Why I will not accept Joe Biden as president - Newt Gingrich

 A smart friend of mine who is a moderate liberal asked why I was not recognizing Joe Biden’s victory.

The friend made the case that Mr. Biden had gotten more votes, and historically we recognize the person with the most votes. Normally, we accept the outcome of elections just as we accept the outcomes of sporting events.

So, my friend asked why was 2020 different?

Having spent more than four years watching the left #Resist President Donald Trump and focus entirely on undoing and undermining the 2016 election, it took me several days to understand the depth of my own feelings.

As I thought about it, I realized my anger and fear were not narrowly focused on votes. My unwillingness to relax and accept that the election grew out of a level of outrage and alienation unlike anything I had experienced in more than 60 years involvement in public affairs.

The challenge is that I — and other conservatives — are not disagreeing with the left within a commonly understood world. We live in alternative worlds.

The left’s world is mostly the established world of the forces who have been dominant for most of my life.

My world is the populist rebellion which believes we are being destroyed, our liberties are being cancelled and our religions are under assault. (Note the new Human Rights Campaign to decertify any religious school which does not accept secular sexual values — and that many Democrat governors have kept casinos open while closing churches though the COVID-19 pandemic.) We also believe other Democrat-led COVID-19 policies have enriched the wealthy while crushing middle class small business owners (some 160,000 restaurants may close).

In this context, let’s talk first about the recent past and the presidency.

The Absolute Moral Authority of Being Black

Charles Blow

In today's column, The Genetic Fallacy, James Taranto does what Newt Gingrich did to Juan Williams in reacting to NY Times columnist Charles Blow who asserts his moral authority to call Gingrich a racist because, to quote his tweet:

"Don't need Newt 2 tell me abt blk ppl, work and food stamps. Ancestors worked 4 free, nearly starved 2 death & were branded w cattle stamps!"

This is reminiscent of Maureen Dowd’s anointing of Cindy Sheehan. Because she had a son who died in Viet Nam, Sheehan had “absolute” moral authority. In Dowd’s words:

“ …the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute.”

Today, the Left anoints black people, especially those whose ancestors were slaves with the absolute moral authority to call people racists who believe that - fifty years after the civil rights act was passed - it’s time to treat everyone equally.

Taranto reflects the views of many of us, especially the young when he says:

Nonetheless, to those whites for whom white guilt is not rooted in experience--those, including this columnist, who are too young to remember a time when full citizenship for blacks was a cruel fiction--the culture of white guilt can seem unfair and irrational, and can be a source of irritation and anger. Why is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People respected while a National Association for the Advancement of White People would be considered racist? Why did Obama get away with calling his grandmother "a typical white person," when a white politician who made the same statement about a black person would be pilloried?

There are reasonable answers to questions like these--answers that are obvious to those who are old enough to remember Jim Crow or who have a sufficiently deep understanding of American history. What is not a reasonable answer is a hectoring assertion of one's own moral authority, either as a black person or as an enlightened white.

As with many unexamined attitudes, it may take the passing of a generation to eliminate old prejudices.

One cannot go backward. White supremacy is as good as dead, and white guilt is dying along with guilty whites of older generations. Both these developments constitute progress toward racial equality. The election of a black president was the most compelling dramatization this country has seen of the death of white supremacy. In our view, it is also hastening the demise of white guilt.

The question for people like Charles Blow is what kind of blowback the stoking of racial animosity that he specializes in will generate from a generation that doesn’t feel guilt because it isn’t guilty. The answer may be found in the reaction of the audience when they rose to their feet to applaud Newt when he said:

"I believe every American of every background has been endowed by their Creator with the right to pursue happiness, and if that makes liberals unhappy, I'm going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn someday to own the job."

For Blow to denounce these words that echo the promise of a better America is very, very troubling.

Gingrich Beats Media in South Carolina, 54 to 14

Well, yeah ... that's why he won.  Duh!

