Prepping for 2012, Newt Gingrich Dusts Off His Old Playbook

David Corn
Politics Daily

The other day an associate of Newt Gingrich surprised me: He told me there's a 97 percent chance that Gingrich will run for president in 2012. Really? I replied, with a laugh. Yes, he said seriously. He noted that he had recently spoken to the former Republican House speaker and had picked up a he's-going-for-it vibe and that, more telling, he had seen that Gingrich was surrounding himself with veteran political operatives who would only likely flock to Gingrich for a presidential bid. Then on Thursday, Gingrich delivered a speech at the American Enterprise Institute -- one with a highfalutin' title: "America at Risk: Camus, National Security, and Afghanistan" -- that sure made it seem he's looking to be the darling of GOP primary voters who yearn for Dick Cheney.

In his typical bombastic style, Gingrich blasted President Obama and his aides for being national security wimps. He declared, "America is at risk of a catastrophic disaster here at home, and that is a reality our elites are hiding from." He proclaimed that it is "clear the Obama administration is willfully blind to the nature of our enemies and the forces which threaten America." And he essentially charged Obama-ites with treason: "It is the natural path of secular socialist intellectuals to prefer our opponents to us and to accept their lies over our truths."

This is all nonsense. Obama and Co. prefer "our opponents" and knowingly ignore threats? This president is sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan (for good or bad) and has ordered far more drone attacks on al-Qaeda and other insurgent targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan than were conducted during the Bush-Cheney years. These are not the acts of a man who fancies the nation's foes.

Gingrich likes to pose as a serious thinker and idea man, but his embrace of such melodramatic hyperbole is more befitting a cartoon character. But Gingrich has always undermined his attempts to be seen as a statesman by immature bomb-throwing. After the 2008 campaign -- during which he originated the GOP's "Drill, Baby, Drill" initiative -- he positioned himself as a post-partisan player, declaring that he wanted to promote a "tri-partisan" approach to politics that would bring together Democrats, Republicans, and independents. He denounced the Republican Party for releasing an ad attempting to tie Obama to disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, decrying "the sort of negative attack politics that the voters rejected in 2006 and 2008." Yet now -- after the Tea Party explosion has made attack politics rather popular on the right -- Gingrich is willing (and eager) to engage in the most foul of attacks: accusing the president of purposefully endangering the country because he and his crew prefer America's enemies. This is the worst form of calumny.

(More here.)

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