Better still is to take an accounting of who supports the erstwhile Speaker and who opposes him. He is roundly opposed by everyone with brains, who correctly fear that his nomination would bring about a historic rout for the Republican Party, likely cost them a gimmie takeover of the Senate and very possibly cause the loss of the House. On the other hand, Newt is bolstered by the Tea Party, which doesn't appear to be aware that Medicare is a socialist government program and wants the size of government reduced, the colonization of the fucking moon notwithstanding. If you haven't got a goddamned clue what you're talking about, chances are that you're on Team Newt.
Speaker Gingrich fancies himself a historian, although his only real-world experience in the field was teaching at some clown college in the backwoods of Georgia, where the majority of the student body was majoring in raping Ned Beatty. And he couldn't get tenured there, essentially shaming him into a career in politics.
As someone who knows little, if anything, about actual history, Newt doesn't recognize his place in it. Gingrich was carried to prominence by the mess of the first 18 months of President Clinton's term in office. Like Bill Clinton himself, Gingrich was an accident of history, who stupidly mistook his good fortune and the poor decisions of his opponent as some kind of bizarre benediction by history.
I've been re-reading David Marainss' and Michael Weisskopf's majestically named 1996 book, "Tell Newt to Shut Up!", of late and it brings back the good times. As soon as he took control of the House, Gingrich started esposing awesomely irrational theories and presentng them as fact. For example, did you know that Susan Smith's children were actually drowned by the Democratic Party, which merely used Ms. Smith as its murderous vehicle of mayhem? Or that women are unfit for combat entirely because they get infections and men were born to hunt giraffe? Now you do.
Oh, and then there was Newt's inglorious quest to impeach an adulterous president whilst getting his own knob polished by a government employee from his office. That a man who is on his third wife and second religion is the darling of the family-values Tea Party crowd says everything that you need to know about the Tea Party.
Those of you old enough to remember the 1996 presidential election will note that the Clinton White House never campaigned against Bob Dole as much they did Gingrich. They were careful never to show a picture of Dole that didn't have a scowling Newt in the foreground. They actually came right out and said that to vote for Bob Dole was to put Newt Gingrich in the Oval Office. And it worked because it scared the bejesus out of everybody but the godamned daredevils among us.
Sure, you can say that Dole ran a shitty campaign, but I'm note sure that even a masterful politician like Ronald Reagan would have been able to survive having a political suicide machine like Newt chained to his ankle. Ginrich sunk the good ship GOP to the point where it had no where else to turn other than a half-wit Yale cheerleader and bankruptcy generator like George W. Bush to keep it afloat for a time.
That greasy bastard is to big time politics what basement Thai cockfighting is to the NFL. Sure, he beat the spread once in awhile, but only because roosters are entirely unpredictable beasts and given to opportunism. Clinton was a child-president in a White House run by children in 1994. And the only reason that Gingrich lived to prevail in South Carolina was that Mitt Romney was too dumbly genteel to finish the job when he had his boot firmly on Newt's throat in Iowa. If you want to know why Romney is going to have his as handed to him in the fall, now you do. He has no instinct for the throat. Venture capitalists don't understand a fucking thing about politics that their cocksucker lobbyists don't explain to them in Powerpoint demostrations.
Of course, Newt Gingrich is about where most sane people expected him to be: Broke and with the national favourability rating of a Peeping Tom. You could write the most delusionally perverted slander about him, and at least half of the American public would believe that the accusations were at least plausible. This, good people, is the House that Newt built and it's collapsing on him at last.
But even that's not stopping him from launching yet another torrent of horeshit onto everyone's porch. I got this in my e-mail yesterday from Human Events.
America needs three goals in energy:Ever hear about the sin of omission being as bad as the sin comission? Well, Gingrich is right, in a particularly Clintonian way. If you read each word verbaitum, there's nothing demonstrably false in there. But it's what he leaves out in his ridiculous fucking argument that really tells the story.
• Independence from dictatorships so no American President ever again bows to a Saudi king.
• Enough energy that Iranian efforts to disrupt the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz have no impact on America.
• Enough production to bring down the cost of gasoline for American motorists.
All three goals can be achieved with an all-of-the- above American energy plan.
During the four years I was speaker, the average price for a gallon of gasoline was $1.13. When President Obama took office in January 2009, the average price nationwide was $1.89 a gallon. Three years into the Obama presidency, the average is $3.47 a gallon.
Today, prices like those we enjoyed three years ago seem like a fantasy—and under the president’s current policies, they are. But these were prices Americans paid in the relatively recent past. Many Americans used to pay just $35 to fill up the very same cars that are today costing them over $60.
While some of the increase in gas prices comes from growing demand, the demand pressures on price can and should be offset by increasing domestic supplies. Yet the Obama administration’s ideological refusal to expand American energy production continues to block the development of resources which could lower prices dramatically. As we saw most recently with the administration’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline, the president is more interested in playing favorites with environmental extremists rather than embracing the “all-of-the-above” strategy that could achieve energy independence and help all Americans now.
Comparing the national average prices of gasoline in 1994-'99, 2009 and today is a cute ploy. But it misses something that you might remember, the entire second term of President Bush.
