Newt! Newt! Newt!

Let us, as a friend of mine is fond of saying, nip this notion right in the butt. Newt Gingrich will not become the next—or any—President of the United  States. If he did, I would have to leave the area, if not the country.

Let me explain. I live in Northern Virginia, a few miles from the Nation’s Capital, close to—but not in—a highly exclusive neighborhood called McLean. Very rich people live in McLean, as does the Secretary of Defense, several congressmen, plastic surgeons, attorneys and other worthies without whom the country would certainly not survive. Newt lives in McLean as well. I occasionally run into him at the McLean Family Restaurant, a township icon venerated for its baked tilapia. Newt and a couple of bodyguards with thing in their ears show up there so he can presses the flesh, though I am
happy to say he has never attempted to press mine. A vast relief, that!

I am sort of fanatical about Newt.  I think he’s a very smart man, perhaps an intellectual giant and certainly taller than one might expect for a moral midget. As a master of the double- and triple-speak he has come to define the concept of ‘Ready, fire, aim.”  This is not what you want in a Chief Executive.

Here, courtesy of The Nation magazine, are eleven Newt quotes that should leave both liberals and

conservatives scratching their respective heads. 

(1) “I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [my grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.” [Address to Cornerstone Church in Texas, March 2011]

(2) “The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.” [To Mother Jones magazine, October 1989]

(3)  “All I would say is, why did it take so long? The whole thing is strange.” [Speaking about the recent release of President Obama’s long-form birth certificate, April 2011]

(4) “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.” [To the National Review, September 2010]

(5) “It doesn’t matter what I do. People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.” [Newt’s explanation for why his multiple affairs won’t damage his political fortunes, as told to his jilted wife.]

(6) “The secular socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.” [In his book To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine, May 2010.]

(7) “This is one of the great tragedies of the Bush administration. The more successful they’ve been at intercepting and stopping bad guys, the less proof there is that we’re in danger…. It’s almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us.” [At a book
signing in Huntington, NY, April 2008]

(8) "A mere 40 years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that's what freedom is all about.” [At the Republican National Convention, August 1996]

(9) “I want to say to the elite of this country—the elite news media, the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite: I accuse you in Littleton…of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made, and being afraid to take responsibility for things you have done, and instead foisting upon the rest of
us pathetic banalities because you don’t have the courage to look at the world you have created.” [Speaking about the Columbine shootings, May 1999]

(10) “How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane.” [Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, March 2007]

(11) “I’m running for President.” [5/11/2011]

‘Nuff said.

Theodiocy

Here are two brand new words--I just made them up this morning and I'm throwing it out there hoping it will become part of the lingua Americana. Theodiocy is the idiotic belief that one knows God's will. A theodiot is a person who practices Theodiocy. To do so is theodiotic.

Pat Robertson immediately comes mind. The Fatuous One recently opined that the earthquakes that ravaged Haiti were the results of Haitian rebels making a bargain with the devil in the 1800s so as to win independence from France. Robertson now stands once again in the moron spotlight. He seems to like it there. Perhaps it keeps him warm.

Theodiocy is practiced by anyone who claims to have a direct line to a higher power's musings. Popes have been theodiotics for centuries--nay, millenia. Insufferable folks of any stripe who maintain their god is better than yours are theodiotics. Terrorists, naturally, occupy the very top rung of theodiocy. Theodiots are easy to spot. They do not talk, they testify. Their prayers are louder than anyone else's in the room. They claim not to proselytize but do so without respite. They are generally very, very boring.

So, go out there, enjoy employ the new words freely. Ideally, I'd like them to show up in a year or so in a New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle, but I'll settle for the Washington Post. Or Webster's.

Accountability

Sunday breakfast, rainy day, cleverly disguised coffeehouse on the street level of an expensive condo in an expensive small town near Washington, DC. The three of us, Peter, Loren and I, have been meeting Sunday mornings for a few years now. We are old friends bound by time and shared experiences, and we enjoy the flights of ideas that hover above the table.

We've all been reading the papers and watching the news, amazed at the ongoing dance of organizations, leaders and countries great and small who remain obstinately unwilling to be held accountable for the miscreants in their ranks.

First and foremost is the Muslim world, numbering between 1.6 and 1.8 billion. Active within this number, much like a cancerous virus, are some 10,000 terrorists who, as terrorists do, are perfectly willing to sacrifice life and limb to their varying causes. The leaders of nations harboring the terrorists maintain that these criminals are beyond their controls, unreachable and beyond the arm of the law. This, of course, is poppycocks, as our British friends say. Closer to the truth is that the terrorists serve a purpose. The leaders get a great deal of money from other nations to deal with the problem. The more terrorists there are, the more anti-terrorist money flows into the leaders' coffers. Additionally, the leaders are seldom on sure footing, so it is better to be pals with the bad guys than not. Lastly, many such leaders are already in the terrorists' pockets. So they claim a powerlessness to remedy the situation. Call this a variation of the 12-step mantra that we are all powerless over people, places and things. But as anyone actively involved in any twelve-step program knows, powerlessness and helplessness are not synonymous.

Part of the social contract discussed by John Locke and later Jean-Jacques Rousseau some three centuries ago establishes that humans have made a deal with governments, and that within the context of the agreement, government and people have distinct roles. Humans contribute to society and government, and the government in turn provides a social structure and, most important, protection. This has seen some serious erosion in the past 20 years as governments allow groups of individuals to practice a form of natural law, that is to say live in a natural state permitting actions harmful to the group. This, in a nutshell, is what terrorism is all about--the abrogation of rule to meet an end.

In essence, the world is being held hostage by some 10,000 ruffians. That's roughly the population of Hendersonville, Tennessee, or Anetta, Texas. That minute segment of the world's population (there were approximately 6.8 billion of us as of last year) is responsible for billions of dollars spent world-wide in the war against terrorism, countless lives lost on the front, and an endless series of large and small annoyances that plague daily life. It could be said that to an extent the terrorists have won. They've forced us to change our ways of life, our behaviors, our thinking, our day to day existence.

All this because a few nations have decided to allow lawlessness to thrive within their borders and plead outraged innocence at the results of their choices. The Saudis are a good example: we have a tendency to forget that the perpetrators of 9/11 were Saudis, that al Qeda's leadership is Saudi, that Saudi Arabia has done remarkably little to stem the growth of terrorism, terrified as it is of an internal revolution that would oust the present leadership. And yet Saudi Arabia is but one nation. Yemen, Lybia, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, the Sudan and a host of other countries have accepted if not welcomed forces hostile to the West. With friends like these, who needs enemies?