Posted on 01/19/2012 12:41:04 PM PST by Jim Robinson
Edited on 01/19/2012 12:44:42 PM PST by Jim Robinson. [history]
I'm officially endorsing Newt Gingrich for president today. Was going to wait until after Florida, but see no reason to delay. We need Newt to win in South Carolina and Florida to stop any possible momentum building up for the establishment big government, statist, abortionist RINO!!
RomneyCare = ObamaCare = government tyranny!! Taxpayer funded abortion is as evil as evil can be!!
Newt is a pro-life Reagan Revolution conservative who led the Republican Revolution of the 90s, taking the majority away from the democrats who had held it for 40 years. And as Speaker, cut the taxes, cut the government, cut the spending, cut the deficit, cut regulations, cut unemployment, brought the federal budget under control for four years running. And unlike Romney, actually blocked a socialist healthcare system from becoming law. And created a pro-growth, pro-free market, pro-jobs environment and extended the Reagan economy throughout the 90s!! Newt is the ideal candidate to lead the Tea Party Revolution!!
Newt plans to go to a 15% personal flat tax after deductions and a 12.5% corporate tax and eliminate the capital gains taxes altogether. He wants to privatize social security and medicare and eliminate the payroll tax.
And he wants to neuter the EPA and the Fed. Repeal ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley. Fire all of the czars, dismantle the Marxist state and fire if not jail Bernanke. And send 185 federal socialist welfare programs back to the states and the people, and return education back to local control.
Newt will directly challenge the liberal activist judiciary and end the unconstitutional power grabs of our usurping black robed rulers.
He wants to restore the constitutional balance of powers between the three branches and restore states rights and individual rights. He wants to turn government control back to the states and local people as the founders set it up.
These are the kind of dramatic reductions in government that the tea party is demanding.
And he has the knowledge, experience, know how, fire in the belly, and the balls to get it done!!
In short, I believe he's exactly what we grassroots conservative tea party rebels are looking for. I think we can use some of Newts conservative revolutionary talents right now!!
As long as the conservatives remain split, the establishment RINO Romney will waltz in just like McLame in 2008 and he will lose to Obama just like McLame. It's time to build the Gingrich Coalition!!
FR is hereby officially in full open rebellion against the elite GOP establishment and the Marxist commiecrats!!
Go, tea party!! Go, Newt!!
We are the resistance!!
Damn the torpedoes, damn the RINOs, damn the exes!! Full speed ahead!!
Free Republic is and will remain a pro-life, pro-family, limited government, strong defense, grassroots conservative site!!
RINOs need not apply!!
Happy Newt Day!! Only 366 days until President Newt evicts Obama!!
About a week ago I wisely decided not to post on the political threads. These days I just post on the economy and SHTF threads, much safer there. Since it is issue orientated and has very little to do with any candidate.
I guess you think Jim DeMint is nuts too?
How about Paul Ryan - screwball as well?
Really Jim...you’re losing it man!
Funny you rip into a series of comments about Ron Paul - who NEVER directly said 9/11 is America’s fault - what he said is we can’t expect to not have people attack us for crap we do - granted his view and position on Islam especially radical Islam is very naive and whacked - HELL we had to build a navy and the marines to fight radical Islam back in Jefferson’s day. Islam hates everything that is NOT Islam.
The GOP better “hear” what Ron Paul is saying because it is ringing loud and clear with American’s frustrations with the government. Jim DeMint is exactly right on that point.
The danger of Ron Paul is if he decides to run 3rd party and we will hear that by May 1st.
Ban me if you want Jim, I have over 14 years invested here at FR, stood with you, have strongly financially supported FR and rallied many others to donate. The point I think you are missing about ALL of this discussion - you don’t even realize you are doing EXACTLY what a progressive would do - shut down any opposition that you don’t agree with because it gets in the way of your PERSONAL goals - to not have to vote for Romney.
You ran off anyone that supported Romney and now you are running off anyone that speaks a different perspective than you have regardless of whether it is thoughtful and honest.
Discourse is what makes America great! Discourse is what makes FR great! You are killing off the greatest asset you have people that can think for themselves and express their perspective and research.
America is about individuals, individuals will NEVER always agree - that’t the point!
Oh, darn it. Count me in too. And I support Newt Gingrich on his own merits. He’s far above and beyond the Newt who was my congressman in Georgia. My misgivings are mooted by the Newt Gingrich who showed up at the debates and showed up the competitors and the MSM as cardboard puppets.
Smart. I should do the same.
You’re very welcome.
You’re very welcome.
