I have atop a bookcase a bubble head of Newt Gingrich during his hey day under Bill Clinton as GOP House Speaker.
The doll has an oversized paunch and head, epitomizing a man with unrestrained appetites and a huge ego.
The nineties were when he worked with Clinton to forge such admiral bipartisan legislation as welfare-workfare reform, from which Hillary Clinton has had to run away this election year, and before Gingrich jumped on the Impeach-Bill-Because-Of-Monica Bandwagon at the very same time he was cheating on his cancer-ridden wife whom he told of his intention to divorce her while she was in the hospital receiving chemotherapy.
With a Ph.D. in history from Tulane, Gingrich has spent much of the past two decades milking the patriotism and piety industry (sometimes the two are indistinguishable) with books like Valley Forge: George Washington and the Crucible of Victory, To Try Men’s Souls: A Novel of George Washington and the Fight for American Freedom, A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters, and Rediscovering God in America: Reflections on the Role of Faith in Our Nation’s History and Future.
Collectively, these works are an update of Parson Weems’ little-George-and-the-cherry-tree hagiography, doing our founders no favor by making them into plaster cast saints. Now, however, Gingrich has taken a new turn as a smirking apologist for Donald Trump, lauded as a tribune of the people seeking to slay that many-headed hydra and liberal medusa, Hillary Clinton.
I await his next book lionizing Trump. As a title I suggest: The Donald: Bimbos, Bankruptcies, and Bigotry.
I must admit my new, recent status as a recovering reader of The Drudge Report and watcher of Fox News. Drudge used to provide his readers with the guilty pleasures of political caricature with their morning cup of coffee. Now, he has descended into borderline political pornography in his Report’s worship of the Orangefuhrer. A few months ago, Roger Ailles of Fox liquidated his unsuccessful bet on Marco Rubio and got on the Trump bandwagon. Now, Fox coverage of Trump is generally sugary enough to triple your blood sugar rating. Soon, Megyn Kelly will go to Trump Towers for a love-fest interview with The Donald anointing him with kiss-up questions to make up for her sharp past questioning of his misogyny.
At least there appears to be some justice in the world of Nielsen ratings. For the first time in a decade, CNN is getting better ratings than Fox.
In one of the sequels to the horror flick, Scream, a character remarks that “popular culture is becoming the twenty-first century’s politics.” Indeed true, in the worst sense, to judge from Drudge and Fox—and New Gingrich, philosopher of history.
