Make sure you ping me when you post Newt's big government record.
That said, I'll be the first to admit that he's strayed off the reservation too often, but of the candidates who are now in the race, he's the only one with the right intellectual heft, experience, conservative orientation, and guts to defeat Obama, then go on to reverse course on what the Dems have done to America in the last couple of decades.
He may be flawed in some ways, but he's the best we've got, by far.
PING!
"On the subject of health insurance, Gingrich said he believes that everyone should have coverage, which Beck said was the same as the individual mandate in Obamacare. Gingrich would provide subsidies to make insurance affordable to all....He argued that the expansion of Medicare to provide a drug benefit improved the program."
http://news.yahoo.com/glenn-beck-tags-newt-gingrich-big-government-progressive-232400647.html
"like Mitt Romney, he was a flip-flopper, being in favor of government mandates on health care before he was against them, and in favor of big-government climate-change “solutions” before he was against them, and in favor of putting giant mirrors in space to light American highways by night before he was agai . . . oh, wait, that one he may still be in favor of.... At Freddie Mac, Newt was peddling influence to a quasi-governmental entity. At Bain Capital, Mitt Romney was risking private equity in private business enterprise. What sort of “conservative” would conflate the two?
" It was Newt who gave us S-CHIP, the biggest expansion of Medicaid since the program was created. On the other hand, when it came to holding the line on “tax credits” for people who don’t pay any taxes, Gingrich looked into Clinton’s eyes and melted. ...In that sense, few of Gingrich’s proposals bear comparison with the Homestead Act: Instead of enabling Americans to take risks and push the frontiers, they incline mostly to the expansion of bureaucracy and an increase in dependency. As a result of Gingrich’s “reforms,” four out of ten American children are on Medicaid.
"Presumably this is what he meant when he told Newsweek that his Gestalt is “in many ways conservative, in many ways very moderate.” I’d prefer to formulate it this way: Gingrich is a pushover for progressivism who’s succeeded in passing himself off as a hard-line right-wing bastard. Which is why Democrats who make the mistake of believing their own talking points on Newt invariably have to improvise hastily. In 2007 John Kerry found himself booked for a debate with Gingrich on climate change and had his speechwriters prepare some boilerplate about Newt’s “marching in lockstep with the climate-change deniers.” Unfortunately for him, the former Speaker spoke first and announced that man-made global warming was a real threat that we needed to address “very actively.” He praised as “a very interesting read” Kerry’s unreadable book on the subject, and for good measure added that he was “very worried about polar bears” because “my name ‘Newt’ actually comes from the Danish ‘Knut,’ and there’s been a major crisis in Germany over a polar bear named ‘Knut.’” Kerry abandoned his prescripted attack on Gingrich, hailed his candor, and put his arm around him. Lest the paying customers feel cheated by the bipartisan love-in, the senator attempted to put a bit of clear blue water between him and the ruthless right-wing bastard by raising the possibility that perhaps Gingrich did not share his enthusiasm for cap-and-trade. Newt said he was willing to be persuaded. “I am going to sell a few more books for you, John,” he declared.
when he was forced from the speakership, Newt stayed in Washington working his Rolodex. These are different times, but even so the Freddie Mac business is not a small thing. Perhaps the single most repellent feature of the political class that has served America so disastrously in recent decades is its shameless venality in parlaying “public service” into a guarantee of an eternal snout at the trough. Newt writes bestselling books about government, produces DVDs about government, sets up websites about government, but he is as foreign to genuine private-sector wealth creation as any life politician. Indeed, his endurance in Washington represents one of the worst aspects of contemporary “public service” — that a life in politics no longer depends on anything so whimsical as the votes of the people.
"So what does that leave? Tonally, his confident swagger is more appealing to the Republican base than Romney’s unctuous aw-shucks wholesomeness — just as John McCain’s maverickiness was more appealing than Romney last time around. And we know how that worked out for the GOP. The Dems are confident that this is a gift from the heavens: The Stupid Party is stupid enough to put up a scowly, jowly fat guy whose name is a byword for everything from the Nineties Mr. and Mrs. Moderate don’t want to revive."
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/286068/gingrich-gestalt-mark-steyn?pg=4
"This came out in the interview in which he supported subsidies for oil and gas exploration, which Beck along with a lot of other tea party people oppose."
http://news.yahoo.com/newt-gingrich-big-government-conservative-000800509.html
When Ron Paul introduced a budget plan in October calling for $1 trillion in cuts in one year, even conservatives who were not Paul supporters cheered. Said Gingrich of the plan: “It’s a non-starter.” When Rep. Paul Ryan introduced an entitlement reform plan this year, conservatives supported it as a bold first step. Gingrich called it “right-wing social engineering.”
"It’s quite another to say that on virtually every issue of importance to conservatives in the last decade — amnesty, TARP, climate change — these men have mostly been on the liberal side. Watching Gingrich now argue with Romney over who’s more conservative is like watching the two guys from Milli Vanilli argue over who’s a better singer. ...Mitt and Newt's lip-synch conservatism increasingly falls on deaf ears. Co
"While Paul wants to cut $1 trillion tomorrow, Gingrich and Romney are stuck bickering over who is more responsible for giving Obama the blueprint for government healthcare — as both men have supported the individual healthcare mandate as “conservative.” It was reported this week that as late as 2006, Gingrich was still praising Romneycare in Massachusetts as the ideal healthcare model for the nation.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/12/28/gingrich-would-be-worse-than-obama/#ixzz1jV87RAfn
Yeah, he's a conservative, all right. Like McCain.