Rep. Ron Paul's supporters are not all young college-kid potheads. We conservatives make a serious mistake if we think Paul draws his support only from people who would otherwise support President Obama. While he does draw some supporters from that camp, he is a real threat to conservatives in a close primary race and a potential threat to the Republican Party if we nominate someone like Mitt Romney who has dubious conservative credentials and Paul decides to run a third-party campaign.
I have to deal with a few supporters of Ron Paul in my own local church. Also, a prominent older leader in my own denomination is an open and aggressive Ron Paul supporter. I know from direct personal experience that a fair number of politically active military personnel like Ron Paul's views on foreign policy because they believe we're fouling up the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, so they conclude (wrongly) that we shouldn't be involved in foreign military action at all.
The problems with Ron Paul are complex. His ideas are not all bad, but he's got no chance of being nominated as a Republican and could do serious damage by peeling conservative votes to a losing cause that won't give up.
The root of the problem is that Paul is a libertarian, not a conservative, but too many people on our side of the fence do not understand the difference.
On the other hand, because libertarianism is fundamentally focused on the role of Constitutional government limited to the written words of the document with an interpretation guided by the words of the Founding Fathers, he reminds us — correctly — that the conservative movement has too often forgotten the importance of adherence to the Constitution. He advocates views on foreign policy which in some ways **ARE** paleoconservative; they're the old Fortress America positions which the Republican Party held up until World War II and which some Republicans continued to hold for a long time afterward.
Furthermore, while Ron Paul has decades of contact with some of the most ultraconservative wings of Calvinist political thought dating back to the early days of theonomy, he's long since come to political positions which, as far as I can tell, hold that government has no role in promoting morality and common decency. The libertinism inherent in libertarianism is not unknown in Republican Party history, but it's largely been forgotten since the rise of the Christian conservative movement. Ron Paul is so old that he predates that rise of that movement, and he's been given a “free pass” too long by conservatives because of his longstanding personal ties with people of unquestioned convictions in the Christian conservative movement.
Much of that is theory that would be irrelevant if it weren't for the all-too-practical fact that Ron Paul is not a college professor writing for a think-tank but rather is a politician who has a track record of winning a fairly consistent minority block of votes. As a practical matter, the problem with Paul is not that he draws his votes from liberals (although he does do that to some extent) but that he represents an older set of Republican views which were wrong then and in the modern world are not just wrong but dangerous.
Ron Paul's views are in large measure views which have roots in Republican Party history but which were long ago abandoned by Republicans. We abandoned them for a reason — you simply cannot have an isolationist foreign policy, trusting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to protect us, in an ago of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Furthermore, his libertarian social views represent a type of Republican Party position which is essentially the Ford-Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party in Texan clothes. He would strongly deny that, but it's the root of why groups of college kids who don't share any sense of conservative moral values are attracted to an old guy in his seventies.
Again, Paul has no chance of winning the Republican primary. He has no chance of winning the general election. What he does have a real chance of doing is serving as a spoiler who throws the primary to Romney and the general election to Obama. In some ways, he's our Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader, and he's problematic for conservatives for the same reasons those men are problematic for Democrats.
Thanks, GVanna.
699 posted on Saturday, January 21, 2012 3:39:36 PM by ez: “Thank you for that information. I hardly recall the comment but I do remember being worried that the ABC story would torpedo Newts campaign. As I remember, I posted that warning to watch out for agitators in that spirit, but I am certain that I had no-one specific in mind. In hindsight, the reaction against Marianne for looking vindictive and psychotic could not have been anticipated, so I worried for nothing. Best FReegards...”
Thank you for the note, Ez. I've been accused before in this campaign of being a paid political operative, which emphatically is **NOT** true — I am unhappy with all the candidates to differing degrees. That may explain a bit of my own concern — I don't want to get viewed as a person who is supporting a candidate because I'm paid to do so.
To both Ez and Kevao — congratulations on Gingrich's win in South Carolina. The margin surprised me a great deal, and in the next few days as the exit polls get digested, we'll probably learn a lot more about the “how and why” of this vote.
Preventing a Romney win in the Republican primary needs to be a key goal, second only to preventing an Obama win this fall, which I believe is what will happen if Romney wins the primary. Even if Romney wins the general election, I believe based on past history he will be Obama-lite, and I'm not willing to risk that.
Paul is wrong — dead wrong — about key issues, most dangerously with regard to foreign policy. He's a libertarian, not a conservative, and there are important differences between the two.
