Newt Gingrich, self-appointed “teacher of civilization” and de facto leader of the neo-con lynch mob, in an op-ed piece he co-wrote for National Review: “Far from defeating terrorism, today’s government-to-government foreign-aid system can actually incite it by propping up corrupt and repressive one-party states.”
The views of Imam Feisal Abdul-Rauf, alleged covert jihadist and anti-American radical, as summarized in a June 23, 2004 interview with Chris Hedges of the New York Times:
“On June 23, 2004, [Imam Feisal Abdul-] Rauf told Chris Hedges, then a writer for the New York Times: `Islamic terrorists do not come from another moral universe … they arise from oppressive societies that … Washington had a hand in creating.'”
If the view Rauf expressed makes him a fellow traveler with jihadis, wouldn’t this mean that “Mr. Newt” is an apologist for Islamic terrorism?
Of course, what’s really going on is that Newt is promoting a taxpayer-subsidized form of micro-colonialism called Free Cities. Through that “private” initiative (which would actually be a form of international corporatism), the blessings of free enterprise, “limited” government, and protection for individual rights would supposedly be extended to hapless foreigners by the same entity — the Regime in Washington — that is the most powerful enemy of the same.
Gingrich may be history’s purest specimen of cynical political opportunism. As a recent Esquire profile makes clear, he doesn’t really believe in anything, other than his qualifications to tutor the rest of us.
Like Lenin, Gingrich is adept at identifying and exploiting grievances — or creating them ex nihilo. He is many loathsome things, but “stupid” isn’t in that inventory. Gingrich knows that he’s spewing unfiltered nonsense about the “mosque at Ground Zero,” and that he’s engendering hatred toward a moderate, establishment-centered Muslim cleric whose “radical” views aren’t that different from his own.
It’s doubtful that those at the terminus of the human centipede-style GOP propaganda cloaca will recognize that fact.
