Newt Gingrich has a talent for putting his foot in his fat mouth. John Podhoretz recalls for us some of the more infamous Gingrichisms. Gingrich actually thought that in 1994 the American people voted him in as de facto president, all they did was vote him in to represent the 5th congressional district in Georgia. The thought of that bloated has-been running for POTUS makes just about everyone sick.
by John Podhoretz
Newt Gingrich is a very intelligent man, if he says so himself.
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I had never before met an educated person who was so determined to make reference to how educated he was.
Then, Gingrich said something unusual for a self-proclaimed educator-historian-PhD. The thinker who meant the most to him, he declared, was Alvin Toffler, author of the 1970 pop bestseller “Future Shock.”
Not Aristotle; not Plato; not Edward Gibbon, the greatest historian in the English language; not Shakespeare or Tolstoy or John Locke. Alvin Toffler.
Newt Gingrich has a restless and outsized intelligence that is tragically unleavened by any kind of critical sensibility.
Without question, he is able to see interesting things others can’t. For example, at a meeting here at The Post a dozen years ago, he offered the brilliant observation that something significant had changed when people began to trust bank machines with their paychecks rather than handing them to actual people — and that we should expect the commercial use of the Internet to explode as a result.
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But like a born actor who only really wants to direct, Gingrich has always been unsatisfied with what he’s brilliant at. He can’t still his hunger to deliver grand pronouncements on life, liberalism, conservatism, religion and whatever else swims into his consciousness.
And while he may understand the kinds of hot-button issues that get to people, what he does not understand is how he, Newt Gingrich, comes across to people. The answer: not well.
His career as a public figure has been marked by the kinds of tin-eared pronouncements, mostly about the personal misconduct of others, that can only be likened to a brilliant professional golfer who consistently knocks the ball into the same water hazard again and again.
He has a weakness for wildly inappropriate Nazi analogies. “People like me,” he said in 1994, “are what stand between us and Auschwitz.” During a bare-knuckled 1985 fight with Democrats over an Indiana House seat, he likened those who wouldn’t speak out about that supposed infamy to German Pastor Martin Neimoller, who famously said that when “they came for the Jews, I did nothing, and when they came for me, there was no one left.’ ”
The two most famous instances of his foot-in-mouth disease came when he 1) likened the Democratic Party to Woody Allen’s affair with his own pseudo-stepdaughter and 2) suggested that if you were upset by the fact that Susan Smith drowned her two children so she could run off with her boyfriend, you needed to vote Republican.
Yet, while he felt free to hold others’ personal conduct in moral contempt, he only recently offered an (almost comically self-aggrandizing) excuse for his own personal weaknesses in an interview with a Christian broadcaster: “There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”
Yes, he actually said he misbehaved because he loved his country too much.
Newt Gingrich never received more than 100,000 votes in his life. He’ll never be president.
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Read the rest: Welcome to the Newt show
Tags: John Podhoretz
