I expect a lot of debate over whether this guy is crazy or simply playing it. My vote is for the latter. He’s too concise, specific, and absolutely dead on with his use of absurdity as satire for this to be crazy. Particularly the bit about ponies, which is actually almost verbatim the talking [...]]]>

I expect a lot of debate over whether this guy is crazy or simply playing it. My vote is for the latter. He’s too concise, specific, and absolutely dead on with his use of absurdity as satire for this to be crazy. Particularly the bit about ponies, which is actually almost verbatim the talking points heard for other programs pushed by politicians with a close association with certain special interests.

Well, okay, that might be true and he might still be a little crazy. But whether on purpose or accidental, it’s some of the most brilliant political satire I’ve seen.

NOTE: Randall Terry, seen at the end of the video, disowned his own son for being homosexual.

Watch the video in full. The whole thing is gold.

Gingrich has been positioned as a “thinking man’s candidate” amidst a field consisting of bigots, caricatures, and charlatans [...]]]> Let’s talk about Newt Gingrich, the alleged intellectual who has inconceivably risen towards to top of the field for the GOP nomination in 2012, despite being about twenty years past his expiration date for relevance and integrity.

Gingrich has been positioned as a “thinking man’s candidate” amidst a field consisting of bigots, caricatures, and charlatans that have run themselves off a cliff in pursuit of the highest office in the land. Even Herman Cain and Rick Perry, who had appeared to be taken seriously for a short stretch, have been plagued with concerns raised through media vetting that have been exponentially exacerbated by their inability to say something that doesn’t make any given situation worse for them.

And so now we find ourselves with, realistically, a two-man race: Romney, who faces very real challenges as a compromising official facing a Christian right that is aggressively apprehensive towards anyone of Mormon faith, and Newt Gingrich, the intellectual who is nothing of the sort.

Where do we even begin to address this farce?

For starters there was Gingrich’s comment to The National Review that Obama possessed a Kenyan, anti-colonial world view that served as a predictive model for his behavior. If you’re wondering what he means, you’re not the only one. Supposedly Obama developed that Kenyan anti-colonial sensibility sometime during the age of six to ten in…Indonesia. Or perhaps during the rest of his childhood, which was spent in Hawaii before leaving for Los Angeles after High School to pursue his education. Perhaps he got it from his absentee and estranged father? Or maybe Newt is just an overtly racist buffoon. Only he knows the real answer, and the rest of us can only speculate.

Throughout his career, Gingrich has cultivated an image of a conservative intellectual that, like any other PR concoction, does not hold up to scrutiny.

This tone is in keeping with his rhetoric, which one must not mistake for intellect or discourse. It is, rather, self-serving blustery bile that eschews hate and vitriol to reinforce an ignorant electorate rather than encourage debate and change. He himself has gone on record saying that the quest to win elections is, for all intents and purposes, a civil war war, giving it the same breadth and earnestness as a bloody conflict but with ballots in place of bullets.

No man who possesses this attitude about politics and society while labeling any and all opposition as fascist, Soviet, or both, should be bestowed the honor of being an intellectual. A strategist, maybe. A hack, definitely. But not an intellectual.

Even if we were to discount these statements as the exaggerations of a paid consultant and occasional pundit, there’s still the issue of his role in fanning the flames of ignorance and, at times, bigotry in recent social and political debates.

When Prop 8 in California was proposed to eliminate same-sex marriage, a coalition of anti-gay extremists spread a wealth of disinformation and lobbied successfully to pass a measure in a mostly democratic state that eliminated civil rights and spread shame throughout this country. Ever the opportunist, Gingrich supported the ban with numerous appearances throughout radio and television. He even went so far to say the following on Fox’s O’Reilly Factor:

I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion.”

Because rather than being advocates for equality, or even at a more base level concerned with the fact that a law was being passed in 2011 that actually revoked civil rights rather than strengthening them, opponents of the measure were instead trying to stifle the rights of others by restricting their right to say others have no rights. Got that? If not, don’t worry, you’re just not an intellectual.

Gingrich has consistently praised and supported Tea Party candidates and now finds himself looking like a shining light in a field of hopeless TP buffoons.

Then there was the infamous dust-up over the Ground Zero Mosque, which was neither a Mosque nor at Ground Zero (two blocks away). For all his faults, I at least understood where Rudolph Giuliani (among others) was coming from. September 11th left a permanent scar on the face of New Yorkers, and anybody who was there that day is going to react first and foremost with emotion when something comes forth that may re-open that wound or at the very least pick at its scabs. I disagreed, and thought that Giuliani and others were getting caught up in the political opportunism of those that were eager to placate a hysterical and racist base. Among those was, once again, our friend the intellectual. His argument was that there should be no Mosque near Ground Zero because of the lack of religious freedoms in other countries.

