Newt Gingrich

(U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert of East Texas accused U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder during testimony of casting “aspersions on my asparagus.” That helps President Obama, says Geoff Rips, but given all the problems the nation and Texas face, this is a sideshow we could do without.)

Molly Ivins used to say Texas was a laboratory for bad government. And she was writing about the good old days when Shrub was a tiny privileged sapling. But Karl Rove swung the door wide on that laboratory, and the demons he’s loosed upon the world cannot be called back.

Look at this mean-spirited Texas lineup. Ty Cobb couldn’t make this hateful team. There’s the governor recruiting gun companies from California to relocate to our trigger-happy shores. While some states pass new gun control laws, the Texas Legislature considers 12 pro-gun bills, including one letting college students carry on campus. Under these rules, the police at Virginia Tech couldn’t apprehend the killer until he shot somebody.  

But Rick Perry’s being overshadowed by the next guy up—the junior senator from Canada, Ted Cruz. Joe McCarthy in cowboy boots wearing a red-baiting sneer, governing by innuendo, cynicism oozing from every pore. A champion of the P.T. Barnum school of political practice. In his oratory, the Seven Deadly Sins become the Seven Virtues: Greed becomes Courage; Wrath becomes Justice.

And let’s not forget the power of Stupidity. Lately even Cruz is ceding important media acreage to the Congressman from Texas’ First Congressional District, Louie Gohmert. Here’s the man who during a Congressional hearing this week accused Attorney General Eric Holder of casting “aspersions on my asparagus.”

The Gohmert litany is pretty well known by now. He told us that Muslim terrorists are sending pregnant women to the U.S. to give birth to “terror babies” in order to destroy our country in future years. He said gun control leads to bestiality. He nominated Newt Gingrich to be House Speaker 13 years after Gingrich left Congress. When Sen. John McCain took issue with Gohmert’s declaration that the Muslim Brotherhood was trying to infiltrate the highest levels of government, he called McCain “Numbnuts.” And he was the only vote in Congress to keep the word “lunatic” in federal law dealing with mental illness, prompting “takes one to know one” comments from his colleagues.

Clearly he’s an embarrassment to those with any brains left in Texas, including some in the GOP, and many of his Congressional colleagues. But he’s adored by the Texas Tea Party. And his sideshow is probably welcomed into the big tent by the Obama administration. How better to make the government confiscation of AP phone records appear to be a trivial matter than to have Louie Gohmert denounce it in front of news cameras in the same way he alerted the press to “terror babies?” He becomes the Administration’s useful fool. But he’s also a useful distraction for those benefiting from increasing income inequality.

Now for those readers fortunate enough to not be held hostage by the current politics in our benighted state, you must wonder how Texas is able to produce these hate-mongers and launch them into the wider political universe. Does Louie Gohmert get elected and re-elected by a Congressional district that never learned to turn on a light switch? Well, he does represent deep East Texas, home to murderous 1950s Night Riders and to chicken plants that depend on undocumented workers while supporting harsh immigration laws so they can turn their workers over to ICE when they ask for fair pay.

But this is also the bedrock of what was once Texas populism. The first district was represented for 47 years (until 1976) by the distinguished progressive Congressman Wright Patman, a New Deal Democrat who railed against the power of banks. Progressive Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough and former House Speaker Sam Rayburn, also a New Deal backer and longest serving Speaker in U.S. history, came from the same East Texas woods.

The populist political momentum nurtured in the New Deal and supported by an electorate who believed in government has been replaced by a politics run by oil and finance industries. That’s who populates Gohmert’s contributor list while the average household income in his district is less than $50,000.

It is the growing class divide experienced across this nation, but in extremis. Racism, including fear of the growing Hispanic plurality, the absence of regulation of major industries—oil, finance, you name it—has created a race to institutionalize privilege in Texas before it’s too late.

At this point, the race isn’t even close.

