David Frum predicts that, should Newt become the nominee, the mood at the GOP convention "will be full unconcealed panic":
[Gingrich] was pushed aside [by his caucus] because he plunged the caucus into chaos, because he lost fights that he himself had chosen, because he could not control his mouth, because he wanted to be a star more than he wanted to get things done. There’s a reason Gingrich is fascinated by management gurus: he needs the help.
The ad is contemptible in many ways, and particularly dismaying when Perry's staff include people like Liz Mair and Tony Fabrizio, who have long-standing outreach to the gay community. It's the kind of ad that lingers with you and creates short shudders of response for a day after you are exposed to it. Let's unpack it a little:
"I'm not ashamed to call myself a Christian …"
Can someone tell me, outside a few hostile enclaves on the intolerant left, where in America people feel pressured not to call themselves Christians? What you have here is classic – and imagined – victimology. This is a particularly Christianist, rather than Christian, position. Historically, Christians have embraced marginalization, even persecution, as a sign of their unworldly priorities. The martyrs were celebrated because they were targets of the state. Ditto the Puritans who took their isolation in English society as a sign of their godliness. If hostility to Christians is expressed, Jesus had an obvious recommendation: embrace the hostility, love your enemies, be utterly unconcerned with worldly power, because the most important things are beyond that. Contrast that with Christianism's neurotic desperation to be vindicated and affirmed in the public square, for fear that without such public support, faith could wither. The truth is: this kind of tribal victimology is really a leftist import that is profoundly alien both to conservatism properly understood and to the message of the Gospels.
Then we get a classic non-sequitur: the notion that allowing openly gay servicemembers to serve without fear of prosecution is somehow connected to the constitutional prohibition of prayer in schools. There is zero connection between the two issues – except both are objected to by Christianist fundamentalists. And in the interview above, we get the simply insane notion that president Obama, a serious and thoughtful Christian, has a war against religion as a whole (does that include Islam, I wonder?). Blitzer rightly points out the nuttiness of this assertion. What's nuttier is that Perry equates religious freedom with government subsidies! Yes, we have a right-wing Republican arguing that not funding religious groups with tax payers' money is somehow a war on religion. That is, in fact, the inverse of the First Amendment.
TNC focuses on the resentment underneath:
Look — There are the Muslims in Congress. And there are the Latinos in the Unions. And there are gays shooting guns in Iraq. And there are women dying in Iraq. And there are black ladies marrying white men. And there are black men marrying white ladies. And their children are Muslims. And their children are in the White House. And for the first time in American history, it appears that you will have to fight to not end up on the bottom. Damn. Things just ain't the same for gangsters.
Don't give Santorum any ideas, Chuck.
The Perry campaign forgot to turn off YouTube "likes" and "dislikes" on its new ad condoning the persecution of gays abroad. The results: 4,061 likes; 190,000 dislikes. Heh. Oh and does that jacket in the ad look familiar? It's identical to that worn by the closeted Ennis (Heath Ledger) in Brokeback Mountain. Just sayin'.
(Hat tip: @DKElections)
"Newt Gingrich is the 'anti-Establishment' candidate only if 'the Establishment' is defined as 'anyone who remembers what happened the day before yesterday,'" – Ann Coulter.
While the opposition Local Coordination Committees announced a new nonviolent campaign to begin on Sunday, analysts looked at Assad's interview with Barbara Walters (full transcript and video here) to get into the dictator's head. David Kenner found Assad "out of touch, at times incoherent, and delusional about the support that he still enjoys in Syria." Daniel Serwer thinks through a Western response:
Bashar al Assad is not a rocket scientist (only a physician), but he is more than smart enough to know what is going on and rational enough to stop it if he did not think it was in his interest. His focus is where it should be: winning the hearts and minds of the majority that is not yet against him, or at least keeping them neutral.
This understanding should inform the strategy of the opposition and the international community. Actions that turn this majority in Bashar al Assad’s direction (violence, sanctions that target vital commodities, rhetoric that suggests NATO is coming to the rescue) should be avoided. Actions that win over the substantial Syrian middle and lower classes (providing humanitarian assistance, international monitoring of the sort the UN has already undertaken or the Arab League has proposed, sanctioning non-vital trade and investment, denouncing regime violence, nonviolent boycotts, strikes and demonstrations) are the way to go.
