A Newt Addendum: The Crazy People’s Party Really NEEDS Him! [New]
Talking Points Memo highlights the National Review‘s Newt-bashing issue, and asks, “[W]ill rank and file Gingrich supporters accept the increasingly loud message from party elites that he’s a disaster? Or will they just resent it?”
A further question might well be, “If they DO derail Newt’s nomination, will this fuel enough resentment to undermine Romney in November and otherwise further deepen the GOPs internal conflicts?” Maybe even push them to the breaking point?
The big problem behind Newt’s surge is that it’s not just about Newt. Yes, Newt’s a problematic individual, so be sure, as my recent AJE op-ed argued. But he’s also quite integral to the conservative movement’s successes as well as failures.
The common conservative approach is simply to ditch anyone who becomes an embarassment (ahem! George W. Bush) and take up the line that they’re not a “true conservative”. So ditching Newt would be totally in keeping with conservative tradition. But the problem is, conservatives STILL haven’t figured out how to reinvent themselves after Bush. Being anti-Obama is the most unifying theme they’ve got.
Yes, they’ve tried that whole “constitutional conservative thing”, but beyond wearing silly hats, and confusing the US Constitution with the Confederate one, what more is there? That may be enough to win the House in an off-year election with unemployment through the roof, but that’s REALLY not saying a lot. And if the M$M weren’t so much in the tank, it would be painfully obvious how little the conservatives have going for them… even with Obama doing everything conceivable to keep them in the game, so that he can pull off his beloved “grand bargain” going-out-of-business sale.
This is why Newt appeals. There ISN’T any more substance left to be added to the mix. It’s all been discredited by reality, with it’s well-known liberal bias. But Newt with his spectacular bombast can keep this reality at bay MUCH better than any other “credible candidate” can. You take that away, and you face the very real risk that the entire conservative ediface may start to crumble back into its constituent parts–the Wall Streeters, nakeder than ever, the religious right, more reconstructionist than ever, and the Paulite libertarians with their insatiable thirst for the 19th Century… without, of course, the publically underwritten canals, railroads, Louisana Purchase, Homestead Act, Morril Land Grant College Act, and, oh year, THE CIVIL WAR, etc. that made it, however flawed, a century of dramatic, if erratic economic progress.
Yes, the right has TONS of money to paper over all of this. But that’s all it is… PAPERING OVER. Without Obama hatred to unify them, they’de have so little they’d be on the brink of tearing each other apart. Newt may be a crazy-quilt sociopath, but he’s THEIR crazy-quilt sociopath. And as of right now, crazy-quilt sociopathy is all they’ve got left. Toss that out, and they’ve got nothing.
p.s. Which just may be enough to get by, thanks to the neo-lib losers running the Democratic Party.
What Do You Think?
10 Responses to 'A Newt Addendum: The Crazy People’s Party Really NEEDS Him!'
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Tim [New]
Thursday, 15 Dec, 2011 at 11:32 am
What’s the angry middle-aged white boy equal to PUMA? As in Party Unity My Ass, the much loved group of Democrats Obama had to deal with?
Aside from a fun parlor game to come up with a wonderfully appropriate acronym for the Newt-lovers, you’re correct the leaders of the Republican party could have an internal revolt on their hands.
The other point I’d make regards Newt is that he is a far superior politician relative to Mitt Romney in the debates (watch almost any Jon Stewart clip from the Daily Show). Plus Newt is fun in the way clowns can be fun. While it is a tenet of aristocracy that you follow the leadership, it will be interesting to see if the Republican base goes along this time. What’s their price? And/or can the leadership generate enough racist fear mongering to get out their vote?
Emocrat [New]
Friday, 16 Dec, 2011 at 10:58 am
In watching snippets of this endless psychodrama, all I can think of now relates to Altemeyer. All these various clowns have to do is validate their audience’s world-view and the rest is just filler–nothing else is actually required. This is why Jon Hunstman, whom some mediots think is some kind of reasonable person, is now advocating war with Iran and denouncing global warming as a “liberal hoax.”
Newt gets away with his crap the same way David Vitter got away with being busted with a hooker while donning diapers. Just validate the audience and all else is forgotten. I think what stands out about Newt is his ability to get out in front of everything with the Dog Whistle. He’s clearly better at it than most. He doesn’t stand there and yip “9-9-9!”, he pivots with real Red Meat.