So we have Gohmert, Cruz and Perry with no one reining them in. The Koch brothers, the finance industry, the fracking oil industry, and the NRA are feeding the frenzy and helping finance their appearance on the larger stage. As former Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower has said, “If ignorance is bliss, these people must be ecstatic.”

And they are.

We have some kind of dogged faith in this country that Texas and this nation will come to their senses. Bloviated politicians will meet their Edward R. Murrows. The growing Hispanic majority will overwhelm the power of money in Texas. The Tea Party will be thrown overboard. The welfare of the poor and the struggling middle class will become the primary goal of public policy and budgetary action. Global warming will be reversed. Institutionalized greed will be undone.

But we’re getting the bread and circuses that Roman poet Juvenal decried during the decline of the Roman republic. Only we’re not even getting the bread. With the rapid redistribution of wealth and power to the upper echelons, there is no guarantee that the clowns will pile back into the clown car and drive away.

Geoff Rips, a former editor of the Texas Observer, is a Special Correspondent for The Washington Spectator.

Like this article? Get more for free!
We'll send you a round-up of the best of the Spectator's journalism and political commentary as well as special offers and information so you can take action on issues you care most about. Sign up today!

Reporters appreciate the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. It never fails to provide good copy.

Consider.

On the mid-March Monday morning when CPAC 2013 opened its doors, there was Congressman Louie Gohmert, trying to make his way to an interview with the Tea Party Network Radio host, a six-foot tall blond woman in a slinky red dress and leopard pattern stiletto heels. Gohmert was navigating a swarm of college students swapping smart phones so everyone could get a picture with the congressman.

Louie Gohmert? The short, bald Teabagger who has accomplished nothing in the six years as he has represented his East Texas district—other than establish himself as a cable news curiosity whose comments are so over the top that they go viral in 24 hours?

Less than 30 feet from Gohmert, in front of the NRA Radio booth, another pack of students has Allen West pinned against the wall, handing him programs to sign and jostling to snap photos with yet another CPAC rock star. West served one term in the House, where like Gohmert, he made his bones by making outrageous statements. It helped that he was a black Republican Congressman taking on Obama, “who uses welfare to keep us all on the plantation.” It also helps with this crowd that he was fined and discharged from the Army for shoving an Iraqi prisoner’s head into a barrel and firing his pistol beside the prisoner’s ear.

If you like this, sign up for our free newsletter!
Every week, we'll send you a round-up of the best of the Spectator's journalism and political commentary as well as special offers and information so you can take action on issues you care most about. Sign up today!

Across radio row from Col. West is Dr. Orly Taitz, Esq., the Russian-born naturalized citizen dentist and lawyer from Southern California whose sui generis second career is a campaign to prove that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

Taitz is telling a TV news team that she has just tracked down the individual whose Social Security number Obama uses to pass himself off as an American citizen.

This abundance of lowhanging fruit distorts reporting on CPAC and its relationship with the party that controls the House and could be a majority in the U.S. Senate in 2015.

CPAC is a right-wing Brigadoon, where the Republican grassroots gather once a year to hear from party leaders and celebrities discuss public policy, and if you’re young and lucky, find someone to sleep with and a job on the Hill or at Heritage.

A slot in the speaker’s lineup is a requisite for every Republican elected official or candidate of national standing. (Reagan addressed CPAC 14 times.) Speakers (pick one: John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal) establish their bona fides by dedicating themselves to the extreme policy positions that are canonical in this crowd.

After four days of immersion, 8,000 to 10,000 participants depart, convinced that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax; government warnings about BPA plastic bottles are a plot designed to create hysteria to drive the public into the arms of the Nanny State; and that Rand Paul is a viable candidate for the presidency of the United States.

Professional politicians leave with a list of positions they promised to support and a reading of which tropes get the best response. The 2012 Republican primary was rehearsed and crowdsourced at CPAC 2011 and 2012. And you can consider Rand Paul placing first in the 2013 Straw Poll the beginning of the 2016 Republican primaries.

