Newt Gingrich slams Sebelius, distorts reality, descends into madness

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Speaking at the right-wing Values Voters Summit (because, of course, greed and bigotry are values, too*) in Washington yesterday, Newt Gingrich said that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius should be removed from office, with a new Republican Congress "zeroing out her office," for "behaving exactly in the spirit of the Soviet tyranny" and for "represent[ing] left-wing thought police," both with respect to health-care reform.

Of course, she did and is nothing of the kind. What she wrote, in a letter to the insurance industry, is that the federal government "will not tolerate unjustified rate hikes." America's Health Insurance Plans, or AHIP, contends that "Obamacare" is forcing them to raise premiums. In response, Sebelius wrote that that is simply not true, that "any potential premium impact" would be "marginal."

Gingrich, as you might expect, takes the insurance industry at its word. Needless to say, that is a stupid thing to do. The industry wants to maximize its profits and will do and say whatever it takes to do so. But it is also stupid to suggest that Sebelius is acting like a Soviet tyrant (and speaking for some "left-wing thought police" by challenging the very industry that wants to harm consumers by charging them more and blaming Obama. Gingrich is supposed to be a historian, is he not? He is supposed to be one of the smarter conservatives out there -- at least, that is what the media would have us believe, given how much respect and airtime they give him. But he clearly lacks any genuine appreciation for history -- history to him is the just past filtered through his partisan and ideological prisms -- and, once again, we see that neither he nor anything he says should be taken seriously.

Also in his address, Gingrich said that he is "totally opposed to any effort to impose sharia on the United States." But who exactly is talking about imposing fundamentalist Islamic law on America? Where is the evidence? Where is it happening? It isn't. This is fearmongering pure and simple, projected through those partisan and ideological prisms, and just the sort of anti-Muslim bigotry we've come to expect from Gingrich. (While he's talking specifically about sharia, the message is really that Muslims are not to be trusted, that Islam is essentially anti-American, and that all Muslims, backed by liberals/progressives/Democrats, are jihadists seeking to undo the Constitution and take over the country.)

Gingrich is moving further and further away from reality -- and he was never all that close to it to begin with. In his partisan and ideological fervor, he has become a spinner of lies and smears and exaggerations, willing, as ever, to traffic in utter nonsense, running his mouth off without anything to back up what he says, simply to try to score political points by playing on popular ignorance and fear, and to keep himself in the news, where he continues to get the media's attention for saying crazier and crazier things, and to maintain himself as a key player in conservative circles, which cheer harder the crazier and crazier things get. Like the rest of the right side of the political spectrum, he's descending ever more rapidly into madness.

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* Tweeted our good friend (and Reaction editor) Carol Gee yesterday, on the VVS: "Reminder: Repubs can have no exclusive claim to be 'values voters.' Dem voters value ideas like creativity, diversity, veracity, lucidity." Exactly.