Hyperaware

Oh, Newt, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways. I could say it is because you are a big schmuck and just leave it at that. That would be true, but it wouldn’t be worthy of a blog entry.  I could also say that I have disliked you for so long (since I was around 10 years old) that it is just impossible to start liking you, but that wouldn’t be completely true.  People could change, but I don’t know that you are capable of any kind of meaningful chance.  Honestly, when I look at you, I think of a a conservative Dennis the Menace or, possibly, a robot; and I just don’t like robots.  But these are not the reasons that I will not vote for you.  No, the reasons are numerous and varied, and might contribute to some people think that this whole post is just too long to read.

Though I don’t want to judge the private lives of others, Newt Gingrich is one that begs to be judged. I don’t particularly like the idea of divorces, and that is probably one of the only things that people might think me as conservative on. (Actually, my issue with divorces is when people don’t take their marriages seriously, so it isn’t really a conservative thing as much as a frustration at folks thing, but I digress.) First, he marries and (eventually) divorces one of his former high school teachers, which I could almost forgive him for, as those types of relationships are often (on some level) a form of authoratative abuse–especially when they start (like his did) by secretive dating. Now, I might have let it slide because of the circumstances related to the start of the marriage, but because he chose to leave his wife while she was being treated for cancer makes this personal decision of his a very disgusting decision. It is even more disgusting, if the allegations by Jackie Battley are to be believed, that he wanted to discuss the terms of her divorce while she was recovering from having surgery (her third related to uterine cancer) to remove a (benign) uterine tumor. Even more disgusting was that he refused to pay alimony and child-support while marrying Marianne Ginther, whom he’d been having an affair with. I have a hard time forgiving any person who cheats on their sick spouse. Adultery is bad enough, but to do it when a spouse is sick is just, in my mind, unforgivable.

Of course, his morally-deficient personal decisions don’t stop with his dumping of a wife with cancer for a younger, prettier version that he’d already proposed to during his first marriage. No, Newt was so into family values that he chose to browbeat Bill Clinton for his cheating ways, even though he had cheated on his first wife and was cheating (again) with who would become his next wife. And when he left Marianne for Callista Bisek Gingrich, it was a surprise to Marianne. Not only did he file for divorce from Marianne, he asked the Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta for an annulment based on the fact that Marianne was previously married. He not only chose to divorce her, but to say that their marriage never existed. That alone would be proof of his lack of a conscience, but he left her eight months after she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. As is true with many chronic illnesses, the symptoms of and problems related to Multiple Sclerosis get worse with stress. It is important for people who have Multiple Sclerosis (or cancer) to stay as relaxed as possible to keep their diseases from worsening. It shouldn’t have surprised Marianne that Newt would do this to her, since it was virtually the same thing that he had done with Jackie. It also shouldn’t surprise her that he has never expressed regrets or apologized to her for the choice to leave her or cheat on her, since it looks like Mr. Gingrich has no moral compass.

So, why do these immoral decisions impact why I wouldn’t vote for Gingrich? Well, it’s a couple of things. In general, people who divorce their chronically ill spouse end up not only dissolving a marriage, but stripping a person of income, health insurance, and a good enough support system. Usually, the divorces come about because of the stress of caring for a disabled spouse or stress over the family’s finances. As the former probably isn’t true since, at least in Marianne’s case, the chronic illness was a relatively new diagnosis and the latter is likely not the case for Newt Gingrich because of his financial status, then it makes it seem like he doesn’t want to take care of someone in need. That is not a personality trait that should be admired or coddled in a politician. It is bad enough when politicians lose their moral compass because they are bought and paid for by corporations, but when they have no moral compass to begin with, it makes me wonder what kind of decisions they might make when given a great deal of power and authority. Another reason that I would not vote for him based on this issue alone is that if he abandons someone when things are stressful, then will he be able to handle one of the most stressful jobs in the world? What will he do when he has to make a decision and someone’s life is on the line? Will he be able to make it or will he just go find something easier to do?

Now, I shall devote my anti-Gingrich opinion to the typical issues that impact many voters on their way to the polls.

