| Well, we all knew it would happen ... on his way down the ladder of GOP presidential hopefuls, Newt Leroy Gingrich would wage a scorched earth campaign on Willard Mitt "Mittens" Romney. We knew this because that's what Gingrich is, a doughy mass of ego and spite who once shut down the federal government because he couldn't sit in the front of Air Force One. And, so he did, unleashing a vicious attack by way of the same sort of Super PAC that Romney used to torpedo Gingrich last month. It's the sort of video, if you haven't seen it, that you'd expect from a Michael Moore, a thorough knifing of the Republican frontrunner that will be difficult for Romney to pass off as looney leftist yelling. Magic Frank, donning his hood as chief inquisitor of the modern Republican Party, sees something else at work. It's now, he writes, time to purge Gingrich from the Republican Party. Conservatives believe the Constitution guarantees Americans the right to seek their own happiness and make the best of their own lives in a free country and economy. Gingrich can no longer claim the latter definition.
If you're part of an ideologically-inflexible political party, nobody every tells you that they're going to purge you. It doesn't happen that way. There weren't arguments or curses like in the movies. Your political commissar comes with banal punditry. I could go on, but you get the picture. Magic Frank has single handedly managed to redefine conservatism as what is mainstream to the Republican Party. Willard Romney, pro-choice and pro-gay rights before he was against them, is now the real standard bearer of conservatism. And, it is so not because Romney has had some sort of convincing pre-deathbed conversion to true conservatism, whatever the hell that is, but because he was the victim of an attack everyone could see coming six miles down the road. Conservatism, according to Magic Frank, apparently finds value and nobility in whatever helps alread-wealthy people become more so ... even if they have to destroy communities to do it. To be fair to Magic Frank, capitalism today is under unprecedented attack. I mean, those stinking hippies in Zuccotti Park were bitching last fall that Wall Street had grifted the nation and that they wanted capitalism back. A more bone-chilling assault on free enterprise the nation hasn't seen (leastways, since the genuine movements to supplant capitalism with anarchy, socialism, and/or communism of the first half of the 20th century). |
