Newt: Not America’s BFF

When writing, it takes effort and discipline to not hurl labels at people.  By now, though, Newt Gingrich has revealed himself for what he is: Aside from being labelled as unstable by people who worked with him, he has all the makings of a budding fascist.  Gingrich’s attacks on the judiciary are nothing less than breath-taking.  His suggestions that judges be hauled before legislative committees by police to explain their decisions speaks to a time and place that the History Channel deals with every day.

Gingrich, who converted to the kind of Catholicism that we hoped had died with Francisco Franco, would be quite at home with the grand Inquisition.  The man is a menace.  Gingrich’s self-unmasking comes on the heels of a report last week issued by the Department of Justice on Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.  There is no budding in Joe.  You do not have to read any part of the DOJ report on Arpaio’s repeated violations on the constitutional and human rights of HispanicLatinos – well, anybody who does not look like him – to know that you are not in the ranks of democrats.  All you have to do is go to his website.  It would make Josef Goebbels proud.

Molly Ivins’ comment – that Pat Buchanan’s hateful speech at the Republican national convention in Houston in 1992 probably would have sounded better in the original German – is no longer funny.  I am glad in a way that Molly is no longer here to witness the retrogression that the Republican Party and a significant share of the American people are undergoing.  Molly was a tough gal, but even she would be truly fearful of how close the Supreme Court is to unleashing some of the truly reactionary forces that we have always suspected existed – but were in denial about – in American society.  If the Court upholds any parts of the Arizona and Alabama laws on how individuals can be targeted simply by the color of their skin and thus held for no reason other than the whim of an officer of the law – what is this other than the undoing of a free, open and democratic society?

If the Court does away through the subterfuge of a battle over congressional redistricting in Texas with Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and allows for any legislative body to discriminate as it wishes against a minority – what is this other than demeaning the principle of one-person, one-vote and thus eradicating the very concept of equality itself and with one fell swoop vote opening the doors to one-party rule?

What is happening to the world, a friend asked me recently.  That was probably the question many were asking themselves in a century now past that suddenly is rearing its head again.

This madness is happening not in slow motion but in real time. The only one missing is Leni Riefenstahl.

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