On June 8, 2008 CNN reported that the national average price of gasoline reached $4 a gallon for the first and only time in American history. Oil was trading about $140 a barrel at the time, which had a lot to do with the Great Collpase of Ought-Eight. The impending ruination of the banks detroyed the credit markets, but oil prices wrecked consumer confidence, which in turn took out the commodity markets. If everybody moves their money from oil to Treasuries, of course the cost of oil is going to go down.
You know how I can prove that? Because the book Gingrich shameless hawks at the bottom of his Human Events column was pubished in 2008, which means that it was probably written in 2007
Also noteworthy is the fact that Alaska's insipid fuckdoll of a governor used skyrocketing oil prices to screw the oil companies into paying higher royalties to the state, and then proceeded to give the money away in $1,300 chunks. thereby "spreading the wealth around." Drivers in the other 49 states were therefore subsidizing Sarah Palin's vote-buying scheme. Funny how Newt doesn't point that out, huh?
The price spike had nothing to do with supply and demand, or production. America historically relied on less oil production and still paid lower prices. Oil price inflation had everything to do devaluation of the U.S dollar as a consequence of Bush's ruinous economic policies. As the world's reserve currency, the dollar is used to trade commodities on the world market. And if the dollar goes to shit, it naturally follows that those commodities are going to cost more dollars.
So the very premise of Gingrich's policy is based on a bright, shining lie. Gasoline prices were considerably higher before Obama took office than they are now. Demand has increased, as Newt notes, but only because of the economic recovery that the Republican Party is determined to avoid admitting the existence of.
This is a lot like blaming the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and ignoring the reign of Adolf Hitler and all of the Second World War completely. It an make sense ... but only if you're very stupid.
The fact that Americans must cope with ballooning gas prices and energy vulnerability while living in a country with some of the richest untapped energy resources on the planet is an absurdity that can only be accomplished by bad government. By unleashing the American people from regulations and bureaucracy designed to promote the agenda of radical environmentalists, we can tap our enormous oil and natural gas supplies to drive fuel prices down.
Most Americans have no idea that the United States is sitting on enough technically recoverable oil to power us at current rates of consumption for over 250 years. We are estimated to have 1.4 trillion barrels of oil—or 1.7 trillion, adding in the resources of Canada and Mexico.
This is based on another fundamentally retarded premise - that the natural resources of Canada and Mexico belong to the United States.
Firstly, the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations have pissed all over NAFTA to the point that the treaty is meaningless. I called for Canada's withdrawal from the treaty as far back as seven years ago.
I also opposed Keystone because I want Canada to diversify it's markets and not tie ourselves so closely to the sinking ship of the long term American economy.To the extent that we can bypass the U.S market, Canada probably should. If that means selling to the murderous Chinese, so be it. President Obama did Canada the biggest favour imaginable in rejecting Keystone.
Gingrich drones on and fucking on, ignoring the fact that none of his proposals meet any of his goals, at least in the near term. Those goals, as we remember, are as follows;
• Independence from dictatorships so no American President ever again bows to a Saudi king.Lets address those one at a time, shall we?
• Enough energy that Iranian efforts to disrupt the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz have no impact on America.
• Enough production to bring down the cost of gasoline for American motorists.
- Even if you eliminate Arab oil from the American marketplace tomorrow, you'll still have American presidents bowing to Saudi kings.Oil isn't the primary objective of American Middle East policy - especially in Republican circles - Israel is. And since neither Israel or the United States has ever expressed a desire to sign a mutual defense treaty, both are going to have to continue praying to Mecca for the forseeable future.
- Even if the Unied States achieves energy independence - which demographics, economics and common sense all dictate is unlikely - the Strait of Hormuz is still going to be the major energy conduit of America's allies and major trading partners, Of course, Russia or China could take up America's slack in that area, but I doubt that Washington would like it very much.
- Ah, to live in Newt world, where if you so much as touch the ground with a fucking spoon, you become the Beverly Hillbillies. Life doesn't work that way. Finding oil, drilling it, refining it and bringing it to market in any meaningful way takes about ten years. By the way, increased exploration and drilling will, of course, be subsidized by American motorists because Republicans and oil industry lobbyists will fuck around with the tax code to enough make it so.
Remember how Republicans always tell you that money is fungible when it comes to things like private dinations to Planned Parenthood? If Rick Santorum, the argument goes, gives a few bucks to the Susan Komen for the Cure Foundation, it inevitably goes to building an almost industrial abortion factory on his paperboy's front yard.
Well, the same is true of oil. It's just as likely that any discovered oil will be sold to emerging markets like India and China than it is to drive domestic prices down. The Gingrich case seems to be premisd on the idea that foreign growth and demand will remain static or decline, as America's is free to continue growing unabated. And that ignores the reality that the reverse is far more likely.
If you've suffered a head injury, love assaulting common sense, or just hate people who know stuff, Newt Gingrich isn't just the candidate for you, but your kind of intellectual as well. And since you're the very same folks that had the unmitigated fucking balls to mock the "reality-based community" less than a decade ago, you're welcome to him.
0 comments:
Post a Comment