As CPAC grows extreme and more inbred each year (it just turned 40), it continues to move the GOP’s center of gravity further to the right.

All of this—underwritten by the American Conservative Union, whose non-profit IRS status designates it an “educational organization”—serves the interest of the Democratic Party. Compared to the political flatearthers who show up in Washington every winter, Democrats come off as even more centrist and moderate than they actually are.

Yet if Republican extremism is good for the Democrats, it is bad for the country. That is the thesis of Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein’s indispensable 2012 book: It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.

“When one party moves this far from the political center of American politics,” the authors write, “it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country’s most pressing problems.”

One factor that contributed to the Republican shift from the political center, according to Mann and Ornstein, is the movement conservatism that Newt Gingrich adopted when he realized that a radical political insurgency was the easiest route to a Republican majority in the House.

After Gingrich was elected House Speaker in 1994, moderation and compromise became anathema to the party. Once a year, the Republican base gathers in a convention hotel in Washington to ensure that doesn’t change.

Beyond the right-wing funhouse stories, the public that pays attention to politics sees CPAC as a series of political speeches delivered by the luminaries of the Republican Party. Mitt Romney delivered the concession speech he didn’t have prepared when he was “surprised” by Obama in November. Rand Paul and Marco Rubio began their presidential races. Rick Santorum kicked off his 2016 campaign for whatever (or the fundraising campaign for his non-profit foundation, which pays his salary and travel expenses) with a jeremiad that used the death of his adolescent nephew the previous day as a ghoulish set piece to attack “the left in government who for 100 years have made it their mission to have a government program that addresses every pain.” And the dimwitted but ruggedly handsome governor of Texas said that Republicans lost the last two presidential elections because their candidates were not conservatives.

The big-name speeches are half the story. CPAC is a right-wing politics kindercamp, where college students are flown in for four days of political indoctrination. Sarah Palin recognized them with a shoutout in her speech: “Yeah, you Young Republicans, especially you who went Greek. I’m so proud of you guys. All of you college Republicans there on campus. You are so bold.”

Fifty percent of this year’s CPAC attendees were between the age of 18-25, according to The Washington Times. All of them looked Greek to me, dressed for fraternity or sorority pledge-class installations.

Blazers, khaki pants, buttoned-down shirts, ties (or bowties) for college-aged men; elegant dresses and heels for young women. (For four days sitting in hotels listening to speeches and panels?) The curriculum is predictable. Among this year’s offerings:

•Former Apollo astronaut Walter Cunningham debunking scientific findings that human activity is causing global warming, while offering no scientific argument to counter what is accepted by 97 percent of climate scientists. (Walt’s work is underwritten by the Heartland Institute, which is funded by industrialist Barre Seid, Exxon Mobil, Charles Koch, the Waltons of Walmart, and Pittsburgh billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, to name a few.)

•The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Angela Logomasini describing the virtues of Bisphenol A (BPA) plastic, despite FDA’s warnings that BPA can adversely effect “the brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and young children.”

•A Heritage Foundation panel that reframed environmental politics in free-market terms. For balance, the panel included Kathleen Hartnett White from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which is funded by San Antonio billionaire James Leininger and the Koch brothers.

Other panels argued for increased military spending, a more focused campaign against women’s reproductive freedom, expanded Second Amendment rights, and Ayn Rand’s preeminence as a public intellectual.

CPAC enthusiasts refer to their event as “Mardi Gras for Conservatives” and maybe this is what some consider a good time. It is more accurately described as a Republican Youth League camp. It recruits and trains replacement voters for a party that the Pew Research Center profiles as “92 percent white…tends to be male, married, Protestant, well off and at least 50.”

Obviously, many constituent groups make up today’s Republican Party. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute, the National Rifle Association, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, to name a few. But the party is captive to CPAC. And to Ralph Reed’s Faith and Family Coalition, the Family Research Council Values Voter Summits, along with other ideological groups that book the same speakers, advance the same arguments, and bolster the same confirmation bias.

