Live from La Farine: I confess that I will never understand how David Brooks can be "so repulsed" by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz but have always found the likes of Newt Gingrich to be just dandy:
: "I have spent the last week so repulsed by Donald Trump, I had forgotten how ugly Ted Cruz could be...
...but he reminded us this week. As I said and as everyone says, the reason we have terrorism is not because the Prophet Mohammed came down and not because there is a religion called Islam. The reason we have terror is that young men are alienated and feel they can wage war and a just war against societies that are racist and xenophobic and crushing toward them.
And if you want to spread the message, a good way would be to have extra police operations directed at Muslim neighborhoods. And so Ted Cruz’s idea is probably the worst idea, well, only of the day, because we have a lot in this campaign, truly terrible idea, only saved by the fact it’s almost certain he doesn’t actually believe it. He just wants to sound like Donald Trump....
Are we really here? Is this really happening? Is this America? Are we a great country talking about trying to straddle the world and create opportunity in this country?
It’s just mind-boggling. And we have sort of become acculturated, because this campaign has been so ugly. We have become acculturated to sleaze and unhappiness that you just want to shower from every 15 minutes.
The Trump comparison of the looks of the wives, he does have, over the course of his life, a consistent misogynistic view of women as arm candy, as pieces of meat. It’s a consistent attitude toward women which is the stuff of a diseased adolescent.
And so we have seen a bit of that show up again. But if you go back over his past, calling into radio shows bragging about his affairs, talking about his sex life in public, he is childish in his immaturity. And his — even his misogyny is a childish misogyny.
And that’s why I do not think Republicans, standard Republicans, can say, yes, I’m going to vote for this guy because he’s our nominee. He’s of a different order than your normal candidate. And this whole week is just another reminder of that.
Let's remember:
(2011): The Washington Monthly: "In 1994... a deranged woman named Susan Smith drowned her two young sons...
...Gingrich... equated Smith's murders with the values of the Democratic Party... told the AP:
The mother killing her two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we have to have change. I think people want to change and the only way you get change is to vote Republican.
Five years later, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people at Columbine.... Gingrich insisted that American 'elites' bore responsibility for the massacre:
I want to say to the elite of this country--the elite news media, the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite: I accuse you in Littleton... of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made, and being afraid to take responsibility for things you have done, and instead foisting upon the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don't have the courage to look at the world you have created.
In 2007, Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people at Virginia Tech. In response, Gingrich blamed liberals for supporting 'situation ethics', adding:
Yes, I think the fact is, if you look at the amount of violence we have in games that young people play at 7, 8, 10, 12, 15 years of age, if you look at the dehumanization, if you look at the fact that we refuse to say that we are, in fact, endowed by our creator, that our rights come from God, that if you kill somebody, you're committing an act of evil.
Gingrich, explaining the VT tragedy, went on to condemn Halloween costumes and the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law...
