Truthless

I'm not sure why anyone takes Newt Gingrich seriously anymore. The guy didn't last as a politician, as a leader of his party, as a husband, but maybe he seems like an intelligent source in comparison to his Republican colleagues. Guys like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and even Eric Cantor aren't dazzling anybody with their intellect. They feel like second-stringers.

So Next goes on The Daily Show to promote his co-written novel about George Washington and they don't even talk about the book except in a glancing reference. Instead, he does what we've come to expect from The Party of No. He lies. Then, when confronted with his lie today, he lies again:

Newt Gingrich tried on Wednesday to brush off the glaring gaffe he made this week on "The Daily Show" when he insisted that the Bush administration was right to read shoe bomber Richard Reid his Miranda rights because he was an American citizen.

But in doing so, the former GOP House Speaker only dug his hole deeper.

In a post on his Twitter page, Gingrich explained that when he made the Reid comment to the "Daily Show"'s Jon Stewart his reference was actually to Jose Padilla. Reid, after all, is a British citizen -- Padilla is American.

But Gingrich wasn't done there. In a dig at the Obama White House, he added to the tail end of his tweet: "Treating terrorists like criminals wrong no matter who is Pres."

That's a standard GOP talking point, and yet when President Bush moved the Padilla case from a military setting to the criminal system, it was Gingrich who came to his defense despite conservative howls of protest, a Democratic source points out.

I wish they'd just admit that they're not being patriotic with their war on the Obama Administration's war on terrorists. Why don't they just say, "we just need some way to wedge him out of there in 2012, and we'll say anything to do it!"

Or maybe they're just waiting for the Bernie Saunders treatment:

"I really don't like being lectured on deficits when you (Sen. Gregg) and many members of your party (Republicans) helped cause the situation we are in right now."

~snip~

"Please, please, spare the lectures on deficit reduction."

Say it, Bernie:



Maybe there's truth coming from the teabagger movement. Oops, as a committed conservative who went to their party last weekend writes, their relationship with reality is even worse:

Steve Malloy, author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Ruin Your Life, kicked off the first full day of conference proceedings by warning that Obama and his minions are conspiring to control every aspect of Americans' lives—the colors of their cars, the kind of toilet paper they use, how much time they spend in the shower, the temperature of their homes—all under the guise of U.N. greenhouse-gas-reduction schemes. "Obama isn't a U.S. socialist," Malloy thundered. "He's an international socialist. He envisions a one-world government."

I consider myself a conservative and arrived at this conference as a paid-up, rank-and-file attendee, not one of the bemused New York Times types with a media pass. But I also happen to be writing a book for HarperCollins that focuses on 9/11 conspiracy theories, so I have a pretty good idea where the various screws and nuts can be found in the great toolbox of American political life.

Within a few hours in Nashville, I could tell that what I was hearing wasn't just random rhetorical mortar fire being launched at Obama and his political allies: the salvos followed the established script of New World Order conspiracy theories, which have suffused the dubious right-wing fringes of American politics since the days of the John Birch Society.

And their truthless queen, we all know...well, she's had enough publicity so I won't add another link to her train.

Vigilance

So more on the Bush/Cheney sunset. It's leaving dangerous residue -- erroneous history:

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an opponent of the Iraq war, is asking the Smithsonian to change some wording about the war that accompanies the newly installed portrait of President George W. Bush.

Sanders, an independent, objects to a portion of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s text that says Bush’s two terms in office were “marked by a series of catastrophic events” including “the attacks on September 11, 2001, that led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

The senator said the notion that the attacks were linked in any way to Iraq has been widely debunked and shouldn’t be perpetuated in the museum exhibit.

“The 9/11 attacks did not lead to the war in Iraq,” Sanders said in an interview. “What President Bush was telling us (before the war) was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq was somehow in collusion with Al Qaeda. Those were misstatements of fact, as even President Bush has since acknowledged.”

Per Thomas Jefferson, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." There will be a battle fought over the history of the past eight years. There will be a huge tendency to want to whitewash the past, even from those who were most alert and informed during this period. To brush it off with comforting notions like, "they did what they sincerely believed was best for the country" or "things have changed so it could never have been that bad" or "maybe int twenty years we will be grateful for their vision."

The truth is that they knowingly lied to the American people, they subverted the Constitution and sought near-dictatorial powers, they drained the Treasury to line the coffers of their cronies, they viciously smeared their critics even if they had once been with them. They alienated our traditional international allies and made our name synonymous with torture in the world. They let a city drown and, it can be argued, their willful neglect allowed another to be burned.

The price of freedom is to remember.

And remind.