Gingrich Bashing

Real Clear Politics reprinted an article by someone named Steve Benen of Washington Monthly that takes newt Gingrich to task for his supposed "refusal to accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities." Reading the piece, I got a glimpse into the distorted world of progressive thought that refuses to accept the idea that views that disagree with their own have any merit whatsoever. The views of the author were plain enough when he called Gingrich the "disgraced former Speaker" when first referring to him. There is nothing so even handed as calling the subject of your article "disgraced". (For those progressives who might read this post, that last sentence was sarcasm.)

Benen claims that Gingrich like all other conservatives want to eliminate learned authorities so that they can just make up statistics to support their crazy ideas. As Benen puts it, "Anti-intellectualism, alas, is now a standard approach to expertise in Republican circles, who necessarily assume those with objective knowledge might interfere with GOP policies, and should therefore be discredited, fired, and/or ignored."

The funny thing, of course, is that the purported examples of this sort of behavior by Gingrich to which Benen points all involve reducing the size and cost of government. In a move that Benen descries as truly horrible, Gingrich oversaw the cutting of bloated committee staffs in the 1990's when the GOP took over control of the House. Imagine, after 40 years during which the Democrats put more and more of their cronies on the payroll of the committees, Gingrich and the GOP cut out many of the unnecessary positions rather than simply fill them with their own cronies. The Republicans did something for the good of the country by cutting costs; no wonder a progressive Democrat like Benen cannot recognize the validity of such a move. Benen also points to Gingrich's statement that he would abolish the Congressional Budget Office. Of course, Benen ignores the reasoning behind the Gingrich view and portrays the proposal as an attempt to exile expertise from Washington rather than one to bring honesty back into the budget process so as to replace the current distortions.

I do get annoyed to read things like Benen's garbage and I get more annoyed to see that a magazine allows this nonsense to be published. Nevertheless, I guess I should take it as a good sign that the progressives are worried that their days in power are numbered. After all, why else bother discussing Gingrich at all?