bookstore during a 2008 tour to promote his book "Days of Infamy," Gingrich lamented that the Bush administration's purported success in stopping terrorist threats (which are actually vanishingly rare) was among the "great tragedies" of recent history. "This means there's less proof … that we're in danger," he claimed. "And it's almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us."

As his audience laughed, Gingrich made it clear that he intended for the shocking remark to be taken seriously:  "The more successful they've been at intercepting and stopping the bad guys, the less proof there is that we're actually in danger. Think about the psychology."

Gingrich's influence-peddling on behalf of various corporate interests – from the Ethanol lobby to the unfathomably corrupt mortgage giant Freddie Mac – provoked George F. Will's lacerating description of the former House Speaker as a "classic rental politician." Devoid of conservative principles, hostile to individual liberty, utterly indifferent to the stench of his personal hypocrisy, and suffused with unearned self-regard, Gingrich isn't likely to win the Republican nomination. The eagerness with which the pundit class has embraced him most likely reflects its anxiety to create a plausible contender to Romney – and its dogmatic insistence on pretending that Ron Paul doesn't exist.

http://www.republicmagazine.com/news/newt-gingrich-supposed-republican-%E2%80%9Cfrontrunner%E2%80%9D-totalitarian-social-engineer.html