Tornado Alley (PROG)

[BullNBear52]

Who’s the Con Man?
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
September 14, 2010


Harry Reid tweets Lady Gaga while Newt Gingrich is truly gaga.

The 67-year-old former speaker, who has a talent for overreaching, is more unbridled than ever. He’s decided he’ll do or say anything to stay in the game — even Palin-izing himself by making outrageous, unsubstantiated comments to appeal to the wing nuts among us.

The conservative who fancies himself a historian and visionary did not use his critical faculties to resist his party’s lunacy but instead has embraced it, shamelessly. He has given a full-throated endorsement to a dangerously irresponsible and un-Christian theory by Ann Coulter-in-pants Dinesh D’Souza.

Gingrich praised D’Souza’s article in Forbes, previewing an upcoming book called “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.”

Newt told The National Review Online that it was the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama” and said D’Souza shows that the president “is so outside our comprehension” that you can only understand him “if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior.”

Newt added: “This a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.”

So the smear artists are claiming not only that the president is a socialist but that he suffers from a socialism gene.

“Our president is trapped in his father’s time machine,” D’Souza writes in Forbes, offering a genetic theory of ideology. “Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”

Playing into the bigotry of birthers and haters who paint Obama as “the other,” D’Souza writes that the president was raised offshore, spending “his formative years — the first 17 years of his life — off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.” The ominous-sounding time in Pakistan was merely a visit when Obama was a college student.

Gingrich, who ditched two wives (the first when she was battling cancer; the second after an affair with the third — a House staffer — while he was impeaching Bill Clinton), now professes to be a good Catholic. Evidently the first two wives don’t count because he hadn’t converted to Catholicism. He even had a big Catholic conversion Mass here with his third wife, Callista, celebrated by a retinue of eight priests and three bishops.

But he is downright un-Christian when he does not hesitate to visit the alleged sins of the father upon the son.

Some of Newt’s old conservative friends worry that he has gone “over the ledge,” as one put it.

If it wasn’t so sick it would be funny. It’s worse than a conspiracy theory because this conspiracy consists of a single dead individual. The idea that there’s something illegitimate about anticolonialism on the part of a Kenyan man in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s is stupid. And it’s inconsistent to accuse a president who’s raining drones on bad guys in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen of having an inherited anticolonial ideology.

It’s also really low. D’Souza and Gingrich are not merely discrediting the president’s father’s ideology. They’re discrediting his character and insinuating that the son inherited not just his father’s bad ideology but a bad character, too.

Newt has always displayed an impressive grandiosity. Who can forget the time during his Congressional heyday when he declared himself a “defender of civilization, a teacher of the rules of civilization, arouser of those who form civilization ... and leader ‘possibly’ of the civilizing forces”?

And he who thinks Obama is too messianic said in 1994: “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz. I see evil all around me every day.”

This fear-mongering is ugly. D’Souza and Gingrich employ the tactics the Bush administration used to get us into Iraq — cherry-picking, insinuation, half-truths and dishonest reasoning.

If the conservatives are so interested in psychoanalyzing father and son relationships, why didn’t they do so back when W. was rushing to avenge and one-up his father by finishing what daddy started with Saddam?

On their Web site, Callista and Newt tout “Gingrich Productions” and promote an apocalyptic movie with the same kind of scary music that Fox uses, suggesting that the Obama administration is weak in the war against “radical Islam.” The movie and the Web site are called “America at Risk.”

It’s Newt and D’Souza and their ilk who put America at risk.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/opinion/15dowd.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print