No, really:

There shouldn’t be a mosque anywhere in the general vicinity of Ground Zero so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.

The proposed “Cordoba House” overlooking the World Trade Center site – where a group of jihadists killed over 3000 Americans and destroyed one of our most famous landmarks – is a test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites. For example, most of them don’t understand that “Cordoba House” is a deliberately insulting term. It refers to Cordoba, Spain – the capital of Muslim conquerors who symbolized their victory over the Christian Spaniards by transforming a church there into the world’s third-largest mosque complex.

America should not, then, strive to be better than other citizens of the world. We should not lead the charge for freedom and tolerance. Rather, stupid is as stupid does, and if there’s no church in Saudi Arabia then there’s no Mosque in Manhattan. Even though, again, this wasn’t a Mosque and this is actually America. It is also worth noting that the purpose of calling the religious interfaith portion of the project “Cordoba House” (not the name of the building itself as was implied by many) was in reference to the fact that there WERE synagogues and Christian churches in the Muslim capital after the conquest. It was meant to be symbolic of the exact kind of interfaith exchange that Gingrich thinks we should restrict for the sake of sentimentality and the realities of an unrelated foreign government. And if the intellectual thinks that this is somehow offensive simply because it also invokes a Muslim empire from hundreds of years ago, then he should probably get to work on ridding us of all those odes and references throughout our culture to conquests and practices of the Roman and British empires.

Then there’s the hot button issue of health care. When “Obamacare” was in debate, Gingrich strongly supported and repeated the astoundingly ignorant (and boastfully reckless) “death panel” claim made by Sarah Palin. Palin’s imaginary scenario was actually co-opted from a practice at Gundersen Lutheran Hospital in La Crosse, Wisconsin, whose end of life care brought forth not only discussion on how hospitals handle the dying but also saved it millions in costs. As such, it actually drew praise from both those who support forward-thinking ideas about dignity in dying and fiscal Conservatives, one of whom said that if all hospitals were to apply Gundersen’s approach it would save Medicare more than $33 million a year.

By the way, that fiscal conservative? Newt Gingrich.

I am not naive enough to think that a man who is running for an elected office can be realistically expected to be one hundred percent honest, forthright, and everything he claims to be. Far from it. I think it is a self-defeating cynicism, and I strive for better, but I would not kid myself by saying Gingrich is the sole offender of these crimes against intellect and national discourse.

It’s just that the best that could be said is that he’s the worst of the best of them, and there has been absolutely nothing in his career to suggest that he should be seen as an intellectual or even a thinker. He is an opportunist, and he is ambitious. And he has a PhD in Medieval history. But even that, as has been shown, is something that he knowingly misconstrues for votes. Or, perhaps more apt, for dollars at the expense of sense.

“In 2010 when I was deployed to Iraq, I had to lie about who I was because I’m a gay soldier and I didn’t want to lose my [...]]]> A small controversy erupted at the Fox News/Google GOP debate in Florida last week when a now openly gay soldier submitted a YouTube question to the panel.

“In 2010 when I was deployed to Iraq, I had to lie about who I was because I’m a gay soldier and I didn’t want to lose my job. My question is, under one of your Presidencies, do you intend to circumvent the progress that’s been made for gay and lesbian soldiers in the military?”

This was, notoriously, followed by a small portion of the live audience booing loudly with no small amount of derision and hostility.

What was more disconcerting to me, though, was Santorum’s response. Firstly, he did not acknowledge those very loud boos for an American soldier and did not chastise that very vocal group for their treatment of the man and his question, which for anyone with any semblance of decency should have been first and foremost on their agenda.

Instead, he began with this:

“I would say that any kind of sexual activity has no place in the military and the fact that they’re making it a point to include it as a provision and that we’re going to recognize a group of people and give them a special privilege to-and-deh-in removing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

The video, a little over two minutes in length, is below.

Okay, let’s back up.

Firstly, “any kind of sexual activity has no place in the military.” What exactly does this statement mean? What he wants to say is that sexual orientation has no place in the military. However, Santorum’s pathological bias against homosexuals can’t be hidden. He’s a guy that wears his feelings, and his insecurities, on his sleeve. Homosexuals are deviants. And they are a verb, not a noun, and that verb is a vile act.

The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” provides soldiers with the ability to acknowledge that they are gay, particularly if they are confronted with it, without fear of retribution from superiors and peers in the military. Rick Santorum, however, seems to think that it means that not only will gay soldiers go around yelling about how gay they are all the damn time, but they’ll follow it up with “and now we will have butt sex in front of EVERYONE.”

