Is Newt slipping?

Fear-jockey Newt Gingrich is compiling so many mortal bugaboos that have America teetering on the edge of destruction, he no longer even makes an attempt to sort them, rationalize them, or sloganeer them.

I see this as his greatest political liability. Which is to say, we survived the mid-20th-century perils of "Korea, Communism and Corruption," as well as the late-19th-century precipices of "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" mostly because we could keep them all straight. They came packaged in elegant, catchy alliterations that just sort of screamed a Boo! that one could never forget. We could pass them along effortlessly across the backyard fence, we could brood over them at the office watercooler with our fellow victims, one could frighten small children and the witless bourgeoisie with the spectres of simple and memorable threesomes.

But ponder this line from Mr. Gingrich, delivered last night in San Antonio at John Hagee's Cornerstone Church:

I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [my grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.

Sure, in one sense Mr. Gingrich held in his hand the names of three deadly threats to America, the last of which was the classic of patriotic amnesia, but none of which rang alliteratively unforgettable with the other two.

Even worse, however, was that while we could once imagine Communism raging in a cesspool of Corruption, or Romanism working its popishly wily ways in concert with Rum or abetting Rebellion, Gingrich somehow pushed us under the caravan of "radical Islamists" hellbent on securing a "secular atheist" America.

This rather ffffundamental (to use Newt's favorite and always dramatically delivered adjective) contradiction is too staggering to ignore, for long, even by Newt's famously obtuse base. Someday, somewhere, even a John Hagee is bound to stop and say: Wait a minute, radical Islamists are hustling a secular atheist agenda? I thought they were imposing Sharia law from the sand up, in godless Michigan. What gives?

No doubt that when asked, Gingrich will reply that he wasn't being inconsistent; that he was only responding to the unctuous inconsistencies of those radical Islamists, every one of whose birth certificates he'd sure like to have a little look-see. That could work.

Still, though, he's left with all that untidiness. In addition to atheistic Islamists murdering our patriotic memory, Gingrich also hauled into our perilous mix the mainstream media's wickedness and unChristian eggheads and San Francisco's, ahem, atmospherically suspect Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Newtster, I think, is slipping. He is cruelly taxing the intellectual capacities of the Republican primary base, piling a fourth, a fifth, even a sixth cause of our imminent desolation onto three already differentiated causes.

And he hasn't even bothered with a punchy trinity of causation, like maybe "Atheists, Assholes and Assassins."

Come on, Newt. You can do better.

Comments

[majii]

Newt has the handle of being the best "thinker" in the Republican Party, but based on things he's said recently, it seems as if he isn't thinking at all. This comment is unintelligible gibberish meant to appeal to the far right-wingers in the RP.

[Vernon]

@Majii, can anyone give any examples of Newt's great ideas? How does he get a reputation for being a "thinker" or an "idea guy"? Dare I say this reputation is a sham that's accepted as CW and never challenged? I mean, even Norville Barnes came up with the hula hoop, what's Newton Leroy Gingrich done? If it was his, the Contract For America was neither great nor actually followed, so what else is there?

[majii]

It's a creation of Newt, rw media, and his supporters in the Republican Party. I remember when Newt was in the state legislature here in GA and when he was Speaker, and I didn't see any signs that he was that much of a "great thinker" then, or now. I think the description is associated with him because he was once a professor of European History at West GA College, or maybe when he went to Congress some members of the party were impressed by his having been a college professor.