First of all, Newt Gingrich is, against federal funding “abortion providers” which is a fun and inflammatory way of saying that he doesn’t like Planned Parenthood. Despite the fact that he knows that it is already illegal for organizations like Planned Parenthood to use federal money for abortions, he still managed to bring it up as one of his campaign promises. He claims that more people in the country are pro-life than pro-choice, though, in 2003, 66% of Americans believe that first trimester abortions should be legal, with 25% of people polled supported legality into the second trimester and 10% into the third. Each of these numbers was up slightly from a 2000 poll and about the same as the numbers from 1996. A 2007 CBS polls also found that 30% of people said it should be permitted in cases like rape, incest, or to save a woman’s life, 16% said it should be permitted, but subjected to greater restrictions, 12% only want it permitted to save a woman’s life, and 31% said it should be permitted in all cases. In that poll, only 5% wanted an outright ban. This means that, regardless of how they self-identify, the majority of Americans are actually pro-choice on some level.

Newt Gingrich is a hypocrite. This is one thing that I’m pretty sure most people could agree on, if they looked at the facts. He has repeatedly gone after Mitt Romney for making money off of the Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae housing bubble, despite working in a “strategic” influential position as a lobbyist for the housing market giants. If he was allowed to make money off of people going into debt, because of the “free enterprise” that he so lovingly promotes, then why not allow someone else to do the same without painting them in a bad light? And it isn’t just the economy that he is a hypocrite on. Gingrich has spoken in favor of cracking down on deadbeat dads, which is almost funny since he chose not to pay child support for his own children. How dare he take the moral high ground on that issue?

Gingrich doesn’t understand the economy and the problems related to it. He blames all of the issues related to the recession on Ben Bernanke, despite the fact that the majority of the problems that actually caused the recession were started during Alan Greenspan’s term. Bernanke became the Chairman of the Fed almost 2 years before the economy officially went into a recession, while most of the actions started in the 90′s and early in the first decade of the 21st century. In fact, he, during his term in Congress and as Speaker of the House, helped pass some of the laws that led to the recession. If anyone should have their feet held to the fire over this recession, it should be people like Newt Gingrich.

Newt Gingirch seems to be a conspiracy theorist. At the very least, he partakes in the conservative tradition of paranoia. He promotes loyalty tests for all Americans working in government positions because, as he puts it, “we now know there really were communist spies.” He doesn’t specify which government positions or how he would be able to tell who was lying and who wasn’t. He thinks that continuing the PATRIOT Act is a good idea because he says that we will all “be in danger for the rest of our lives” from terrorism. While it is true that we could be the victims of terrorism, it could also be true that we are all potential victims of crime, car accidents or accidents in other forms of transportation, health problems, etc. I mean, a lot of people have the possibility of having aneurysm somewhere in their body, which would increase the risk of dying unexpectedly, but that doesn’t mean that the possibility of dying by aneurysm should cause us all to have panic attacks and force everyone to be checked for them, including people who aren’t even necessarily at risk for them. The support of the PATRIOT Act is a support of severe and, many times, unwarranted anxiety and panic in all Americans. By making people fear some sort of imminent death, Gingrich promotes the allowing the government to use our fears and irrational thoughts against us. That is an action that could have severe repercussions for our basic rights and freedoms.

Newt Gingrich loves bringing up that he helped author the Defense of Marriage Act, a law enacted in 1996 that defines marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman. If it fails, he wants a constitutional amendment to ban it. I could point out how hypocritical it is to have a noted philanderer promoting a law that defines marriage. I could also point out how cruel it is that Gingrich has a half-sister, Candace Gingrich-Jones, who is personally impacted by his ignorance. Gingrich-Jones came out as a lesbian years ago, even appearing on Friends for the marriage of Carol and Susan, and has been challenging his political views openly since then. (Gingrich-Jones did say that privately her brother is cordial to her wife and bought the couple a shower gift and a wedding gift, which makes her question whether he is really anti-gay.) But I think it is more important to say that promoting the Defense of Marriage Act, Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, or any law denying civil rights to any group of people is not the kind of behavior that I would want in a leader of this country. It is even more disheartening that Gingrich chose to help finance the ousting three Iowa Supreme Court justices who approved same sex marriage in the state. I find it disturbing that he chose to call those who supported the ACLU’s lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America a group of “counter-culture warriors”, as it is a way to stir a greater hatred against the LGBT community and those who support the civil rights of all persons. It is also disturbing that Newt Gingrich refuses to accept that America is socially behind (including in same-sex marriage) so many other “developed nations” which impacts how the rest of the world sees us. He may think that it doesn’t matter, but even he should know that a lack of foreign support makes it harder for this country to be taken seriously when we comment on the actions of dictatorships and regimes that deny civil rights to their people and it also hurts when, in times of military conflict, we need the help of our allies. Regardless of what he wants to think, we are not on this planet alone, which means that we need a better ethical standard in this country.

