Gingrich Aiming to Lead "Militant" Tea Party Movement

by: Ted Frier

Fri Apr 23, 2010 at 09:18:25 AM CDT

"It is only from the perspective of the cultural elite that the left-wing governing of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid team could be seen as moderate," Gingrich responds.

He then offers Gallup survey data showing America to be "largely a center-right country" on issues of energy, taxes, jobs, balancing the budget, "English as the language of government," and more.

"Americans oppose the views of academic elites by 75 to 85 percent. And a recent New York Times/CBS News poll showed that 52 percent of Americans think the Obama administration's actions are leading America more toward socialism," he said.

"It was precisely my effort to place the Obama-Pelosi-Reid team in some historic context that led me to conclude that this is, indeed, a secular-socialist machine. While clarity may make some uncomfortable, such language is appropriate in explaining a movement of big government, high taxes, big bureaucracy, massive deficits and huge debt run from a politician-centric system of power," Gingrich concludes.

I can only hope the editors of the Post gave this space to Gingrich so soon after his last appearance on their page in order to show us the advanced state of Gingrich's dementia.

Read closely between the lines, because Gingrich's message is a deeply anti-democratic and authoritarian one. Gingrich may be calling the president a radical, but Gingrich's genuinely radical message here is that elections don't matter. Only political polls do -- polls whose results can be manipulated on a daily basis like the Stock Market by skilled propagandists like Gingrich who have access to a powerful media apparatus in Fox News and conservative talk radio.

Gingrich and his Tea Party "militants" are now engaged in an effort to steal political legitimacy away from the party that won the last two national elections decisively and give it to the rag, tag right wing mob which refuses to accept the verdict of those two elections and so is protesting in public parks demanding that their views prevail based on nothing more than Gingrich's empty assertions that they, and not the party that won the election, represent the true and authentic voice of America.

Gingrich wants to lead the Tea Party movement so that he can bring it back into the GOP coalition as its "militant wing," as he called it the other day.

Gingrich calls the Tea Party an authentic protest movement, but remember it began almost immediately after Obama took office. Promoted heavily on Fox News, hundreds of Tea Party rallies were held across the nation just two months after Obama was sworn in.

So, in trying to divine the group's motivations it's important to keep in mind that at the time of the movement's inception the only concrete thing the anti-tax Tea Partiers had to protest was a $700 billion stimulus bill -- half of which were tax cuts for small businesses and average Americans.

The Tea Party rally held here on Boston Common on tax day 2009 was actually hosted by a Fox Business News personality who implored the viewing audience to take a stand and stop the nation's slide down the road to "fascism." He actually used that word on air.

The Tea Party movement is part of a much larger attempt of the Fox-led radical right to change the subject.

The American people rejected right wing conservatism because they saw what a disaster it was under George W. Bush.

So, led by Fox and other conservative propagandists, the GOP and right wing are trying to engineer a strategic retreat by changing the narrative and our memory of Republican failures over the past decade.

The first step was to throw George W. Bush under the bus in order to prevent his failures from contaminating the conservative movement as a whole -- to claim in short that Bush was not a conservative at all. Master propagandist Newt Gingrich did this early when he called the TARP bill under Bush and Obama's stimulus bill "The Bush/Obama Big Government Bailout Plan."

Step two was for the GOP to recapture the glory days -- to reinvent itself as the Party of Ronald Reagan -- which meant it had to move in one fell swoop from the party that had doubled the national debt in the eight years when it had power to the party that refused to spend a dime when Democrats were in control.

Step three was to radicalize Barak Obama -- to take a president who was acting prudently by using the federal government as the buyer and lender of last resort to restart an economy teetering on the brink of another Great Depression thanks to the incompetence of the previous administration, and turn him into a wild-eyed tax and spend socialist who for no good reason was taking the country down the road to European-style statism.

That of course required that the right wing drop nearly 20 years of Republican control of Washington down the nation's Memory Hole -- to pretend the Bush Administration never happened and that Obama began with a clean slate -- which is why you heard so often on Fox and elsewhere in the Conservative Noise Machine challenges to Obama's manhood that he stop blaming his troubles on George W. Bush. It's hard to call someone a radical, after all, if you acknowledge that he is forced to take radical action thanks to the giant hole your side dug for him.

And the final step, was to mobilize the inchoate rage among the largely white, Christian and Confederate-inspired far right, and transform it into a virtuous and spontaneous grassroots eruption of traditional American patriotism motivated by nothing more sinister than fiscal prudence, which Fox and the GOP could then promote as the authentic voice of some invented American majority that was outraged at this foreign invasion and determined to take to the streets to retake their government and their country, just like the tea-wrecking Boston patriots of 1773.

I first met Newt Gingrich 20 years ago when he was the GOP's designated bomb-thrower.  So, we naturally retained him as our keynote speaker for the Massachusetts Republican Party's big "Junefest" fundraiser in 1989.  This was five years before Gingrich would lead a Southern-reactionary takeover of Congress, which then produced in succession a "radical" shutdown of government and a constitutional crisis as he and other Southern "radicals" like Tom DeLay staged a coup d'etat  to overturn the results of the 1996 election.

But as I sat in the audience listening to his rants against the "corrupt liberal welfare state" I remember thinking at the time: You can always tell a genuine radical by how much radicalism he detects in others.

And remember what Gingrich said: Only from the perspective of the "cultural elite" and the "left-wing governing of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid team" can the president be seen as "moderate."   Only to someone hopelessly mired within the matrix of right wing extremism could President Obama's obvious prudence -- even conservatism -- in responding to the unprecedented challenges Gingrich's party bequeathed to him, be seen as coming from "the most radical president in American history."

What's the old joke: if you are a hammer everything looks like a nail?

Every evening years ago when I left the Boston State House I would pass a lost soul standing at the corner of Beacon and Park, his clothing festooned with red, white and blue ribbons and buttons, holding an American flag in each hand, who would rail against "THE DEMOCRATS, THE EVIL DEMOCRATS" who were leading him, and us, down the road to perdition. He was harmless and most people paid him no mind because they recognized him for the fool that he was.

Gingrich may have a bigger soap box but his platform is the same.