In an amazing act of non-partisanship and most importantly, SANITY, Newt Gingrich sent the following very scathing letter to GOP Chairman Mike Duncan (EXCERPT FOLLOWS):
“I was saddened to learn that at a time of national trial, when a president-elect is preparing to take office in the midst of the worst financial crisis in over seventy years, that the Republican National Committee is engaged in the sort of negative, attack politics that the voters rejected in the 2006 and 2008 election cycles. The recent web advertisement, “Questions Remain,” is a destructive distraction. Clearly, we should insist that all taped communications regarding the Senate seat should be made public. However, that should be a matter of public policy, not an excuse for political attack. In a time when America is facing real challenges, Republicans should be working to help the incoming President succeed in meeting them, regardless of his Party. From now until the inaugural, Republicans should be offering to help the President-elect prepare to take office. Furthermore, once President Obama takes office, Republicans should be eager to work with him when he is right, and, when he is wrong, offer a better solution, instead of just opposing him.This is the only way the Republican Party will become known as the “better solutions” party, not just an opposition party. And this is the only way Republicans will ever regain the trust of the voters to return to the majority. This ad is a terrible signal to be sending about both the goals of the Republican Party in the midst of the nation’s troubled economic times and about whether we have actually learned anything from the defeats of 2006 and 2008.”
Try not to have a coronary. Just reach for that nice bottle of Scotch or Xanax, count to ten, click your heels three times and say , “There’s no place like home”. Make sure the pigs that are flying outside your house don’t break any windows either. Say what you want about much of what good old Newt has said in the past to piss off the very liberal readers of this blog, but the guy is absolutely right here. As a matter of course, I’m a pragmatic Liberal-Libertarian anyway, so I find some of what Gingrich has to say sometimes very interesting…but this one absolutely is spot on the mark. Whether or not there are ulterior motives behind it (like a Presidential run in 2012, perhaps?) is irrelevant. He just said what any sane American on all sides of the political spectrum has been saying for weeks: accusing the President-Elect of anything untoward at this point is clearly partisan politics at its absolute nadir, and totally premature. It is making a Political Party that just got its ass handed to them on an tarnished silver platter look like a bunch of whining sore losers offering no concrete alternatives and an intelligent philosophical argument against the Democratic Agenda (which has YET to be FORMALLY proposed for legislative action I might remind you). What the GOP has done with this issue is put Party ahead of Country, something that Mr Gingrich is clearly against. Say what you want about the guy (and I have said some nasty things about him when I don’t agree with him), he is an American first and a Republican second.
The rest of the Republican Party need to look at what he’s basically saying: as long as the GOP offers no concrete alternatives and changes the way it does business, it will become as irrelevant as the Republican Party was from 1932-1952. Gingrich is an Historian (he has a PhD), and he sure as hell has no desire to see his Political Party go into exile for what could be at least a generation…or longer…most especially if the Democrats manage to put aside THEIR own political partisanship and completely change the way this Nation runs itself and how it conducts business with the rest of the world. He is an extremely intelligent man, someone who the GOP really needs to look toward now if they ever hope to have a means of reconstituting themselves into a viable political brand once again. Let’s face it folks (and I’m addressing the Republicans who are reading this now most especially), the GOP as you know it is DEAD. Expired. It has no relevance in its current form.
The politics of the Reagan Revolution have succeeded over the past 28 years of bankrupting this country and sending it (and the rest of the world) most likely into the throws of another Great Depression. We may have “won” the Cold War, but at a cost of creating an enemy that we cannot see, let alone adequately fight. Thousands of families are on the verge of losing their homes, thousands have already lost theirs, and thousands go to bed hungry every night. The rift between rich and poor has been turned into what seems to be an uncrossable chasm. 28 years of failed policies and politics that began and ended with the Republicans with 8 years of “Republican Lite” represented by the Clinton era in between. There needs to be an entirely new way of looking at the way we can improve our country’s national security, infrastructure, economics, health care, and education…just to name a few items on the list. President Elect Obama has offered his ideas, and the American People voted him into office on the belief that he can bring about the change necessary to accomplish this. The Republicans can offer their vision…a new vision outside of the failed policies of The Reagan Revolution…to enhance or offer viable alternatives to Obama’s policies.
Obama has clearly signaled his intentions to be a a bi-partisan leader in order to get this country moving again and back on its feet; Gingrich has just laid the foundations for what the Republicans need to do to accomplish the same. As long as we continue to play politics as usual, both Democrat and Republican, we risk the complete destruction of the Republic. Surely, if we do not change the way we as Americans work together to save our beloved country, that proverbial snowball has a much better chance of survival than we do.
“The word ‘bipartisan’ means that some larger-than-usual-deception is being carried out” – George Carlin
Intersections In Real Time 