The result is a party so extreme that it is toxic. Pew reported in February that 62 percent of the public perceives the party as out of touch with the American people and only 33 percent of the public view Republicans positively. In The Washington Post, Pew director Andrew Kohut wrote that, “The outsize influence of hard-line elements in the party base is doing to the GOP what supporters of Gene McCarthy and George McGovern did to the Democratic Party in the 1960s and early 1970s—radicalizing its image and standing in the way of its revitalization.”

Kohut describes “a party dominated by a highly energized bloc of voters with extremely conservative positions on nearly all issues…These staunch conservatives who emerged with great force in the Obama era represent 45 percent of the Republican base.”

The Republican National Committee is trying to steer the party toward a more reasonable political center. A 98-page report the RNC released last month describes the party’s demographic crisis, in particular its alienation of Hispanics, arguing that Republicans need to embrace immigration reform or risk further marginalization.

The report addresses the anti-gay positions and rhetoric that are creating a generational divide within the party.

It describes a lack of appeal among younger voters: “In 2012, Mitt Romney won individuals older than 30 by 1.8 million votes; he lost voters younger than 30 by 5 million votes.”

And it describes the “Republican Party’s ‘women’ problem.”

“In 2012, President Obama won women by 11 points, whereas Governor Romney won married women by 11 points. However, it is important to note that 40 percent of female voters are single and that Obama won single women by a whopping 36 percent.”

The “Growth and Opportunity Report”—shaped by pragmatic conservatives, including former George W. Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer—is a near-complete catalog of deficiencies the party needs to address to win national elections. Yet it avoids the rogue elephant in the room. No mention of the extremist base working to defeat moderate incumbents, such as Indiana Senator Richard Lugar.

No mention of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, Senate candidates so extreme and misogynistic that in one election cycle they converted Republican women into Democratic voters. And no examination of the extremist institutions that have redefined the party.

The “hard-line” elements represented by CPAC are too big to confront.

The tail is now bigger than the dog.

So the race to the right continues.

Rand Paul tells an on-its-feet-and-screaming CPAC crowd that “the GOP of old has grown stale and moss-covered. I don’t think we need to name any names here, do we?” He is referring to the moderate conservatives who on occasion vote with the Democrats.

The highly overrated Marco Rubio dismisses the argument that the party needs to reconsider some of its conservative positions: “We don’t need a new idea. There is an idea called America and it still works.”

Rick Perry describes John McCain and Mitt Romney as Republicans who are too moderate to win a national election.

Rick Santorum warns that President Obama is turning the United States into a country that is “godless and without faith, where the government is the center.”

The Republican Party is at war with itself.

It appears to be losing.

Lou Dubose is the editor of The Washington Spectator.

(Illustration by Edel Rodriguez)

In "A Brodner Minute," illustrator-animator Steve Brodner's series of satirical videos for The Washington Spectator, Brodner twits everyone in his path. No one is safe—from Rudy Giuliani to Mitt Romney, Arizona governor Jan Brewer to fatcat donors, Grover Norquist to Newt Gingrich. Below, Spectator interns Annie Jones and Renae Lesser ask the artist a few questions about his work.

AJ: You studied fine arts, but what inspired your interest in politics?

To me, politics was never any different from life. As a kid—maybe because it was the '60s—I saw this connection. How you lived was affected by the way you saw civil rights, the war, and so on. Louis CK has a line about wondering why, on a bus to Pittsburgh, a person is annoyed that somebody brings up the subject of Pittsburgh. Well, that's the place the bus is going! We're all going to Pittsburgh. If, then, all we talk about is Kim Kardashian, Snooki, Simon Cowell, what does that say about us? There must be a finely tuned psych term for that.
 

AJ: Who’s the most interesting politician to satirize?


