Loving Newtie
by digby
Dave Weigel is shocked. And he doesn’t strike me as the type to be shocked easily:
These numbers from Gallup are shocking. It’s not just that 82 percent of self-identified Tea Partiers find Gingrich acceptable. It’s the rotten numbers for the other candidates.
I guess I’m not as shocked by this as I should be but then I’ve been observing Newtie and his relationship to the right wing for years and they have always spoken the same language. In fact, their affection for him proves that they aren’t any more consistent or principled than he is.
They love him because of who he hates: liberals. He is really good at it and they appreciate his talent. This was after the massacre at Virginia Tech:
GINGRICH: Yes, I think the fact is, if you look at the amount of violence we have in games that young people play at 7, 8, 10, 12, 15 years of age, if you look at the dehumanization, if you look at the fact that we refuse to say that we are, in fact, endowed by our creator, that our rights come from God, that if you kill somebody, you’re committing an act of evil.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But what does that have to do with liberalism?
GINGRICH:“Well, who has created a situation ethics, essentially, a zone of not being willing to talk about any of these things?
Let me carry another example. I strongly supported Imus being dismissed, but I also think the very thing he was dismissed for, which is the use of language which is stunningly degrading of women — the fact, for example, that one of the Halloween costumes this last year was being able to be either a prostitute or a pimp at 10, 11, 12 years of age, buying a costume, and we don’t have any discussion about what’s happened to our culture because while we’re restricting political free speech under McCain-Feingold, we say it’s impossible to restrict vulgar and vicious and anti-human speech. And I would argue that that’s a major component of what’s happened to our culture in the last 40 years.”
It always comes back to liberals polluting the culture.
Update: Oh, and in case anyone’s wondering why nobody’s holding his immigration stand against him, here he is back in 2007. He knows how to bring it:
There is a war here at home, and it is even more deadly than the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Far more Americans are being killed by violent, evil people here in America than in our official military “combat zones” overseas.
The truth is, all too many Americans are being killed. But what is so completely senseless is having the lives of three young, achieving students cut brutally short by someone who not only should not have been in the United States in the first place but also, after two previous arrests for violence, should not have been on the streets. Instead, the suspected killer should have been in jail awaiting trial, sentencing, prison and eventual deportation.
Another case in point: Authorities are now seeking an additional suspect in the Newark killings — yet another suspected illegal alien…
The issue is simple: Either Congress and the President want to defend innocent Americans from violent illegal aliens or they don’t.
Either the killing of three young Americans is a horrendous event that requires us to act or we will go on with politics as usual while young Americans in our inner cities are massacred by people who should not be here.
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