In New York, Gingrich envisions a world of gun-owners
Speaking last night at the New York State Republican Party’s annual dinner in Manhattan, Gingrich said that in “a place like Darfur, if the helpless were able to protect themselves, there’d be fewer murders, fewer robbers, fewer rapists.”
The Republican presidential candidate, who is out of contention but still running, said he recently called for the United States to propose a treaty to the United Nations declaring the right to bear arms a “natural” right of all people.
Romney’s New York backers tell Newt’s supporters that they’re wrecking the party.
The most forceful denunciations of Gingrich came from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who appeared on Romney’s behalf on “Meet the Press.” “This is a guy who’s had a very difficult political career at times, and that has been an embarrassment to the party,” said Christie, who added that “sometimes past is prologue.” More from Reid’s Sunday morning news show roundup.
It is difficult to strike a balance between the way the modern G.O.P. wants to see itself and the way much of its base wants to see the Civil War. The inconvenient fact of slavery always comes up, which, no matter how much one idolizes Robert E. Lee or admires the resilience of the ragged warriors of the Army of Northern Virginia, makes it impossible to justify the cause for which they fought.
But Gingrich manages to avoid the balancing act entirely. By writing fiction, he creates a past in which the most inconvenient facts simply don’t exist.
Gingrich has made it a talking point that kids these days, particularly in poorer neighborhoods, aren’t sufficiently imbued with the ethics of hard work.
“Take some of those kids who are in danger of dropping out. What if they were the assistant clerk in the front office? What if they helped in the kitchen?” he asked.
He also tried to clarify a prior suggestion about them doing janitorial work by saying he wasn’t talking about “heavy, dangerous janitorial work.”
“There are a number of things done to clean buildings that are not heavy or dangerous,” he said, adding that it would give them a little extra money in their pockets.”This is called America. It’s how people rise in America. They learn to work.”
Gingrich is a former history professor, as he is always happy to remind people, and his books teem with eclectic erudition: warnings about civilizational collapse mix with Popular Science-style prognostications about space travel and exotic weapons, and ritual invocations of the Founding Fathers. He sprinkles even his most pedestrian passages—a triumphant defense of the Willy Horton ad used against Michael Dukakis, say, or a discussion of a now-forgotten Teamsters strike against U.P.S.—with references to MacArthur’s landing at Inchon and the German war strategy. Amid all this intellectual riffing, though, one theme rings constant: Gingrich subscribes to the Great Man view of history, and he admires one very great man in particular.
