At some point in the last few years, my political views became much more focused. A side effect is that it takes less time than before for me to decide that someone is a doof. That seems like a step back in some ways; one might hope to become more tolerant and compassionate of others' views as one matures. That's one of my goals, at least: to gain wisdom and perspective with age, the kind of deep calm which seems to bring with it a certain mellowness and even humor about the strange dance that is American politics.
Worse, I can't claim to be much better informed than I was when Newt was on the Big Stage. To be honest, I don't know the specifics of Newt's ickiness, just that his ideas have been presented as a point of contrast to ideas I support. What happened to listening? What happened to being open to the possibility of goodness?
All this by way of introducing a blurry photo of one of my favorite tiny creatures, this one found in the yard today. I love these little guys. They're easy to mistake for earthworms at first. They're about the same size as an earthworm and they have a passably-wormish brown-red color. Their little legs are tiny, with little newt toes that look like the world's tiniest jazz hands. So cute, the newt. Finding one of these little guys hiding under a flower pot seems absolutely magical to me. Even the fact that he's actually a California slender salamander doesn't keep from thinking this is the best newt in town.
2 comments:
Your newt is cute. The political Newt, not so much. Here's one for instance from The Nation in 2006:
"Gingrich, after all, was the architect of the so-called K Street Project, which is at the center of the current corruption scandals. As the Post reported in 2002, 'Starting in the mid-1990s, some Republicans, including then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and [Representative Tom] DeLay, have advocated tracking the political affiliation of lobbyists, as part of an effort to place more conservatives on K Street.' In return, K Street would help the GOP ram through corporate-written legislation and fill GOP coffers with campaign contributions. It worked perfectly. The American Prospect reported in 2000 that within the first six months of Gingrich's tenure as Speaker, 'the Republican leadership introduced a spate of controversial bills gutting regulatory agencies' and that 'business contributions more than doubled from what they had been during a comparable period in 1993.' By 1998 Gingrich wasn't even trying to hide the K Street Project, as he 'held up a vote on intellectual property legislation in protest of the Electronics Industry Association's plan to hire a Democrat to run the group,' according to the Post. In fact, when Gingrich resigned at the end of 1998, the Hill newspaper ran a story headlined NEWT'S DEPARTURE DEFLATES KEY LOBBYISTS, which detailed the unsuccessful effort by Gingrich and corporate lobbyists to help him hold on to power and preserve K Street's bridge into Congress."
Deregulation has turned out to be such a good thing....
For more, read all the Nation stuff on Gingrich.
And don't forget, he's the guy who served divorce papers to his second wife while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery. And he lead the attacks on Clinton for Monica Lewinsky while admitting (later, of course) he himself was having an affair.
So he's a total hypocrite.
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