Gingrich opens the debate.

If only Mitt Romney had it in him to do the same thing, this election would be over. Could we have a Romney - Gingrich slate for 2012?

Rush Limbaugh: “Are journalists monogamous?”

More: Drudge Screwed Up ABC's Plans for the Marianne Gingrich Interview


Even more Limbaugh: Barack Obama is the Problem

The things that I do know are that this country is precariously balanced on an edge -- and if it goes the wrong way, the country as you and I know it is finished. What I know is, as I said yesterday: Whatever Mitt Romney's tax rate is, he's not responsible for that.

Mitt Romney nor Newt Gingrich nor Rick Santorum nor Rick Perry have anything to do with the economic misery in this country. That is traceable to one man and one location: Barack Obama and the Oval Office. Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Santorum have not played over 90 rounds of golf in three years while everybody's suffering. Gingrich, Romney, Santorum, the Republican nominees have not flown all over the world on the federal government's dime. They're not having lavish parties and concerts on the public's dime. They're not living like kings on other people's money.

Obama sends his wife on government jets four hours ahead of him to the same destination, or she decides to take the jet herself. The Republicans are not doing that.

Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich will be taking a pay cut. For Obama winning the White House was a path to wealth. For the Republican nominees all except Santorum, now, it will be a pay cut. Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Santorum. None of the Republican candidates are responsible for the 16% real unemployment in this country. They are not responsible for the increased fuel and food costs. They are not responsible for any of this. That would be Obama, who pretends to care about the middle class but lives like a king at the public trough. Mitt Romney's not the problem. Newt Gingrich is not the problem. Rick Santorum is not the problem.

We find ourselves in the mess that we are in, precariously balanced on the edge, because of Barack Obama.

The Food Stamp President

What are the facts?  The Left (see Andrea Mitchell and Chris Matthews) is trying to tell us that the reason we have more people are on food stamp because there are more people.

But here are the numbers, via Powerline: the money spent on food stamps has DOUBLED since 2008.



The population hasn’t doubled. Sure, we are in a recession; a recession that the Obama administration has had three years to fix and at which it has failed miserably. The answer of Team Obama is not to get America working again, but to pay people to be unemployed for 99 weeks and to give them food stamps.

The Obama administration sees Detroit and likes the model.   "Prolonged Death Spiral."

Newt tackles race card -slams it into ground.

THIS is the reason Newt Gingrich is still in the race for the Republican nomination. He is willing, and able, to give it back to the Liberals in the media in a way that people can understand, and enjoy. Who with a trace of red blood in his veins does not enjoy watching Newt cram the ball down Juan Williams' throat?

That’s old news. Move on.

One of the keys to the Clinton administration’s success  in dealing with bimbo eruptions and other scandals was to tell the press that they were talking about old news, it’s time to … “move on.” There was an entire movement that went by the name “Move on” that not only helped Bill Clinton weather his political scandals but helped elect Barack Obama.

Suppose that George Romney learned a lesson from Move On?

Stay with me here. The "Move On" concept was tremendously useful not just to Clinton but also to Obama. The skeletons in Obama’s closet: Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, even Tony Resko were quickly dropped by the MSM after receiving just enough mention to deflect the accusation that they never mentioned them at all.

“Sure” the media big feet would say, we wrote about Wright's “God damn America” ... once; Ayers was just a guy in Obama's neighborhood and Resko was a guy that the Obama's bought a lot from.  We covered it. And that was it. When the media wants to cover something they remember the secret of advertising: repetition. A single ad doesn’t work; repeat it often enough so that everyone can sing the jingle and it sells ... big time. That’s the way it works and the MSM knows it.  When the New York Times decided that the Augusta National Golf Club should admit female members - a story that no one cared about - they ran over 50 stories, as did the Los Angeles Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  The Washington Post and USA Today only ran over 40 stories, all to help a feminist with an axe to grind.  They almost got that venerable club to cave, and the only people who cared were the editors at the MSM.  The rest of the country still doesn't care.