The most interesting politician is always the one with the most telling face. It’s much harder to drag messages out of a face that is constructed to say nothing, or the reverse of the truth. So we love Gingrich and Nixon and hate Reagan and Romney.

AJ: What do you look for in a target?


I don’t really look; anything worth saying rings my doorbell. All you have to do is open the door and let the horrors in. And there are way too many of them. Every day. So this is, tragically, an easy job.

RL: How did you learn the art of caricature?


It is a skill learned in the doing. There are no textbooks, only sweat and self-criticism that will help the next piece along. I have done many thousands of pictures, and each one has been an interesting project—but more important, it has gotten me to a better place with the next one.

RL: What advice do you have for young artists?

Video will prove to be an important piece in the puzzle. It’s the medium that the computer is starting to embrace in a major way.

Steve Brodner, The Washington Spectator's award-winning satiric artist and animator, has been skewering the famous and infamous for the last three decades. His illustrations and animations have appeared in most major publications in the United States, including The New Yorker, PBS, and Slate. He lives and draws in New York City. His website is brodnersbicycle.com.

Click here to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Got an idea about who Brodner should target next? E-mail us!

When American politics was engulfed by a furious debate over contraception earlier this year, many onlookers were puzzled. The 2010 election, which saw sweeping conservative victories at both the state and national level, was fought over economic, not social issues. How did the Tea Party’s triumph turn into a war on women?

The Republican primary process has served the purpose of winnowing out the Republican party's sideshow candidates. But not before they succeeded in inflicting real harm on the country — in small ways and in much larger ones, such as convincing a segment of the public that the scientific research on which the future of the planet depends is not valid.

"If Newt Gingrich is the nominee. Wow!"

That's how Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank responded to Gingrich's ascent in the polls. Frank believes a Gingrich candidacy would be a godsend for Barack Obama, and might again make Democrats the majority party in the House. That Barney Frank is a Newt Gingrich antagonist is not exactly news. Google "liar and lobbyist," and the first 17 stories are accounts of Frank responding to Gingrich's risible claim that Freddie Mac paid him more than $1.5 million for his services as a historian. "There are two 'L' words that apply with Newt," Frank said on MSNBC. "Lobbyist and liar."

Yet Frank's partisan opinion shouldn't be disregarded. Frank was elected two years after Gingrich drove a beleaguered Democrat into retirement by running two grueling campaigns against him, then defeated a weaker candidate in 1978. He is ending a remarkable career in which his mastery of the arcana of banking regulation was critical to passing the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in 2010. Both Democrats and Republicans consider Frank an "institutionalist" — one of a vanishing breed of members devoted to the rules and norms of the House.

Under the new rules for the 2008 election cycle, the DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] asked rank-and-file members to contribute $125,000 in dues and to raise an additional $75,000 for the party. Subcommittee chairpersons must contribute $150,000 in dues and raise an additional $100,000. Members who sit on the most powerful committees … must contribute $200,000 and raise an additional $250,000. Subcommittee chairs on power committees and committee chairs of non-power committees must contribute $250,000 and raise $250,000. The five chairs of the power committees must contribute $500,000 and raise an additional $1 million. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Majority Whip James Clyburn, and Democratic Caucus Chair Rahm Emanuel must contribute $800,000 and raise $2.5 million. The four Democrats who serve as part of the extended leadership must contribute $450,000 and raise $500,000, and the nine Chief Deputy Whips must contribute $300,000 and raise $500,000. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must contribute a staggering $800,000 and raise an additional $25 million. —Marian Currinder, Money in the House (2008)

THE YEAR IS 1909. The U.S. income distribution is about as lopsided as it is today. J. P. Morgan is fine-tuning a tariff bill by telegraph from his yacht. Morgan and his fellow robber barons have for years reliably tied Congress up in knots whenever anyone proposes regulating trusts, railroad rates, financial speculation, or labor disputes. A notoriously corrupt ring of U.S. senators, the so-called "Millionaires Club," is on hand to bury in committee any measures that the corporate titans frown upon.