Search This Blog

Monday, December 5, 2011

Maureen Dowd on Gingrich

Dowd can be incredibly trivial and snarky at times but she sums up Gingrich perfectly. sums up Gingrich perfectly.

Newt Gingrich’s mind is in love with itself.

It has persuaded itself that it is brilliant when it is merely promiscuous. This is not a serious mind. Gingrich is not, to put it mildly, a systematic thinker.

His mind is a jumble, an amateurish mess lacking impulse control. He plays air guitar with ideas, producing air ideas. He ejaculates concepts, notions and theories that are as inconsistent as his behavior.

He didn’t get whiplash being a serial adulterer while impeaching another serial adulterer, a lobbyist for Freddie Mac while attacking Freddie Mac, a self-professed fiscal conservative with a whopping Tiffany’s credit line, and an anti-Communist Army brat who supported the Vietnam War but dodged it.


If he wins the nomination will these failings sink him? Not necessarily. His glibness has a way of making his most absurd ideas sound reasonable.

His glibness will serve him better than any of the other GOP hopefuls in debating Obama. His baggage may hurt but then again Americans have notoriously short memories. The best political strategy for the Democrats may be to use a PAC to attack him from the right for his vast arsenal of contradictions. Their best hope may be to peel away a percentage of the Tea Party zealots from voting for him, then again their obsessive hatred for Obama may cause them to hold their noses while voting for Gingrich.

No comments: