Columnist.
Washington -- There is a grisly pallor that has beset former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Then, too, there is a lumpiness -- to his face, to his features, to his ... well, to his lump. When he walks into a room, I feel rather sorry for him, but then I feel rather sorry for Bill Clinton, too, and for Hillary. No longer do I call her "Bill's lovely wife Bruno." She looks grandmotherly rather than tough. I guess maybe her coeval from the 1960s generation of student government goody-goodies, Newt, looks grandfatherly rather than brainy. What does Al Gore look like these days, and Jean-Francois Kerry? They all quite abruptly assumed old age.
WASHINGTON -- As the tents were coming down at McPherson Square, the dead rats and mice being retrieved, the urine and feces and filthy bedding disposed of by District of Columbia employees dressed in hazardous-materials suits like their contemporaries at Fukushima, I thought of the left-wing press. You see, I read the left-wing press. Not the urban throwaway rags, but I read The Nation, The Progressive, The American Prospect, and more -- I read them all. They have been raving for months about the exciting prospect of a great wave of reform coming out of the Occupy movement. It was here to stay, and for a while, silly old me took them seriously.
WASHINGTON -- Ah, yes, Newt Gingrich did in the last days of the Florida primary precisely what I predicted he would do. He hurled wild charges at Mitt Romney that suggested Newt was losing his grip. He charged Romney with lying and falling into the hands of George Soros and Goldman Sachs, and he did this while seeking the Republican presidential nomination! Newt quoted Soros as saying, "We think either Obama or Romney's fine, but Gingrich, he would change things." Citing Goldman Sachs' profiting from the bailout, Newt linked the Wall Street firm to anti-Gingrich ads, filling in the dots: "Those ads," he averred, "are your money recycled to attack me."
WASHINGTON -- How long have I been saying it? At least for 15 years, but in private, I have been aware of it longer. Newt Gingrich is conservatism's Bill Clinton, but without the charm. He has acquired wit, but he has all the charm of barbed wire. Newt and Bill are, of course, 1960s-generation narcissists, and they share the same problems: waywardness and deviancy. Newt, like Bill, has a proclivity for girl-hopping. It's not as egregious as Bill's, but then Newt is not as drop-dead beautiful. His public record is already besmeared with tawdry divorces, and there are private encounters with the fair sex that doubtless will come out. If I have heard of some, you can be sure the Democrats have heard of more.
WASHINGTON -- Whose job would you want to have? Would it be President Barack Obama's or Governor Chris Christie's in the great state of New Jersey? Would it be President Obama's, whose budget woes are getting graver, or would it be Governor Christie's, whose budget is at least looking to be survivable? Now Obama is facing the choice in his budgetary decisions. Does he raise taxes only on families making $1 million a year? Or does he, as he has heretofore promised, raise taxes on families making $250,000? Governor Christie has had an easier choice. He has promised a 10 percent cut on every New Jerseyan's income. He has stopped the bleeding in New Jersey. He has cut 375 government programs. He has capped property taxes. He has confronted public employees with reasonable cuts in their bloated health care and pension benefits.
WASHINGTON -- I have officially called off my boycott of the National Football League. I do not care how many felons or frotteurs play the game. Now there is Tim Tebow to redeem it. He can pass and run. He inspires his teammates. He inspires many returning fans like me. I shall follow him through the playoffs and maybe even next year as the season resumes anew. He is an American original -- and he is controversial. I am for him. No, I shall not fall for the NFL's gimmicks. You will not see me wearing a jersey of the Denver Broncos, for whom Tebow plays. I shall not even buy a coffee mug. In fact, I think I shall add up how much money I could spend on Tebow paraphernalia and donate it to charity. Tebow inspires his teammates, and now he has inspired me.
WASHINGTON -- An underlying theme of our times that has gone unperceived by the high and mighty in media, government and other locales where the politically alive come to roost is the thumping failure of an increasing number of counter-productive, old progressive reforms. Once they were beheld as prodigies from the minds of superior citizens -- such stars of yesteryear as Robert M. La Follette and Woodrow Wilson. Now they are revealed as hollow shams or, at best, curiosities. Surely soon they will be seen for what they are: catnip from the egotists. In a political year, progressive reforms from a bygone era are all around us, assumed by the high and mighty as the way things should be. Is there too much money in politics? But of course! Are the pols being bought off by the vested interests? For a certitude, the giant corporations, the fat cats, the vested interests are flooding the halls of Congress and lesser political venues with cash (never in this list is included the unions, particularly the public-sector unions).
WASHINGTON -- The year 2011 has drawn to an end, and as I look back, I see several of my predictions that appear pretty sound. President Barack Obama is dead in the water and will be beaten in 2012. I have made that prediction over and again this year and I think it will be borne out. Another observation I've made is that liberalism is dead. By the coming election, it will be the rare psephologist who fails to notice. Say, the occasional MSNBC political expert may still think liberalism is full of brag and bounce after the fall elections, as will the Sunday morning news know-it-alls. But after the Nov. 6 elections, with the Senate and the presidency added to the Republicans' trophy chest, I think my observation will be commonly accepted.
WASHINGTON -- They are back! I speak of the episodic apologists, who have been a phenomenon of the Clinton Saga since its earliest days, back when the Clintons were flipping real estate and exchanging bad checks in Arkansas. The episodic apologists, like the legendary court historians of Franklin Roosevelt's time, are an essential ingredient of the era in which they labor. The court historians gave us Roosevelt's "One Hundred Days," "He Saved Us From Communism" and other legends of the 1930s -- forget not, "He Ended the Great Depression." The episodic apologists are admittedly somewhat different. Drawn from the ranks of journalists, historians and politicians, they have contributed more actively to the soap opera of the Clinton Saga than mere historians, for they are active participants in the drama. After every disappointment that the Clintons perpetrate, these saps go into an emotional tailspin: with all their trembling alases, forsooths and oh-woe-is-me's.
WASHINGTON -- Do you recall in reading President Harry S. Truman's very good memoir, "Years of Trial and Hope: 1946-1952," his scholarly dissection of the Federal Reserve system and his discussion of low inflation's influence on relatively unstable growth? Actually, I don't either, and I read the book from cover to cover. How about Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man who led our forces in vanquishing Hitler's war machine, became the first Supreme Commander of NATO and eventually president, serving until 1960? Do you remember his erudite discussions of domestic policy during his 1952 campaign? His plan to pare down the national debt with a temporary "surcharge" on the top 1.5 percent of income-earners? And then there was, of course, his education policy, which would include highly nutritious lunches to low-income students so the students would not be a burden on our healthcare system in future years? Well, I don't recall these discussions either.
WASHINGTON -- Do my eyes deceive me? It seems that the Republicans are in danger of losing the debate on cutting taxes. Some 30 years after President Ronald Reagan proved that tax cuts encourage economic growth -- which enriches us all -- glum figures like President Barack Obama are roaming the land talking about the apolaustic lives of the very rich and the need to take their loot so we can all live better. Facts are facts: If you expropriated all the wealth from the top 1 percent, you would but dent our national debt, and then where would you get the money for next year and the year after that? Class warfare is not the answer.
WASHINGTON -- When Barney Frank announced the other day that he was shuffling off stage after three decades in the Congressional limelight, I was brought back to 1980, when some very thoughtful friends from Harvard told me to watch him. Paul H. Weaver had been an aide to Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism, which was lustrous in those days, and rightly so. Paul was one of the brightest young neo-cons of his generation. I always took him seriously. He thought that Congressman Frank was principled, stupendously intelligent and of good cheer -- a wit. It seemed Frank was going to be another Daniel Patrick Moynihan, or at least an Allard Lowenstein, the former congressman and principled liberal activist who had recently been murdered.
WASHINGTON -- On Sunday morning we lost a big-hearted prodigy: Teddy Forstmann, financier, political player, philanthropist (especially for the young and those in education) and a bit of an adventurer. I know -- I accompanied him on some and feared for my life. He was a member of the Board of Directors of The American Spectator in the 1980s and early 1990s. Teddy died of brain cancer, and we shall miss him. He was from a prosperous family, but his fortune he made on his own. He relished "the deal," and sports, and gambling. He also had an interest in the ladies: Princess Diana, Elizabeth Hurley and recently a television personality, Padma Lakshmi. But he never married.
WASHINGTON -- The death of Fred Iklé last week inspires me to prophesy. Thus far, only the redoubtable Wall Street Journal has remarked on Fred's passing. That he was a formidable mind during the Cold War and important to the peaceful settlement of that decades-long struggle is remembered thanks to the Journal. Yet, to the rest of the media, he is a minor figure -- perhaps a menacing figure. We shall see what they say, but I am not holding my breath. This is the way liberalism creates the Kultursmog, which is to say, the politicized culture that surrounds us.
WASHINGTON -- Last weekend I was given a hint as to how an erroneous idea is born and how it takes on a life of its own. I was at Yale University as a guest of the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale. It's run by a group of extremely winning young Yale students who are all admirably conservative. Bill would approve. They all carried themselves like young ladies and young gentlemen. They were confident in their ideas and amused.
WASHINGTON -- A presidential election looms on the horizon, and already the nation's great organs of opinion -- and occasionally of fact -- are gearing up to serve the commonweal and, ever so quietly, their own biases. Already we're told that Herman Cain -- the non-politician seeking the Republican nomination -- had two untoward incidents in the 1990s with ladies who were not his wife ... or maybe he did not. He pleads innocent. His wife does too.
WASHINGTON -- It's called the Taranto Principle, and it's now being employed by the Kultursmogists to blanket the country in a preposterosity: namely that the Tea Partyers and the Occupy Wall Street crowd have much in common. So go ahead, loyal Democrats, and take up the Occupiers' anger. Giving presidential voice to the Occupiers' complaints will be a sure winner for President Barack Obama in 2012.
WASHINGTON -- I do not know what the learned political scientists of the Republic say about it, but it seems to me that the laws of the land are now so poorly written that almost no one knows what they mean. That is a government bureaucrat's delight! The healthcare bill, disparagingly and often referred to as Obamacare, is typical. No member of Congress could have read it before voting on it, and, even now, I doubt any congressperson has read it through. I know someone who did read it all, but he is an insomniac and does not count. Then there is Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York. She read it through, but only because she thought it an atrocity and wanted to protect Americans from it.
WASHINGTON -- As an observer on the national scene lo these many years, I have noted time and again that in a discussion of politics the first person to inject the topic of race into the discussion is often the racist. Though that person almost always affects to be without bigotry, in fact he or she is invariably a racist and hopes to emerge from the fracas as the moral colossus. Those who have followed the careers of the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his holiness Al Sharpton will get my drift. These frauds would have to be debating George Wallace to be the lesser racists, and, frankly, I think the contests would be too close to call.
WASHINGTON - Supposedly, this White House has just made a furious attempt to sink a book, "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President" by Ron Suskind, which came out Sept. 20. Jay Carney, the White House spinmeister, spoke ill of it. Numerous former White House staffers spoke ill of it. Carney said, "One passage seems to be lifted almost entirely from Wikipedia." Why would a respected writer want to do that? I suspect that the White House is going to be as effective in sinking Suskind as it has been in keeping President Barack Obama's polling numbers lofty.