However, we as conservatives ignore his appeal at our peril. If we were doing a better job of teaching the Constitution and American history to our people — especially the reasons why Republicans jettisoned “Fortress America” and George Washington's warnings against foreign entanglements based on the threat of nuclear missiles and intercontinental ballistic missiles following World War II — we wouldn't be having the threat Ron Paul represents.
I am saddened to see younger military personnel supporting Ron Paul because they believe our foul-ups in Afghanistan and Iraq show that we shouldn't be involved in foreign wars at all. That's simply illogical; yes, we've got real problems in how we're handing those wars, and yes, Pat Buchanan was correct that America is equipped to be a Republic, not an Empire, and yes, we Americans do a bad job of trying to act like an imperial power.
But the fact is we **WERE** attacked by forces operating out of Afghanistan, and the former Afghan government refused to turn over Osama bin Laden, so we had every right in the world to invade and do what we did.
Furthermore, every intelligence service in the world, not just our own, believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (and there's a good chance Hussein himself believed he had WMDs, being lied to by his own frightened generals and scientists), so we had at least arguably good grounds to do what we did in Iraq.
Ron Paul can blame the State Department all he wants for fouling up military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He may have a point, but the correct point is not that we shouldn't have invaded but rather that we should have done a better job once we got there.
If anything, 9/11 showed us that even apart from the threat of Soviet military power, our adversaries in the War on Terror can inflict tremendous damage on the United States homeland. Prior to World War II, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans provided a real barrier to foreign aggression. Back then, the old Republican Party position of “Fortress America” may have made some sense. It no longer does in an era of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles, and that's why the Republican Party moved from an isolationist to an interventionist position on international affairs.
George Washington had a point in the 1700s about not getting involved in European wars when the American continent was mostly a howling wilderness and the governments of the emerging American states, Canadian provinces, and Spanish territories were weak at best in comparison to European military power. Washington understood from firsthand experience the dangers of the French and Indian War, and he believed in the 1700s, the best way to protect American citizens was to avoid any foreign entanglements. The world has changed, and to protect our people against attack, we simply must be involved in foreign affairs.
Ron Paul doesn't agree. Many of his supporters don't understand the issues. We need to educate our people or Ron Paul's views will continue to pose a threat long after Ron Paul's campaign is gone.
FR's own C. Edmund Wright explained the why in his excellent American Thinker article yesterday:
"what the voters are craving in the debates and on the stump is someone who can look liberals squarely in the eye and tell them why we are right and they are wrong. The American conservative base has had to put up with being called stupid, racist, greedy and unfair for decades by not only the Democrats but the vast majority of the media. The pent up frustration of these decades is magnified by the fact that George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush and John McCain would not or perhaps could not confront this."
And Newt is just perceived as more of an effective fighter than Santorum, IMO. Have you seen the Floriday polls? Newt is already ahead of Romney!
He sure didn’t most much so it was easy to read all of his past posts in short time if you’re a fast reader. Hard to say on this one. I’ll let others be the judge but I’m always suspicious of someone that posts a a few times a year over a period of 10 years.
Honey Badger would rather have
Rick Santorum.
S when can we expect you to endorse Obama?
Or, are you waiting for the general election so as to not jinx your track record?
If I could vote, I would also be endorsing Newt. Mitt Romney is NOT your man. The man is a spit polished phoney!! Can’t stand him. Also he is NO Christian, that is for sure. CO
Not complaining . . . 'Boss's prerogative' or am I waaaay more confused than usual ?? lol
oh well ... g’night bump to the mystery thread
With Rick Santorum not in the running, I’ll vote for him on May 8.
"In the 1994 campaign season, in an effort to offer an alternative to Democratic policies and to unite distant wings of the Republican Party, Gingrich and several other Republicans came up with a Contract with America, which laid out ten policies that Republicans promised to bring to a vote on the House floor during the first hundred days of the new Congress, if they won the election.
The contract was signed by Gingrich and other Republican candidates for the House of Representatives. The contract ranged from issues such as welfare reform, term limits, tougher crime laws, and a balanced budget law, to more specialized legislation such as restrictions on American military participation in United Nations missions.
In the November 1994 elections, Republicans gained 54 seats and took control of the House for the first time since 1954. Long-time House Minority Leader Bob Michel of Illinois had not run for re-election, giving Gingrich, the highest-ranking Republican returning to Congress, the inside track at becoming speaker. The midterm election that turned congressional power over to Republicans "changed the center of gravity" in the nation's capital.[42] Time magazine named Gingrich its 1995 "Man of the Year" for his role in the election.[4]" wiki MISSION ACCOMPLISHED..THANK YOU MR. SPEAKER!
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