Newt Gingrich promotes the more of his illogical ideology when it comes to drugs. He claims that legalization of Marijuana would tear the country apart. He claims that this would result in more people on welfare, more people being dependent, more people with bad health care outcomes, fewer people being able to work/pay attention on the job, and more people advocating cocaine and heroin becoming legalized. Maybe it isn’t his fault that he sees things this way, since this what many Americans are taught as children. The fact is that marijuana was more openly used in America up until the early to mid part of the twentieth century and its illegal status is the result of a series of actions by Andrew Mellon, William Randolph Hearst, and the Du Pont family. Hearst felt that the use of hemp as a substitute for paper pulp was a threat to his timber holdings, while DuPont, which was heavily invested in by Mellon, was promoting nylon as a replacement for hemp. The financial impact of marijuana was impacting their bank balances so they worked to make it illegal. The result is people like Gingrich continuing to promote an anti-marijuana stance, despite the fact that it could actually help the economy (since it is the #4 value crop in the country and is #1 or #2 in several states), does help some people with chronic illness to deal with various symptoms related to their disease, has never proven to be a gateway drug, and its being illegal has a negative impact on the crime rate of the country. (Many people are imprisoned on charges related to marijuana, thus contributing to prison over-crowding. The illegality also contributes to money going to various criminal enterprises, which increases the rate of other crimes.) It should also be noted that, though it is illogical to say that a legalization of marijuana would lead to a legalization of cocaine or heroin, the legalization (at least in certain cases) of those drugs might actually be a good thing, since both have been known to treat certain medical and psychiatric problems. (Also it is hypocritical for him to be anti-drug since he also admitted to smoking marijuana during his youth.)

His suggestion of increasing penalties on drug users is also a form of cruel and unusual punishment. In this country and in the world, we have a tendency to want to punish people using illegal drugs, while we do not understand that punishment is the wrong course of action for drug addicts. Drug addiction is both a psychological and physiological condition. It is something that we should try to treat, not punish. Throwing an addict in jail does not help the addict to deal with his or her addiction. Instead, it punishes him or her for his or her problem and, in some cases, introduces them to the world of drug smuggling within prisons. If we dealt with drug addiction in a more progressive way, then we might actually have fewer addicts.

Newt Gingrich’s promoting of ending the student loan program and only having a work-study model might sound good to some folks, but it is not flexible enough to deal with the lives of many college students. Gingrich thinks that students go to school longer if they are on loans, and take fewer hours per semester on average, which he says has led to the tuitions going up. He does not take into account that many students who are on loans are actually very well aware of what their education costs, but are, for one reason or another, unable to afford college any other way. Some people may not be able to do work-study because they already have a job or because they have a child at home or because they are ill and unable to work. Some may be unable to do a work-study program if they are in a program that requires them to complete an internship. For example, to get a Bachelor of Social Work degree, you have to complete a 40 hour internship. While some universaries will allow a work-study student to count some of those hours toward their BSW, it is generally on a case-by-case basis.

Gingrich also continues to promote ignorance when it comes to social welfare programs. He has made various statements that make programs like food stamps sound like they are being used primarily by blacks and other minorities (whites are actually the majority) or folks on Medicaid are actively abusing emergency rooms. (At least in Alabama, if you are on Medicaid alone, you must be going in for an emergency or something that cannot wait until a doctor can see you, or you are responsible for the full-cost of the visit.) His comments also make poor people sound like they are some how intellectually deficient in statements like, “to the shock of academics, poor people were aware of money and strived to get that bonus by not abusing emergency rooms”, which almost makes people using social welfare programs like Medicaid sound like either academics or Americans in general expect these people to have some severe cognitive issues. He does not understand that people within the system can be just as intelligent as those outside of the system. He even suggests that people who are unemployed need to do some kind of training, which seems to point to his idea that they are not educated. Given the number of jobs related just to the financial sector that were lost over the past few years, I have a hard time accepting that people who lost their jobs are somehow untrained or uneducated. The idea that people aren’t working because there is something wrong with them is a type of victim blaming that is just completely unacceptable. He also does not understand that the majority of abuses that the right claims as being rampant are the result of restrictive social programs. (For decades, the restrictive welfare programs would help single mothers, but not families. This led to families making the decision that in order to feed and shelter their children, they would split so that they could have help with income or food or housing. Thus the tradition of belittling “welfare moms” began.) There is no such thing as “free welfare” as he calls it. Gingrich willfully plays up the idea that welfare programs are something that people can have throughout their entire life, despite the fact that he was instrumental in working on the bill that started TANF, which is a temporary program that promotes work and only gives benefits for five years over a person’s lifetime. Oddly, the requirements that TANF set for people and the time limits actually led to employment rates of 20% less than those who left voluntarily. About two-thirds of people worked at some point after they left welfare, but many are still impoverished either by not having a job or by being concentrated in low-wage jobs. Having fewer people on the books for assistance hasn’t helped lower the poverty rate, since the number of leavers considered impoverished is between 48% and 74%. It has actually the share of the population considered to be working poor go up within the country. Newt can pretend that because people are working that this is somehow acceptable, but it is never acceptable for children and families to be in poverty.

