Posted on 03/10/2012 3:55:56 PM PST by VinL
Edited on 03/10/2012 4:01:19 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
There was an overflow crowd greeting Newt Gingrich when he arrived at the Wiregrass Museum of Art in the southeast corner of Alabama on Saturday.
Looking over the hundreds of people packed into the gallery area and spilling down the steps in the main lobby, Gingrich enthused, "What a crowd. I'm really impressed. There must be no one left at Wal-Mart this afternoon."
(Excerpt) Read more at politics.blogs.foxnews.com ...
Hi Bailee,
Oh, I know. I was just using your post as a convenient opportunity to grandstand on my own. I do that a lot. LOL
I'll give you a pass, Charles, since being from Connecticut, you don't know what "nobody must be left at the WalMart" means in a lot of places in the South (it means something to the effect that something big must be happening).
The comment shows that Newt knows his people.
I don’t think Santorum implied anything when he said Gingrich sits on the couch with pelosi but he himself only sits on the couch with his wife. But it shows how stupid and illogical Santorum’s remarks are - his sitting on the couch only with his wife has nothing in common to Gingrich sitting once on the couch with pelosi.
What is Santorum’s message in saying it like that?
People are either puzzled by this ‘message’, or they interprete it the wrong way (sex joke?)
One thing for sure - Santorum is not good at delivering his message. He constantly blabbers his mouth and spills forth gibberish.
Family always tries to fit in a trip to the Conestoga Sheakhouse every time we pass through.
ITA, it’s a dead issue. I’m not a sanctimonious holier-than-thou and I believe that Newt could be the David for our time. I would definitely vote for Newt if he was on the ballot. I was just pointing out to the posters who were hammering Rick about his comment. I didn’t think it was an out-and-out attack on Newt’s romantic relationship, it was about Pelosi.
Yes, after I hit send I realized that I had typed “many” and regretted that. Wish there was a way to edit posts, within a few minute time period at least.
He didn’t intimate in any way that all Republicans shop at Walmart. He was speaking to a specific crowd. Even so, why would that be an insult? As those who live in that area have said, it’s pretty much true. If he were speaking in my little town and said the same thing we would have laughed too because it is packed on Saturday It’s pretty much all there is unless we want to drive 40 or 50 miles.
Cindie
Of course he didn’t. And Santorum didn’t intimate (or imply) that Gingrich was sleeping with Nancy Pelosi. That was my point, that if you were going to make rediculous leaps of illogic to attack Santorum, you better deal with the Walmart comment.
I wasn’t attacking Gingrich in this thread, I was pointing out the illogic of the initial comment made with the article by the freeper who posted it — who took a pro-Gingrich thread and poisoned it by starting with a hypocritical attack on Rick Santorum.
I guess because it implies a certain lack of seriousness of purpose. Like, “Gee, I’d rather be shopping, but I guess I’ll go to listen to a presidential candidate instead”. Also, it’s not as if Calista would ever be in a Walmart, so it sounds little patronizing to me.
Of course, context is everything here. I merely read the words, while those who were there heard them. And a poster who was there commented that the line went over well.
We are on the edge of the precipice. One slip, and we are done.
Good one, Yaelle... some of the Gingrich people are not helping their candidate. I like Gingrich a lot more than I like some of his supporters. Of course, Gingrich has a lot of solid supporters too.
And I have no problem with the Wal-Mart comment. Gingrich “gets” the South. Wal-Mart is the hub of commercial life in many small Southern towns. My only problem with Wal-Mart is than Sam Walton's successors seem to have decided supporting Chinese manufacturing is more important than being good Americans... but it's pretty hard to argue with the economics of their decision.
67 posted on Saturday, March 10, 2012 6:47:19 PM by Reddy: “I totally disagree that this was a dig at Gingrich’s many marriages and affairs. Santorum was simply using an analogy about not sitting on the couch with another woman (I had a pastor that would never sit alone with a women nor be in a car alone with a woman because he wanted to make sure that there was never any question about fidelity) and the incident with Newt and Pelosi- sitting on the couch with Pelosi was improper because it led to all kinds of questioning of Newt’s loyalties. Period.”
104 posted on Saturday, March 10, 2012 7:29:56 PM by Yashcheritsiy: “What's funny is that for the past fifteen years, Newt has been as happily and faithfully married as either Santorum or romney. It's a dead issue, people. People can change. Newt did. Get over it. Stop being sanctimonious little holier-than-thous.”
