MICHAEL CARMICHAEL

archived: 16 - 22 Jul, 2006         Back                 Next

                        THE LUNATIC FRINGE 

Appearing on Meet the Press, Newt Gingrich sounded a shrill alarm. 

Aping Paul Revere, Gingrich could have shouted, “The Terrorists are coming! The Terrorists are coming!” 

Citing North Korea, “who fired seven missiles on the 4th of July,” and Iran’s nuclear program, Gingrich accused the Bush White House of the moral outrage of “Blinking.” 

Deeply upset and disappointed, Gingrich is crestfallen that the White House has not launched an attack on either North Korea or Iran as a first strike of the pre-emptive war policy of the Bush Doctrine. 

Shrilling hysterically and rising to his message, Gingrich declared his total support for the actions of the Israeli Defense Force that is now demolishing the fragile infrastructure of Gaza and Lebanon. Under the command of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Minister of Defence, Amir Peretz, the Israelis blasted the power station in Gaza and bombed the offices of the President of the Palestinian Authority. 

In the Lebanon, Olmert’s forces have bombed the new airport in Beirut and are now in the process of blasting away at the power stations and other civilian infrastructure in what promises to be yet another campaign that will not solve any problems but will incubate new ones. 

From his starkly bellicose performance on Meet the Press, Gingrich clearly longs for an American regime that would be equally as brutal as Olmert’s Israel. Gingrich seriously believes that Americans should bomb the hundreds of nuclear sites in Iran as well as North Korea – and that we should have bombed them yesterday or even the day before.  

In contrast to Gingrich’s militant prescription for launching World War Three, Senator Joe Biden said that he did not agree. Biden would not commit the United States to any more hostilities in the Middle East, and he pointed to the stark failures of our current war in Iraq. 

Gingrich was not impressed. Not one little bit. Like the madman intent upon wreaking havoc on a world in which he has little or no power, Gingrich hurled threats left, right and centre at the “terrorists” he sees endangering American security. Gingrich left little doubt about whom he would love to annihilate: Muslims, Islamists and Jihadists as well as North Koreans and Iranian mullahs. According to Gingrich, the security of the world is melting down along racial and cultural fault lines, and the Bush administration is failing to protect America from the brutal onslaught of the darker races and their strangely foreign religions and exotic cultures. 

The principal author of the notorious Contract with America, Newt Gingrich was the Speaker of the House in another era that now seems like a halcyon period of American greatness – the Clinton Boom. 

That was then, and this is now. Today, Gingrich is a leading member of the lunatic fringe of circa twenty percent of American voters who actually believe that they are under the immediate threat of terrorist annihilation orchestrated by cunning and crafty Asians lurking undetected in high-tech Bat Caves in the Middle and the Far East who want to destroy our way of life – because they hate our freedoms. At the same time, Gingrich advocates the curtailment of our civil rights for the absurd reason that (he says) we must sacrifice our freedoms in order to preserve, protect and defend them. 

Gingrich is a highly intelligent academic historian who employed Christina Jeffrey as a Congressional analyst at the salary of $85,000 per year. Shortly after Gingrich appointed Jeffrey to her post, it emerged in the national media that Jeffrey had argued in favor of adding balanced and “objective” (read, sympathetic to racism) material about the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis to courses for eighth and ninth grade school children.  

Commenting on the curriculum for the eighth and ninth grades, Jeffrey wrote: "The program gives no evidence of balance or objectivity. The Nazi point of view, however unpopular, is still a point of view and is not presented, nor is that of the Ku Klux Klan.” Considered an extremist for her views on the racial philosophies of the KKK and the Nazis, public pressure forced Gingrich to fire Jeffrey immediately. 

That is merely one incident that is not isolated amongst many other lunacies of equal value, depravity and outrage in Gingrich’s groaning closet of political skeletons. 

On Meet the Press, Gingrich actually had the unmitigated gall to compare the current situation in the middle east between Israel and Lebanon with the Cuban Missile Crisis, even though the two events have little in common except for the word, “missile.” 

In the Lebanon, Hezbollah have stockpiled an arsenal of Katyusha missiles with a limited range of between 12 and 25 miles. Military experts define these weapons as artillery rather than missiles. These small rockets are routinely fired from the backs of trucks. Their payload is not nuclear, and the only similarity they bear to the ominous missiles of October is their rocket propulsion system. They are notoriously inaccurate and ineffective. Apparently, Gingrich, a professional historian, forgot those minor details, plus, the undeniable fact that the unregistered and unregulated nuclear weapons in this scenario are in Israel – not Lebanon. 

In fact, Gingrich may have also forgotten that Jack Kennedy did not order the bombardment of the airports, the power stations and the government buildings of Cuba. Unlike Ehud Olmert, Jack Kennedy negotiated via direct correspondence with Nikita Khruschev as well as ordering a blockade of Cuban ports. Jack Kennedy did order Adlai Stevenson to launch a debate in the United Nations – unlike Ehud Olmert who is unwilling to debate the existence of the Israeli nuclear arsenal.  

Jack Kennedy did not order the killing, the bombing or the strafing of Cuban civilians – unlike Olmert, who has ordered the destruction of civilian infrastructure and the bombardment of populated civilian targets. Jack Kennedy never attacked Cuba in the way that Olmert is now attacking Gaza and Lebanon. Jack Kennedy would never have done that. I remember Jack Kennedy.  I supported Jack Kennedy.  Jack Kennedy was a bold and brilliant president in stark contrast with most of those who have followed him.  Ehud Olmert is no Jack Kennedy.  

In the international media, we are now seeing daily images of dead Palestinian and Lebanese children blasted by Israeli bombs. Jack Kennedy never did any such thing – at any time during his presidency – and Newt Gingrich knows it. He knows it very well.  

Newt Gingrich has allowed his fears, his paranoia and his deeply seated racial hatred to take total control of his mind. His vision is distorted. His message is radical. His condition is lunacy. He is a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.

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Last Update: 07/23/2006