I jest, but his phrasing is important because it betrays a very outdated and somewhat warped sense of what being a homosexual is: it’s not an orientation or who you are, but rather a fetish akin to someone who smells shoes or sucks toes. So for me, I wasn’t bothered by the booing, because it really was a small handful of cranks that were quickly shushed, and there were just as many others (if not more) in the audience  that applauded the soldier for his question and his bravery. What I was and continue to be bothered and deeply concerned by is not only Santorum’s nervous, blustery bigotry, but the undue sensitivity granted to him and his archaic world view by pundits and the general public. The mainstream media took a small handful of anonymous, boorish crowd members to task, but not the Presidential hopeful who champions the rhetoric.

Rick Santorum complained last week about the search engine Google and how it wasn’t doing anything to eliminate the horrible and offensive search results that come up when you enter his name as a query. I was curious, so I entered his name myself. The second entry is to his Wikipedia page, but the first entry was to Spreading Santorum, a site that lists the new definition of “Santorum” provided by a reader of gay columnist Dan Savage in response to Santorum’s description of pedophilia in priests as a “homosexual relationship.” I felt and do feel for him, and honestly wish Savage had never done it. It’s imbecilic and childish, and only lends the man the appearance of being a victim himself.

It also distracts from what I assumed he meant when he complained about offensive search results: all the terrible things he’s said and believes about gay people.

Well…kind of.

Actually, Donald Trump doesn’t want to be President. Donald Trump [...]]]>

Image via Wikipedia

Entertainment headlines the last several weeks have been dominated by Donald Trump’s speculated Presidential bid. Trump has been everything from a bankrupt billionaire to a morally bankrupt reality television show host, and now he wants to be your next President of the United States.

Well…kind of.

Actually, Donald Trump doesn’t want to be President. Donald Trump isn’t the man who spoke before the CPAC Conference recently and was heckled by the Tea Party portion of the crowd. Donald Trump isn’t the guy who’s been making the rounds talking up his potential Presidential bid and suggesting he may run as an Independent instead of as a Republican. Donald Trump isn’t the one saying he doesn’t believe Obama was born in the United States (even though he totally was). Donald Trump didn’t recently call Bush the “worst President in history,” further polarizing himself amongst other GOP Presidential hopefuls.

That was television character The Donald.

We’re coming out of a decade where reality television dominated the landscape. Fortunately (for us), that era is coming to an end. The popularity of these shows is no longer guaranteed; slumping ratings for key shows and the embarrassingly low attendance at the recent Reality Rocks! Expo in Los Angeles are further proof that television is trending away from cheap voyeur programming. However, despite the sharp decline in popularity, it has left in its wake a permanent legacy: people knowingly portraying caricatures of themselves for the sake of entertainment or, more often, self-promotion.

The Donald from New York, like The Situation from the Jersey Shore, isn’t the same guy in front of a camera that he would be if you were to meet him in private. It’s a version of the real person with the volume turned up, along with a handful of personality traits created during the course of a television series. Although he made a name for himself initially in Real Estate, Trump has co-opted a method perfected by a new type of celebrity that is famous simply for being famous rather than any particular talent.

It’s not just his portrayal of The Donald  persona in public appearances that has me skeptical of a Presidential run. It’s also the timing. Talk of his running started in early March, the same time NBC was premiering the latest season of “Celebrity Apprentice.” Now he’s stated he’ll make his official decision in June…after the conclusion of the current season and the announcement of next season’s contestants.

In the meantime, the speculation will continue and more questions will be asked by everyone from Wolf Blitzer in his ominous Situation Room (which sadly is not located anywhere near the Jersey Shore) to Mario Lopez on the set of “Access Hollywood.” Will he run as a Republican or an Independent? Will he “Ross Perot” the GOP ticket, a reference to the theory that Clinton’s 1992 victory was the direct result of a split created amongst Conservatives by Perot’s candidacy? If so, is he really a Democratic plant  (I could have sworn during the 90s he even publicly identified himself as such)? Will he continue to surge in the polls?

No, because The Donald will tell us in June that he’s decided not to run. He will call politics a nasty business and infer that personal attacks against his character have come in conflict with his duties as a businessman. He’ll also note that he ultimately decided his life’s work as a businessman and media mogul was more important. Then he’ll wrap up by alluding to a conspiracy to force him out of the race.

The real reason, however, will be that The Donald can’t run because he – not Obama – isn’t a citizen of the United States. You have to be a real person to meet that criteria.