Reddy is right, but Yashcheritsiy has a point about Newt and Callista Gingrich apparently being faithful to each other for the last decade and a half. Having the Roman Catholic Church approve a twice-divorced man for a church marriage is not an easy thing to do, and I have good reason to be confident that Gingrich's priests know more about the situation than we ever will.
However, let's try to understand what Santorum was saying.
No less a figure than Rev. Billy Graham had a well-known policy than neither he nor any member of his staff would be alone with any woman other than his wife. (I'm assuming that the details of the rule also allowed being alone with daughters, mothers, sisters, and other close family.) Graham's policy is well-known among evangelicals and it's a good policy, one I try to follow as much as possible in my personal and professional life, though it sometimes simply cannot be done in secular business.
Guys, I know there are people who think Gingrich's past doesn't matter. There are other people, among them the pastor of Skyline Wesleyan Church in San Diego, who have written that Gingrich's past **DOES** matter but they're convinced he's repented.
The fact of that matter is that for those of us who take Scripture seriously, we believe that a man who cannot run his home cannot be trusted to run the church of God. If you don't like that, go take it up with God — he wrote I Timothy 3:5, not me.
I am very much aware that we're selecting a president, not a pastor or an elder, but the fact is that when someone has serious problems in their home life, it **IS** an indicator of whether the people who know the candidate best might just possibly know something the rest of us need to pay attention to before it's too late.
I've read the articles by Gingrich's daughters defending him. I've read enough about Gingrich's past to believe he may be truly repentant. Fair enough.
But to say Gingrich's family life is irrelevant simply isn't true. If the Republican Party nominates Gingrich, we're going to be treated to wall-to-wall family values advertising by Barack and Michelle Obama talking about how much they want to be a model for family life in an America where families are falling apart, and where Barack Obama himself personally experienced the pain of divorce and paternal abandonment. What Obama will throw at Gingrich will make Santorum’s “family values” comments look pretty mild by comparison.
If someone believes Newt Gingrich is the best candidate despite his marital background, certainly go ahead and vote for Gingrich. I supported Reagan despite his divorce, and there are often other issues which are more important than family life. I will almost certainly support Gingrich if he becomes the Republican nominee.
But don't act like it's only Santorum who will bring up family values. President Obama will do so, and he'll do it with a vengeance.
216 posted on Sunday, March 11, 2012 3:47:02 AM by Bizhvywt: “(Quoting Bailee): ‘Santorum doesn’t pay his tithes?’ According to his tax records, Santorum gave an average 2% of his income to charitable donations. I don’t know where it went, but it was definitely not a biblical 10%. But he is a ‘devout Catholic’ which in his case apparently means a sanctimonious blowhard.”
The main thing this shows is the difference in practical aspects of church life between conservative Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants. Tithing is not emphasized in the Roman Catholic Church the way it is in many evangelical circles.
Santorum is a Roman Catholic. There are differences between what his church believes and what I believe, and what his church chooses to emphasize even if there is no formal disagreement.
We simply cannot hold Catholics to evangelical standards, and vice versa.
Then perhaps you should have directed your answer to him and not me. I didn’t say anything about Santorum.
Cindie
“But don’t act like it’s only Santorum who will bring up family values. President Obama will do so, and he’ll do it with a vengeance.”
Let the “Infanticide President” make it a family values election. The guy said that he would abort his own grandchildren for Pete’s sake.
I think we are too pre-occupied with potential “baggage”. Obama has far more baggage than any of our candidates. What we need is someone with the cajones to call Obama on it. Newt has shown that he can do that better than the others.
Fair point, and that's probably the tack that we as Republicans are going to have to take if Newt Gingrich is the nominee. We can assume on the abortion issue that Obama will say “every child should be a wanted child” and he'll be an advocate for adoption, saying “hate is not a family value.”
We need to be prepared to respond to that.
I've said many times that if Gingrich wins the nomination I will almost certainly support him. I like a lot of things about Gingrich's views and I like his demonstrated record of accomplishing the impossible by taking back the House of Representatives.
If you believe Gingrich is the best candidate to defeat President Obama this fall, then please work for him as hard as you can, but don't dismiss the importance of dealing with the family values argument since Obama will use the “family values” argument this November.
Part of his appeal in the 2008 Democratic primary was that unlike Hillary Clinton's marital problems and John Edwards sex scandals (which at that point were mostly tabloid fodder which hadn't yet been proved true), Obama presented himself to Democrats as a clean-cut family values guy.
We'd better get used to responding to that sort of attack on Gingrich, because even if Republicans don't do so, the Democrats definitely will.
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