POLITICUSUSA
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich congratulated President Donald Trump for receiving a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize and claimed former President Barack Obama merely received the prestigious award “for waking up and they gave it to him at the very beginning of his administration.”
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich repeated President Donald Trump’s own false claims about mail-in voting, saying that Democrats can’t win an “honest election” so they are trying “to set up an ability to steal it.”
Newt Gingrich has suggested that Donald Trump can turn his campaign around by adopting Richard Nixon’s 1972 election strategy. That was the year of the Watergate break-in.
In an extensive new report, Politico outlines how the President’s usual tactics don’t seem to be working against former Vice President Joe Biden. The article explains Gingrich’s thinking.
Are the majority of Americans lazy and averse to work? Would they prefer not to work and to enjoy a free ride from the government?
How we answer this question, or how congressional leaders answer it, has a lot to do with what is really life-or-death legislation coming out of Washington, particularly with regards to COVID-19 relief packages.
Americans enduring unemployment have typically, in the culture of the U.S. political economy, not been responded to with sympathy but rather with disdain, judgment, and blame.
And this has been true, we see, even when the nation has faced conditions of great economic austerity, begging the question, how can we blame people for not working when there is a scarcity of jobs?
Donald Trump has been attacking Bob Mueller’s special counsel investigation for nearly two years, calling it “a witch hunt” and “a hoax.” But according to the Associated Press, he may try to claim victory and upend Robert Mueller’s report no matter what it says.
Mueller may issue a report any day now, and as we wait the president and his Republican allies are saying that they expect it to show no clear evidence of Trump wrongdoing. They continue to maintain that the Trump campaign did not conspire (or “collude”) with Russia during the 2016 campaign which gave Trump a surprising victory.
Trump and his GOP congressional allies seem strangely confident that he will be exonerated despite Mueller’s findings. In fact, they are now saying that the Muller report will be used for Trump’s political advantage.
The AP reported:
“One scenario would have seemed downright implausible until recently. The president will take the findings and run on them, rather than against them, by painting the special counsel as an example of failed government overreach and Trump himself as the victim who managed to prove his innocence.”
"They're going to get somebody, and they're going to get him for something. And they're probably going to go to jail."
"They should abolish the Congressional Budget Office. It is corrupt. It is dishonest," Gingrich said.
"Those bureaucrats overwhelmingly voted for Clinton. There won’t be any real cooperation until we change federal law so we can fire them.”
"This a ridiculous shame? He loves these kids, has raised millions of dollars for them, and now must stop. Wrong answer!"
"I'm told he now just disclaims that. He now says it was cute, but he doesn't want to use it anymore."
"He could simply say, ‘Look, I want them to be my advisers. I pardon them if anyone finds them to have behaved against the rules. Period."
Ethics violator and Chief Clinton conspiracy monger from the 90s Newt Gingrich called Jill Stein the "nut wing of American politics" today in an effort to defend Donald Trump from her recall.
The Trump campaign has spent months questioning the legitimacy of the FBI.
Megyn Kelly took down Trump surrogate Newt Gingrich while destroying the Republican presidential nominee, and igniting the next phase of the implosion of the Republican Party.
"I think you have a duty...to have the courage to stand up and tell the truth; tell the truth about those who would impose a totalitarian secularism on us"
Teleprompter Trump tried to pivot to the economy this week in Detroit. Real Trump was having none of that.
Newt Gingrich accused the Bush family of behaving “childishly” simply because they had the prescience to avoid the Trump clownshow, aka the Republican National Convention.
Newt Gingrich showed up on Fox News’ Hannity Thursday to call for something really “kooky” (Bill Kristol’s words) – the imposition of religious tests for Muslims:
“We should frankly test every person here who is of a Muslim background, and if they believe in Sharia, they should be deported.”
This is coming from one of Donald Trump’s most likely VP picks.
In any normal election year, Gingrich would have taken himself out of the running with his remarks, and we can never know what effect they had if any, on Trump’s eventual decision. But in any normal election year Donald Trump would not be in a position to be picking a VP.