Promoting tort reform is another anti-freedom issue that Gingrich seems to enjoy having as part of his campaign. Torts allow Americans to have some way to right a wrong within the civil justice system. It is a right guaranteed by the Constitution. Tort reform has not stopped “frivolous” lawsuits. It has, however, allowed corporations and bad doctors and other professionals to hold onto their money, even if there is proof that they have harmed a person in some way.

He has severe misogynistic tendencies, which is not only evident in his treatment of former spouses, but is also evident in a claim he made in 1995 about women and combat to make a point. Gingrich made a comment to a college class that women are not suitable for combat because after 30 days in the ditch they are susceptible to infections, while men were born to hunt giraffes. While he was trying to say that women have skills that make them better suited for non-combat positions, he used a grotesque way of saying that and he promoted an idea that women are somehow built to fight. That is rather odd to me, because as many girls and women will probably tell you, you do not want to pick a fight with those of us without a Y chromosome because there are many women who will willingly kick someone’s ass. Underestimating the fighting ability of women is one way that Newt Gingrich exhibits that he doesn’t understand women. His misogyny was also exhibited by his statement that high school girls should be rewarded if they graduate as virgins. I’m not exactly sure if he’s planning on doing a virginity test, like the ones done in countries accused of or known for human rights violations, or if he is planning just taking the word of the girls.

I have expressed on this blog and off that I feel that Gingrich is a racist. Gingrich wants to replace bilingual education in this country with immersion in English so that people speek a common language and prosper, instead of staying in the ghetto. Whether referring to Hispanics or Asians or any other group, what he said was, at best, disrespectful and comes across as being very hateful. (Interestingly, there are many countries that provide multilanguage educations that have better economies and better education systems than the predominantly one language system that we have in America.) Another racist and/or classist tendency of his was saying saying that kids should work poor-time in school as janitors. This is not only a disrespectul position with regards to race and class, it is also against the law, cruel and dangerous (given the chemicals used by and activities done [like electrical repairs] that “janitors” do in schools) to make children do janitorial work, and advocates firing a group of working class people who probably need jobs just like other adults in this country. So, in that regard, he is not only racist and classist, but a complete and utter fool. Another racist idea of his is that Palestinians are an “invented people” and that somehow he is the only person telling the “truth” on this. It isn’t true. It may have been under the control of different groups over the years, but that doesn’t mean that they are an invented people any more than calling Estonians, who were controlled by various countries for hundreds of years, an invented people. The fact is that people lived there before Israel was established, both in Biblical times and in the last century. What they were called officially didn’t change the fact that they were Palestinian. Pretending like they didn’t exist will help spur more anti-American sentiment in the region, which will result in a greater risk of injury or death for Americans and American allies abroad.

Gingrich is one of many Republicans who has said that the Environmental Protection Agency is a radical, over-reaching agency that should be putting the economy over the environment. He fails to acknowledge that the quality of actual protection of the environment by the EPA has been reduced regularly and dramatically since his hero Reagan was in office; by not acknowledging this, he also fails to acknowledge that the economy and corporations have regularly benefited from the decrease in environmental protections. If we continue to put the economy over the environment, we will only see more of an increase in rates of asthma and other chronic diseases. (Asthma alone has increased by 4.3 million people in the United States in the past 11 years.)

And of course, there is Gingrich’s plan to have an American colony on the moon in eight years. Now, NASA is a wonderful agency. But getting to the Moon within 8 years is out of the question. It was a lot more feasible in 2005, but with just 8 years, it is financially impossible. And trying to get it past a Congress that has repeatedly decreased funding for the space agency is politically impossible. Then, of course, there is the science of building it for the moon and getting it to the moon. Newt proposes smaller rockets that already exist, but that would be more difficult and time-consuming, which would end up costing even more. Of course it seems like Newt Gingrich is either promoting this idea either to pander to Floridians or to promote his belief that China is out to enslave and/or kill all Americans. Either way, he is promoting this idea for the wrong reason.

So these are just some of the many reasons why I would not vote for Newt Gingrich.