Why I'm Now Supporting Newt Gingrich for President

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejvyDn1TPr8

“When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” — Richard Nixon

Ever since I first learned about this quote in high school Tricky Dick has been my favorite President. I of course don’t agree with the absurd, totalitarian sentiment. Who would? But to have the audacity to make the argument with genuine sincerity is something one can’t help but admire.

My friend John Hawkins, a talented Gingrich supporter, here at the Tatler last night commenting on his candidate’s defeat in Florida, (now reported as a 14-point loss):

Whether Santorum and Gingrich will have the money to continue to effectively compete or whether the conservative base will move towards Mitt to put an end to a damaging primary fight is still an open question. Still, there is many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip, so hopefully the other candidates will stay in, fight like hell, and try to spare us the least conservative GOP nominee since Nixon.

I know he didn’t mean it this way, but the implication of John’s invocation of Nixon’s Ghost as a stand-in for Mitt Romney is to suggest that the most significant problem with our 37th president was his RINO, big government, pseudo-conservative ideology.

But of far greater concern than Nixon founding the EPA, was the fact that he lacked an ethical foundation and responsible judgment. Failure to pursue conservative policies is indeed objectionable, but it pales in comparison to possessing a personality and an ego that leads not only to law breaking but then years later a legendary justification for it on national television.

But apparently that level of power is what’s now necessary to defeat Barack Obama. This is how the mainstream media and about 25% of the electorate dream of their Fearless Leader:

We too need someone who is going to be even more ruthless and cool. And in this Florida battle Gingrich proved it beyond all doubt with this razor sharp attack on Romney, a robo-call claiming as Governor Romney,

“vetoed a bill paying for kosher food for our seniors in nursing homes — Holocaust survivors, who for the first time, were forced to eat non-kosher, because Romney thought $5 was too much to pay for our grandparents to eat kosher.”

Bryan Preston explains the pretty obvious factual problems with “the Gummy Bear” using this line of attack. (Love that nickname that Bryan coined for the apparently gummy bear-addicted Gingrich.) But the sheer viciousness of invoking the Holocaust in a primary fight in the heavily Jewish regions of Florida shows a Machiavellian commitment to victory no matter the cost. And that is apparently what it will take.

Newt maintains this out-for-blood mentality by being the only candidate not to call Romney to congratulate him. Doug Mataconis observes:

Not only was Gingrich alone among the other three candidates in neither calling Romney nor congratulating him in his speech, but he sounded last night like he was accepting his parties nomination…

So, now that Romney as the nominee approaches greater certainty, I renounce my previous six weeks’ worth of anti-Gingrich argumentation. For the same reasons that I previously argued he should not be the nominee, I now argue that he should. If Newt Gingrich is able to bounce back and seize the nomination over Romney then it will be an act of such political genius/expertise that he will have more than earned the right to go toe-to-toe with Obama. If Gingrich can beat Romney now then he can certainly beat Obama.

Only by actually living up to the mainstream media’s childish stereotype of what a conservative Tea Partier is (a ruthless cutthroat capitalist with no values who cares about no one else) can we be strong enough to defeat Barack Obama. How a candidate will perform once president and if he can be trusted to protect the integrity of the conservative brand are secondary concerns in comparison to the anything-goes political warfare needed to crush the Soros Socialists. Who’s with me?