Another Elite Media Lie About Gingrich

Ramesh Ponnuru examines Newt Gringrich's bold new ideas and finds them illogical, impractical, and expensive. His wacky no-risk privatization of Social Security, for instance, could break the Treasury:

His plan guarantees that if people’s investments fail, they will still get all the benefits that current law promises them. How can the government save money while giving everyone their promised benefits and making up unlucky or incompetent investors’ shortfalls? It can’t. And won’t those shortfalls be larger if people know they can’t lose? Plenty of Social Security plans involve the government saving money in the long term by taking a hit in the present. Gingrich has managed to devise a plan that actually increases the program’s long-term cost. The price tag for Gingrich’s originality, based on estimates of similar proposals in years past, would be several trillion dollars.

In The Natural Disorder Of Things

Is grief a "disorder"? Experts disagree:

Jerome C. Wakefield of New York University and Dr. Michael First of Columbia concluded that the evidence was not strong enough to support the change. “An estimated 8 to 10 million people lose a loved one every year, and something like a third to a half of them suffer depressive symptoms for up to month afterward,” said Dr. Wakefield, author of “The Loss of Sadness.” “This would pathologize them for behavior previously thought to be normal.”

But Dr. David J. Kupfer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the chairman of the task force making revisions, disagreed, saying, “If someone is suffering from severe depression symptoms one or two months after a loss or a death, and I can’t make a diagnosis of depression — well, that is not being clinically proactive. That person may then not get the treatment they need.”

Gingrich's Failed European Policies

In 2010, Newt Gingrich compared Muslims to Nazis -- political hate speech, according to his former House colleague Joe Scarborourgh -- and argued that U.S. citizens who are Muslim should be banned from mosque worship in the vicinity of the World Trade Center. More recently, he said he'd insist on a religious test for Muslim citizens who wanted to work in government. If elected, would he try to make his anti-First Amendment beliefs the law of the land? Then he'd be leading the U.S. down the road he claims Barack Obama is taking, toward a militantly secular Europe. Besides being unconstitutional, it would be stupid. As Jonathan Laurence writes, Gingrichism has slowed rather than accelerated Muslims' integration into European society:

Europeans should not be afraid to allow Muslim students to take classes on Islam in state-financed schools and universities. The recognition and accommodation of Islamic religious practices, from clothing to language to education, does not mean capitulation to fundamentalism. On the contrary, only by strengthening the democratic rights of Muslim citizens to form associations, join political parties and engage in other aspects of civic life can Europe integrate immigrants and give full meaning to the abstract promise of religious liberty.

The rise of right-wing, anti-immigrant parties has led several European countries to impose restrictions on Islamic dress, mosque-building and reunification of families through immigration law. These policies are counterproductive. Paradoxically, people for whom religion is otherwise not all that important become more attached to their faith’s clothing, symbols and traditions when they feel they are being singled out and denied basic rights.

Start Spreading The News

The view at dawn Wednesday morning from our hotel in midtown, looking south along 3rd Ave. We arrived on the redeye from LAX -- a homecoming for Bronx-born Kathy and for me, too, since we both worked in New York for former President Nixon for many years. Both my daughters were born in Manhattan.

Kathy's superior instincts told her that we'd find a diner on 2nd Ave. We bought the papers -- actual printed newspapers, the Times, the Daily News -- and had eggs and coffee and juice. Then Kathy went to St. Patrick's Cathedral and I went looking for a Village Voice, which, I was distressed to find, is now just a flimsy giveaway like its sister paper OC Weekly and no longer the two-section authoritative cultural and political source book that I left behind in 1990. It still carries Michael Musto's column, though. This week he interviewed Joan and Melissa Rivers. He asked Joan about Golden Globe fashions. She said, "Meryl Streep is the best actress alive, but she looked like was wearing the Temple Grandin collection. Meryl, call me."

Full Of Passionate Intensity

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-- W. B. YEATS, 1920

Nixon: "For Me, [Being Gay] Is a Choice"

Not this Nixon. That Nixon.

Egypt Is Not The New Iran

Alon Ben-Meir give three reasons Egypt won't be the new Iran: The military's power, the Muslim Brotherhood's comparative moderation, and the Egyptian people's gumption. He then advises:

The United States and its allies, especially Israel, must accept the fact that in the wake of the Arab Spring, Islamic governments are likely to dominate the Arab political landscape. This does not suggest that these governments will follow Iran's model and naturally commit themselves to hostility toward the West or seek Israel's destruction. Without throwing their caution to the wind, the U.S. and its allies will be wise to adopt a pro-active policy toward Egypt. They must demonstrate that they stand for democracy, in words and in deeds, and welcome any genuine democratic development in Egypt that leads to sustainable reforms and progress, however treacherous the road may be.

"Worse Than Anyone Imagines"

Veteran Middle East watcher Robin Wright on the dire economic news from Egypt. Remember that unemployed young men were fodder for Iran's Islamist revolution in the late 1970s:

[A] year of turmoil has...reversed tentative economic progress in the Arab world's largest country, which accounts for 25 percent of the 300 million Arabs spread across 22 countries. Egypt's economy, which is the fourth largest in the Middle East, has been tanking. Tourism is drying up. Investors have been scared off. And foreign currency reserves have plummeted.

Prime Minister Kamal el Ganzouri broke into tears last month as he told journalists that Egypt's economy was "worse than anyone imagines." The situation is sufficiently dire that the government has opened talks about a $3.2 billion from the International Monetary Fund, an idea it originally rejected as a threat to its sovereignty.

But to jumpstart the economy with an IMF loan, Cairo would also have to undertake reforms and reduce subsidies that could seriously increase public pain. By last October, 40 percent of Egyptians surveyed by Gallup already said they found it "very difficult" to get by, with nearly half of Egyptians saying they had faced times when they did not have enough money to buy food.

In an ominous sign for the future, youth unemployment -- in a country where 60 percent of the population is under 30 -- is currently estimated at 25 percent, with few of the young having any imminent prospects. Sayed and Abdel Nabi are among them. Many of the hardcore who returned to Tahrir last fall are the marginalized and unemployed, not the idealistic activists who launched the uprising.

The Party Of Palin And Gingrich

Andrew Sullivan believes that Newt Gingrich is slouching toward Bethlehem, an unstoppable creature of the GOP of Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, and Karl Rove. He writes:

This now is the party of Palin and Gingrich, animated primarily by hatred of elites, angry at the new shape and color of America, befuddled by a suddenly more complicated world, and dedicated primarily to emotion rather than reason. That party is simply not one that can rally behind a Mitt Romney. He too knows what he has to say - hence his ludicrous invocation of Obama as some kind of alien being. But it doesn't work. He believes it - since he seems capable of genuinely believing in anything that will win him votes and power. But he doesn't have the rage to make it work.

Newt Is The New Nixon III

Carter Eskew, quoting Rick Perlstein's Nixonland:

”Politicians. . .make their life’s work convincing 50 percent plus one of their constituency that they understand their fears and hopes, can honor and redeem them, can make them safe and lead them toward their dreams.. . .” In the 1960’s, “America was engulfed in a pitched battle between the forces of darkness and the forces of light. The only thing was: Americans disagreed radically over which side was which. . .” In 1964, the voter “pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else. . .seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason.”

Sounds at least plausible today, doesn’t it?