Newt, Newt, Newt. Can you imagine a president named Newt? Now if your name is Newt, I apologize. But the old argument of what if someone disparaged your name doesn’t quite ascend in such instances when your name is Dick.
The real name of former U.S. House speaker is Newton Gingrich, Newt for short. Although his moniker has a giggly ring to it, my opinion is that he, too, should be named Dick.
Gingrich is playing coy about running for president. I suppose that is in case the current pack of jackasses in the GOP who are running find that all of them combined have the same poll numbers as our Republican president. I don’t know if that is really the reason. Perhaps Gingrich just thinks it is cute. It isn’t.
This morning on “Meet the Press,” I could only take about five minutes of Gingrich’s bloviating on immigration and the war on terror. The show’s host, Tim Russert, asked Gingrich if he was running for president in 2008 and was finally able to get an answer that the former speaker was a)thinking about it and 2)would announce a decision in October. Boy, I can hardly wait.
How do I dislike thee, Honorable Pupek (Pupek is Slovenian for Newt, according to Dictionary.com)? Let me count the ways. Actually, I don’t have the time to sit here all day and list reasons why I believe Gingrich shouldn’t run for president or become president or run for any office again.
At least Gingrich isn’t afraid of sounding like a fascist when he talks about restricting the nation’s civil liberties for the greater good of fighting terrorism or whatever.
Today on Russert’s show he said one of the ways to fight illegal immigration is by instituting biometric identity cards. I didn’t quite understand for whom these cards should be required whether those from a foreign country who are in the U.S. or for the naturalized citizens as well. I would be tempted to say that he meant immigrants should be scanned and their info be put on cards to keep track of them. He said this as far back as 2001 while emphasizing the same should not be used for American citizens:
“I would not institute a national ID card because you do get into civil liberties issues.”
As if that would stop Speaker Salamander from having his fellow citizens tracked like sex offenders on parole.
Gingrich has already expressed a willingness to dispose of our First Amendment rights in the name of fighting terrorism.
“Either before we lose a city or, if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people.”
Like his ideological brothers and sisters such as Bill O’Reilly, Gingrich also sees us fighting a holy war at home among ourselves due to the danger of so-called “radical secularism.”
“In hostility to American history, the radical secularists insist that religious belief is inherently divisive and that public debate can only proceed on secular terms.”
As if we didn’t have enough problems to tackle such as real wars and various societal problems.
The next president of the U.S. will certainly find his or her hands full with whatever was left out back of the White House by Gee Dubya and his gang. I would hope that the majority of voters in the country would have enough sense to not elect a demagogue like Newt. But then again, look who voters gave a second term to lead the nation. That bunch alone has torn to pieces what is known as our “Bill of Rights.”
If you care in the least about civil liberties, you have to worry just a little.