But that’s really it. His polls are starting to fall, like the others, but not as precipitously. For him, I guess that counts as a “win.” He’s the current winner of the “Anybody but Mitt” sweepstakes, but I wonder if it will last. There’s still a big opening if someone else cares to take it.
But at this point, President Gulag has to be pretty happy with all this, especially since his main talking point is, “I look better than those other idiots.”
I guess I’m getting Newt Fatigue or something.
Thursday, 15 Dec, 2011 at 12:41 pm
Newt’s The Clown King, to be sure. Trump was the Clown Archbishop. Too bad their Divine Right lovefest got the boot. It would have lived forever on YouTube.
PUMA was relatively minor, tho, regardless of how it seemed at the time. (I’m sure there are still grudge-holders out there, but such is life.)
The thing here with Newt is that crazy is integral to the conservative project. It’s all about (1) who gets the pain that crazy makes, and (2) how you rationalize it. Newt’s regarded as (a) too rough-edged, (b) too unrealiable and (c) too erratic. But all three traits were part & parcel of what made him so effective for the concervative cause in the first place. That’s why this particular fix the GOP is in is at least two orders of magnitude more serious than the PUMAs ever were.
But, still, the search for acronyms is always a fun pasttime. Unfortunately, on my end none that spring immediately to mind have enough vowels in them. Ah well…
Tim [New]
Thursday, 15 Dec, 2011 at 2:45 pm
Apparently Newt is an Idiot is a meme. From Alan Grayson in an email today:
My favorite image, however, was Jon Stewart putting up an image of the Pillsbury Dough Boy float from Ghost Busters. In a way, it’s too easy.
UPDATE: Actually it’s the Stay Puff character, about 1:33 in (although the whole video is amusing):
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-december-12-2011/indecision-2012—abc-news-gop-debate
Emocrat [New]
Friday, 16 Dec, 2011 at 11:52 am
I think the partisan kabuki is really getting to me now, in a rather fundamental, almost existential way. As it turns out, yesterday’s experience of watching a wee bit (nausea sets in early now) of MSNBC’s coverage of Republicans (and Nancy Pelosi’s laughably disingenuous interview with The Ed) rather filled me with dread. To wit:
Yesterday 86 US Senators–including all Democrats except Wyden, Merkley, Franken, Harkin, Cardin and Durbin–violated their oath of office in passing Obama’s assumed right to indefinitely detain Americans on US soil… for any reason POTUS deems necessary. All without habeus, due process, right to counsel or even communication with the outside world. They are all subversives at this point.
Meanwhile, the media is still having fun with the GOP Sociopathy Roundtable and generally avoiding the fact the US Constitution is being shredded before our very eyes. Well, it would be before our eyes if anyone with serious viewership thought it important enough to discuss in public.
Even on most (nay, all of them) progressive blogs I visited yesterday, only a couple bothered to even mention it. The rest are all just hyperventilating over the latest gaffes offered up by Thugs who are still, much like the long-deceased Generalissimo Francisco Franco, polling in the low single-digits… among Republicans, I might add.
So this cycle’s election kabuki is taking on a decidedly surrealistic patina. This year’s GOP psychodrama is just like previous editions, because that’s all they really know how to do. Sling a bunch of irrational mud and see what sticks. Slime and defend. Race cards are crucial for this sort of thing, since there’s nothing more distracting than the Two Minutes of Hate, with shows starting every 20 minutes or so. Seriously, without a black man in the White House, they’d really be up a creek.
On the “Democratic” side, the process is slightly different in style, but the substance is becoming oddly similar: distract people from what is actually being DONE by government with GOP soundbites guaranteed to prompt nervous howls of laughter from the audience. Nancy Pelosi comes on to validate her audience’s world-view, all while ignoring the fact that Americans can now be plucked off the street and disappeared a la Pinochet’s Chile. Then again, it’s not like anyone is asking her why she feels the need to support POTUS in that policy.
The weird thing is both sides’ comm strategies share some rather huge similarities. One pretends to be more brutal, while the other pretends to be, “really very sorry about all this poverty and stuff. But the deficit…!” But in the end, they both do the same thing: validate the world-view and distract the audience with the same old bullshit.
I’m starting to think the Weimar Republic was an awful lot like this, but less sophisticated in its bullshit.
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Tim [New]
Friday, 16 Dec, 2011 at 12:15 pm
Well it’s how you maintain the status quo, especially one that has already yielded disastrous results.