So pivot to Newt Gingrich and the rest of the team trailing in the wake of the Romney coronation. It should be obvious by now that unless Mitt Romney commits suicide, he will be the Republican nominee. Why would reasonably intelligent men like Gingrich continue to attack him when the best strategy would be to drop out and seek a place in the Romney administration?  No one is angry enough to run through millions of dollars just for revenge unless he's a lot richer than Gingrich.  Here’s where the strategy could get very, very deep. Suppose they are raising the issues that the Obama campaign is going to raise so that Romney can call them “old news” and tell the media to “move on.”

To use a medical analogy, the attacks that Romney’s opponents are mounting are like an inoculation, designed to give Romney a slight fever but to allow his system to create the antibodies to ward off the much more vicious attacks that Team Obama is preparing. I believe that’s what some other commentator are implying when they say that these attacks are actually good for Romney. I would go further and suggest that Gingrich and some of the others are actually deliberately in cahoots with Romney. We’ll see if that’s true by his response.

Of course the MSM will not move on for Mitt Romney; he's a Republican.  But by the time the general election rolls around the public will be supersaturated with "Mitt, the Wolf of Wall Street."  He just doesn't look the part, or act the part.  And the public will be ready to "Move On." Is he that many moves ahead? We’ll see.

“The future is known. It’s the past that keeps changing.”

The Soviet Union had a habit of editing and airbrushing history books as a result of Stalin’s purges. One of the most popular jokes among Soviet citizens was: “The future is known. It’s the past that keeps changing.”

Editing the past is one of the favorite past-times of all ideologues, and because Democrats are in charge of academia and the press, the good things that happened in the past are always done by The Left and all the bad things by the Right.

My latest example, brought about by the current concern about government debt and deficits is the myth that “Clinton balanced the budget.” Whether people who write that are simply misled or are lying is immaterial because it’s simply wrong. Clinton was in office when the “budget was balanced” (and I use scare quotes deliberately) and so was Jacques Chirac, the President of France. Neither one is responsible for balancing the Federal budget.

I was there at the time and paying attention. The facts are fairly simple; Clinton came into office with plans that promised deficits as far as the eye could see. Republicans in Congress, led by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich blasted Clinton for this and made balancing the budget a political priority. The following years provided a gusher of revenue for the government caused by a stock market propelled by the dot.com bubble. Clinton, ever the smart politician, decided to take credit for the inevitable and – having resisted the calls from Congress for a balanced budget for most of his two terms – suddenly had a “road to Damascus” conversion and announced that he was now for a balanced budget. The conversion from spender to budget balancer has two primary reasons: (1) to take credit for a politically popular act and (2) to resist the call for reducing the tax increase Clinton and the Democrats in Congress enacted at the beginning of his term.

But back to that so-called “balanced budget” or “budget surplus.” Surprise, there wasn’t one. And this is something I did not realize at the time because I too was fooled by the headlines and the stories in the press. That was a time when people in the financial community were actually worried about a shortage of US Government Treasury bonds! How could we have been so wrong?  Well, keep in mind that "smart" investors also believed that dot.com start ups with no earnings and no revenues were worth billions.

So how much did the national debt decline when we were running that fabled budget surplus in the late 1990s? Nothing? You mean the debt actually rose when the papers were full of praise for budget surpluses? How can that be? Let Craig Steiner explain. The BEST year of “budget surpluses” during the Clinton presidency saw the national debt go up nearly $18 billion. After you read this you’ll never again believe either the government or the press. After the dot.com bubble burst and the attack on 9/11 occurred those fanciful “budget surpluses” disappeared.

This will not dispel the myth of the Clinton budget surplus. It’s too valuable to the Democrats and to the press. Remember Comrades, a lie told often enough becomes the truth.

Newt Gingrich To Obama: Let's Debate, You Can Use Your Teleprompter