He would be off doing normal Trump-things, like screwing over his employees and stiffing vendors and contractors.
Not screwing the American people.
Sean Hannity got the ball rolling by asking Gingrich about a favorite conservative talking point, the Islamization of Europe:
SEAN HANNITY (HOST): I don’t want to really tie this into politics, but every issue America is now dealing with, every issue that we have discussed in recent months and years about the Islamization of Europe, about refugees, about immigration, about open borders — it seems to come together, and also political correctness and not recognizing radical Islamic terrorism as the enemy and evil in our time. From your perspective, what does this tragedy, this evil attack tonight, mean for that conflict and debate?
NEWT GINGRICH: Well, first of all, Sean, as you know, I was in Paris just last weekend talking with people who are deeply involved in trying to deal with the Iranian government and other sources of terrorism. And let me also say Daniel Silva has a remarkable new novel called Black Widow, and the entire opening section is on the systematic Islamic attack on Jews in France, which is the worst it’s been since the Nazis. So let me start with where I’m coming from, and let me be as blunt and as direct as I can be.
Yes. Daniel Silva. Good book. Thriller. FICTION. Perhaps Gingrich has been reading too many of Bill O’Reilly’s historical fiction best-sellers and getting fact and fiction confused. Remember how the Bush administration drew inspiration for its torture program from television’s “24”? If Jack Bauer can do it, why can’t we?
Then he returned to some favorite Nazi tropes about Western Civilization at war. Hitler was prepared to do all sorts of horrible things in the name of Western Civilization as well:
Western civilization is in a war. We should frankly test every person here who is of a Muslim background, and if they believe in Sharia, they should be deported. Sharia is incompatible with Western civilization. Modern Muslims who have given up Sharia, glad to have them as citizens. Perfectly happy to have them next door. But we need to be fairly relentless about defining who our enemies are. Anybody who goes on a website favoring ISIS, or Al Qaeda, or other terrorist groups, that should be a felony, and they should go to jail. Any organization which hosts such a website should be engaged in a felony. It should be closed down immediately.
Our forces should be used to systematically destroy every internet-based source. And frankly if we can’t destroy them through the internet, we should destroy them with kinetic power, using various weapons starting with Predators, and frankly just killing them. I am sick and tired of being told that the wealthiest, most powerful civilization in history, all of Western civilization, is helpless in the face of a group of medieval barbarians who, for example, recently burned 20 young women to death — burned them to death because they wouldn’t have sex with them. A group which beheaded recently in the Philippines two Canadian businessmen.
So we have this thing called the First Amendment which protects our right to believe as we will in religious matters. Republicans can pretend all they want that the world’s second-largest religion is not a religion, but it is a religion. They can even pretend Sharia is something peculiarly and uniquely pernicious, but Sharia is pretty much identical to the Law of Moses Evangelicals go on and on about, telling us all (like they complain Muslims do) that we must all obey it.
Gingrich wasn’t just talking about religious tests, however:
“Look, the first step is you have to ask them the questions. The second step is you have to monitor what they’re doing on the internet. The third step is — let me be very clear. You have to monitor the mosques. I mean if you’re not prepared to monitor the mosque, this whole thing is a joke.”
Hannity said this was “a powerful statement” and that he agreed “wholeheartedly.” Of course he did. You can’t separate Hannity from stupidity.
Yet even Fox News contributor Stephen Hayes tweeted his objections to the plan, calling it “embarrassing”:
Embarrassing. And from someone who surely knows better. https://t.co/zBuIiTFhOH
— Stephen Hayes (@stephenfhayes) July 15, 2016
And Bill Kristol was no less scathing in his response:
Curious: Is Newt proposing Congress enact unconstitutional law, or that president act unconstitutionally on his own? https://t.co/6drR1v7T5a
It's official: On Friday in New York, Donald Trump will announce the poor soul who he's chosen to be his running mate.