Fares Chamseddine believes the interview is evidence that the regime is cracking up. Joseph Kechichian has the same read on a crazy presentation by the Syrian foreign minister. Ammar Abudlhamid, worrying about the efficacy of anti-Assad forces, sounds a more pessimistic note. Below is footage of a large Dara'a protest chanting "Get ready for your execution Assad:"
Here's a newly leaked video of what looks like soldiers torturing a man while he cries out in agony:
And this is a night protest in Aleppo yesterday:
"Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 top al-Qaida leaders who've been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement. Or whoever's left out there. Ask them about that," – Barack Obama.
If you don’t have to have insurance until you’re sick, why buy insurance? … How much would insurance be if only people who needed insurance bought it? The whole point of insurance is: healthy people buy it, sick people buy it, and those who are healthy support those who are sick…. But if insurance is only sick people buy it, well guess what’s going to be the cost of insurance. That’s why there’s a preexisting-condition clause.
Grant Gallicho swallows:
Has Santorum been paying attention to the health-care debate? Does he have the slightest idea what the health-care law he’s promised to repeal actually does? … What he’s just described is the signal achievement of the Affordable Care Act. Not only does the law bring coverage to millions of uninsured Americans. It also lowers costs across the health-care system.
Clearly, Newt is as surprised as the rest of us by his sudden rise:
Yahoo! News reported that phones for Newt Gingrich’s Iowa campaign office finally arrived on Tuesday, exactly one month before the state’s caucuses.
Ron Paul, meanwhile, has been there for months, with an impressive and impassioned ground game. As I mentioned yesterday, I'm going all-in with FNC this primary season. I don't know how else to cover it, except in its own media cocoon – which turns out to be Gingrich's base. And I notice that there's an obvious Ailes-dictated line whenever Ron Paul's name comes up. Hannity and O'Reilly barely mention him, but when they do, they look into the camera and say he has zero percent chance of winning the nomination. Zero. And yet Ron Paul is now tied for second in Iowa and third in New Hampshire. Nationally, Paul outpolled Gingrich from May to October.
Now I know the odds of Paul winning the nomination are not high. But they are now and long have been clearly more promising than Perry, Bachmann, Santorum or Huntsman. The reason for the bizarre exclusion, I suspect, is that his foreign policy dissent renders him unacceptable to a party establishment long wedded to permanent warfare and global hegemony. Paul's exclusion from the Israel Lobby panderthon yesterday was another sign of his unfair treatment by the party. But who provided the message in 2008 that ended up dominating the campaign of 2011? Who isn't a flip-flopper? Who doesn't have glaring personal flaws?
What is the GOP scared of? A man the public knows is sincere? The most dedicated defender of liberty in his party?
Andrew Sprung compares Obama's Osawatomie speech with Teddy Roosevelt's. If today's Republicans believe Obama is engaging in class warfare, what would they have made of their one-time leader? Money TR quote:
The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. That is what you fought for in the Civil War, and that is what we strive for now… We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.
This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary.
I think we are at a similar place today. Update from a reader with a "money money TR quote":
Too much cannot be said against the men of wealth who sacrifice everything to getting wealth. There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest uses —whether these uses be to speculate in stocks and wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high social position, foreign or native, for his daughter. Such a man is only the more dangerous if he occasionally does some deed like founding a college or endowing a church, which makes those good people who are also foolish forget his real iniquity. These men are equally careless of the working men, whom they oppress, and of the State, whose existence they imperil. There are not very many of them, but there is a very great number of men who approach more or less closely to the type, and, just in so far as they do so approach, they are curses to the country. (Forum, February 1895.) Mem. Ed. XV, 10; Nat. Ed. XIII, 9.
(Photo: Theodore Roosevelt, standing next to dead elephant, holding gun, probably in Africa, by Edward Van Altena, N.Y.C.)
The Dish 