Gingrich, Like Cagney, Is Better than Romney

  Newt Gives It to the Taxpayers



The Economist was ebullient when Romney was winning. Now that Gingrich has trounced Romney in South Carolina, our financial overlords in the City of London and on Wall Street may be may be a bit less, but almost as, content. The difference between Romney and Gingrich is like the difference between Cary Grant and James Cagney. Romney, the debonair aristocrat, an opportunist beneath his manly charm, Gingrich, the thug who twirls around in a ménage à trois before mashing a grapefruit in taxpayers' faces (see Cagney's Gingrich-like performance in The Public Enemy above).  These are two dogs out of the Council on Foreign Relations' kennel.

Of the four standing GOP candidates Romney is the most accomplished, having achieved impressive business success.  In contrast, Gingrich's chief achievement, his appointment to speaker of the house, led to quick failure due to his incompetence.  Romney is a stable and cautious friend of global financial interests while Gingrich is full of big ideas, each one more destructive than the last.  In the last debate, Gingrich's proposal for a government subsidy to build a port in Charleston was an example. Gingrich seems to have planned a massive pork barrel project for each city in which a debate is held.

Romney blows with the winds; Gingrich proves that 180-year-old tax-and-spend Whig socialism is alive and well. Romney is in the centrist, globalist, and corporatist tradition of Richard Nixon;  Gingrich is in the Whig tradition of Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln practically bankrupted Illinois with frivolous infrastructure projects, and, now that Illinois's credit rating has been reduced, what better expression of the GOP's big government Whig tradition than to nominate Gingrich?

Presidents don't usually win or lose because of ideas. Lyndon Baines Johnson fought Goldwater over the New Deal, but Kennedy had just been shot. Perhaps Ronald Reagan fought a campaign of ideas, but would he have won without his actor's charm?  And did he really believe that government was the problem? He didn't act like it.  Rather than ideas, Nixon's half-day-old whiskers are the kind of issue that America's increasingly impoverished electorate emphasizes. America was once the richest and freest country in the world, but television news has led it to its favoring candidates, like Gingrich, Romney, and Obama, who are bleeding them, diminishing their freedom, and creating a paper money aristocracy at their expense.

That said, Gingrich is better than Romney for one reason: Gingrich can't win. He can't win because his image is tarnished, he is fat, his ideas are ridiculous, and he is an imaginative sexual virtuoso.  That makes him preferable to Romney, who can win. 

The most important thing in this election is a strident protest vote.  The greater and more explicit the vote against the Federal Reserve Bank, the greater a threat to its political security, the sooner the Ron Paul revolution will win.  In the event that Paul loses the primary race (and his 13% showing was better than in '08, but discouraging), a vote for the Libertarian Party in the general election will speak more loudly than one for the GOP candidate. There is more likely to be a stronger protest vote with a Gingrich than with a Romney candidacy.

As well, a Republican Congress coupled with a Democratic presidency is unlikely to achieve much. That is the best we can hope for.  If the Republicans win both branches, we will see plenty of ports and plenty of pork in Charleston and every other hurricane-prone city in the country, if not the world.