So Newt Gingrich, self-proclaimed historian, self-proclaimed “most seriously professorial” American politician, self-proclaimed presumptive Republican nominee for president, thinks there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.
“Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. We have invented the Palestinian people,” Gingrich told the Jewish Channel recently.
He then went on to explain the Palestinians “are in fact Arabs… and they had the chance to go many places.”
To summarize: Palestinians might think they’re Palestinians, and so might the US, and so might just about every other government in the world, including Israel, but Gingrich knows they’re just run-of-the-mill, generic Arabs who were too stubborn to go someplace else.
Does that mean Professor Newt also thinks the Canadians were invented, or the Americans, for that matter, given that until a few hundred years ago, they were part of the British Empire?
As Elliott Abrams, the ultra-conservative former deputy national security adviser to George W. Bush put it: “There was no Jordan or Syria or Iraq, either, so perhaps he would say they are all invented people as well, and also have no right to statehood. “
Gingrich addresses the 38th annual Conservative Political Action Conference meeting in Washington, Feb. 10. Gingrich has called the Palestinians an invented people. (Larry Downing/Reuters)Saturday night, during a debate with other Republican presidential candidates, Gingrich elaborated.
“The Palestinian claim to a right of return is based on a historically false story,” he insisted, adding: “These people are terrorists.”
You have to wonder whether Gingrich, who believes America is locked in what conservatives still call a war on terror, thinks somebody should therefore just bomb these terrorist Palestinians out of existence, neatly putting an end to the Middle East’s defining political pathology.
Gingrich a one-man think-tank
He is, after all, also a self-proclaimed idea machine. He thinks big, he thinks out of the box, and by the way, did I mention he’s seriously professorial?
Whatever he is, he’s scaring the Republican establishment, which would prefer to beat Barack Obama next November.
Polls suggest he has a significant lead over the rest of the Republican field in Iowa, which holds its caucuses in about three weeks. He’s closing on Mitt Romney in New Hampshire, whose primary vote is a week later, and has opened up double-digit leads in South Carolina and Florida.
In other words, he’s a serious threat to the man many Republicans believe is the only candidate able to beat Obama — a bombastic, over-the-top, bomb-throwing, loose-cannon threat, with a checkered history to boot.
The rise and fall of would-be Republican candidates
Now, Gingrich is not the first meteor in this race. The party’s rank and file has embraced several others: Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain have all spent the political equivalent of dirty weekends with the conservative base, only to be ditched on Monday morning.
Gingrich holds a copy of the Contract with America, during a press conference Jan. 4, 1995. At the time, he was the incoming Speaker of the House of Representatives. (Gary Cameron/Reuters)But Newt Gingrich is different. Hes the only candidate who’s operated at the presidential level. As Speaker of the House in the 90s, before he was censured for ethics violations and then pushed out by his own party, he was second in line to the Oval Office, behind only the vice-president.
Yes, he might have led the effort to impeach an adulterous Bill Clinton while carrying on an adulterous affair himself, but he was also the architect of the Contract With America, the Republican manifesto that propelled the party to congressional power.
Perhaps the party’s base thinks he can successfully lead another charge like that one.
He’s also something the military refers to as a target-rich environment, and the people who really run the Republican Party know it.
This is a man who once agreed with the basis of President Obama’s health-care legislation, the law that crystallizes conservative anger more than any other.
Mitt Romney, who is reviled by many Republicans for having passed a similar law when he was governor of Massachusetts, has said he actually got the idea from Gingrich.
The Newty professor
Then there are Gingrich’s assertions that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the US mortgage giants, were a principal cause of the 2008 economic collapse, and that the Democrats who supported those companies should be jailed.
As it turns out, Gingrich was paid at least $1.6 million by Freddie Mac for what he calls “strategic advice” after he left public office. Gingrich sees no hypocrisy at all in the fact that he accepted the payments. That’s capitalism, he says.
Callista Gingrich, Newt Gingrichs wife, listens to him speak during a Newt 2012 campaign office opening in Urbandale, Iowa, Dec. 10. While he was still married to his second wife, Newt and Callista were having an affair at the time of the Lewinsky scandal. (Jeff Haynes/Reuters)There was also Gingrich’s recent call for a repeal of child labour laws, so that poor (read black) children can be put to work and learn its value.
Or his rather strange warning, scoffed at by scientists, that some foreign regime may detonate a nuclear device high in space above the United States, releasing an electromagnetic pulse that would paralyze electronic systems across the country, leading to the deaths of millions.
Gingrich vs. Romney
Anyway, Gingrich would certainly be a more interesting nominee than Mitt Romney, the measured, squeaky-clean former money manager so despised by right-wingers for his moderate views. (They also loathe Romney for flip-flopping on issues, something they don’t seem to mind from Gingrich, who once starred in a TV ad with Democratic icon Nancy Pelosi, warning about climate change).
One suspects reporters here are ready to root for Newt. Guaranteed page one for months.
But big name Republicans aren’t so keen. John Sununu, the former governor of New Hampshire, has called Gingrich “inconsistent, erratic, untrustworthy and unprincipled.”
Representative Pete King, a pillar of the party’s right wing, says Gingrich damaged both the Republican Party and Congress during his time as Speaker.
When Gingrich attacked the Republicans’ alternative health-care proposal as “right-wing social engineering,” the plan’s author, Representative Paul Ryan, asked “With allies like [Gingrich], who needs the left?”
Most Republicans who served under the Gingrich speakership won’t support him.
Last of the red-meat populists
Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich talk during a break in the Republican Party presidential candidates debate in Des Moines, Iowa, Dec. 10. (Jeff Haynes/Reuters)But it may not matter. The base wants a red-meat populist, and it’s run out of choices. Such is the grassroots’ dislike for Romney that they may be getting ready to cut off their political noses to spite their angry faces.
You almost have to wonder whether it has something to do with the fact that Romney is a Mormon, a religion evangelical Christians consider some sort of cult. (Evangelicals also disparage Catholicism, the religion to which Gingrich converted, but there is little mention of that in the race so far).
Whatever the reason, I have a hotel room booked in New Hampshire next month. This might get really interesting.
