Gingrich's disavowal of Ryan's Medicare reform comes just a few weeks after he told Time's Jay Newton-Small that he would have voted for it:
The former speaker sang Ryan’s praises for being a “brave” “man of ideas,” like Gingrich himself.
“But would you have voted for Ryan’s plan?” I pressed.
“Sure,” Gingrich replied.
“Do you think it would actually save the health care system?”
“No, I think it’s the first step,” Gingrich said. “You need an entirely new set of solutions.”
So he would have voted for it before he would have voted against it. And apparently, according the above-linked piece, Gingrich's spokespeople are now claiming that he meant the Ryan plan was only "politically" radical, and thus unworkable. Flip, then flop, then...flop.
Yesterday, I compared Newt with Barack Obama, today, I wonder if John Kerry might be the more apropos analogy. Especially since Gingrich, like Kerry, has been all over the place on foreign policy. George Will calls him out:
On the 7th of March he said, 'Let’s go get Qaddafi.' On the 23rd of he says, 'I never favored intervention.' He did it on television. … He’s one of these people who says that to understand Barack Obama you need to understand his 'Kenyan anti-colonial mentality.' This is just not a serious candidate."
And remember Dede Scozzafava? Gingrich fully backed the liberal "Republican" in the 2009 upstate New York congressional race, despite a grassroots uprising of support for Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman. He supported her quite vocally, until she dropped out of the race and endorsed the Democratic candidate. Newt's excuse? "She had some positions that were far more radical than I realized at the time".
So Ryan is a "radical social engineer", while Scozzafava, who voted for same-sex marriage in the New York State Assembly, received an award from a Planned Parenthood, supported "card check" union legislation, federal funding for abortion, Obama's 2009 stimulus package, and refused to rule out support for health care reform that included a "public option", is not a radical. Until she starts supporting Democrats.
And of course, there's cap and trade. Gingrich supported this legislation in 2007 when it seemed inevitable, even running ads together with Nancy Pelosi, perhaps the most liberal Speaker in House history. He flipped in 2009, when historical inevitability seemed to be going in the opposite direction, but this picture should live for eternity, and doom Newt the way Charlie Christ was cursed forevermore by his heartfelt embrace of Barack Obama:
The final flip-flop: Three wives and counting. "Till death do us part" is a meaningless phrase to Flip Gingrich...
Yesterday I wondered at Gingrich's motivation:
Is Newt tearing Ryan down, consciously or otherwise,in order to retain his own unique legacy?
Newt reminds me a bit of Barack Obama - infatuated by his own intelligence, flattered by his sycophants, and utterly convinced that he is the smartest man in the room.
Looking at the flip-flops, I wonder if Newt is simply attempting to stay in the spotlight by chasing the front-running ideas amongst the liberal elite: "Cap and Trade" is a must, Ryan is radical while Dede Scozzafava isn't, bomb Libya/don't bomb Libya...it seems as if where ever the conventional wisdom is at the moment, Newt Gingrich is there, like a dog chasing a car, or his own tail. All this in a year when the "CW" has been turned completely on its head...
Hardly an intellectual. Hardly a leader. And completely unprincipled, except when it comes to inflating his own pathetic ego.
I'd say he reminds me of Obama, but at least the president believes in certain things, wrong though they may be. Newt believes in nothing, except Newt.
Get him off the national stage. Stat.