I’m amazed how many busy people I’ve heard mention this vote. Some large number of people are aware their constitutional rights are being disappeared. Perhaps they think the Supreme Court will right the wrong? But that’s delusional, in my view, given the court packing project of the past three decades. Every so often a judge will decide based on the merits and the Constitution. But it’s a slim reed.
Remember, too, that all the warrantless illegal spying gives the government the power to disappear people surgically. You don’t have to round up hundreds or thousands of people. Although I wonder if a person had a high enough public profile, would they do it? That would force the issue.
I’m sick of US politics, which is what the elites want. Things will crash eventually.
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Emocrat [New]
Friday, 16 Dec, 2011 at 1:04 pm
Well, if you’re hearing people talk about this, that’s more than what I’ve seen… which would be good. Supremes? Heh, that’s always a good one given their recent record. Still, a massive, very public challenge of this in court is absolutely necessary… if nothing else for the PR value of it. I can’t think of how else to get it into the lamestream media, other than by very publicly challenging Emperor Obama’s power. It could actually hurt him next November. Then again, maybe not. Perhaps Dems would prefer to enter Obama’s gulag than Newtie’s. That would at least be consistent with the Party meme: Hey, at least we’re not as bad as them! We’ll let you have bread AND water! And we won’t torture you as badly!
As for the method of disappearing people, surgicality is rarely if ever the point. Sure, they’ll make some trouble makers disappear, but really, it’s the fact that unmarked vans filled with unmarked paramilitaries are going around rousting innocent people out of bed at 3 AM that really makes it work like a charm. It is an instrument of State Terror, first and foremost. Randomness is what terrifies the living crap out of “normal” people who might be prone to mouthing off down at the neighborhood tavern after work. Ultimately, that is the real goal of this strategy of social control. The image of surgical removals is what justifies it, so people can denounce their neighbors after they’ve been picked up. “I don’t know what they did, but they must have done something to deserve it…” So on and so forth.
Disappearing people also makes it easy to torture them, since no one knows where they are, or even if they’re in prison at all. And with torture comes false confessions and the odd show trial, so people can see how awesome the system is at protecting them from subversives!
The US has a long history of this sort of thing elsewhere in the world. The US was central in developing the logistical structures Pinochet needed to pull of his “reforms” of Chilean society. So DOD has decades of knowledge in how to carry this out in an efficient manner.
It seems it is now our turn to be “reformed” along similar lines. I figure if Obama doesn’t pull the proverbial trigger on this, his successor will. Indeed, perhaps that will be one of his selling points: With me in power, you won’t be disappeared.
I’m starting to think the USG keeps two sets of policy “books.” One for the public, and one for itself. I’ve been slogging through various LEA policies and guidelines for managing free speech-related events and I don’t see anything that says it’s somehow OK to do any of the things we’ve seen across the country with respect to OWS. Indeed, DOJs own guidelines would suggest having Israelis, Bahrainis and Jordanians training US LEOs on “crowd control” wouldn’t even be remotely allowable.
And yet, that’s exactly what’s happening. Perhaps that’s where the privatization comes in. They have their own set of policy books.
Sadie Baker [New]
Sunday, 18 Dec, 2011 at 11:28 am
As a friend who is far wittier than I put it “Obama’s re-electon strategy = Vote for me or Newt will indefinitely detain you.”
Sigh.
Emocrat [New]
Sunday, 18 Dec, 2011 at 12:17 pm
They say great minds think alike. ;^)
David [New]
Saturday, 17 Dec, 2011 at 7:02 am
Electorally perhaps, but in terms of policy the reinvention of the conservative wing of the Republican Party as the Tea Party was pretty successful. And it was also effective (before the nomination process began) at uniting the party and energizing them – things that are always underappreciated on the other side of the spectrum.
That said, I think the talk of Republicans divided is way overblown. Rachel has been banging this drum since Obama took office. I tend to believe that the party will get behind whoever wins the nomination (which will likely be determined by elite support, which means probably Romney), unless the recent changes to their system throws a wrench in the process of elite self-organization.
Your point about Newt revealing what conservatism is all about is a good one, yet with the neoliberals in charge, as you say, we’ll never see the Democratic Party challenge them over that. We’ll keep arguing that their policies won’t lead to the outcomes they claim they want, or fighting over facts, or attacking individual Republicans for saying horrible things instead of noticing how ordinary those claims have become.
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