Newt and Mitt

Listening to the commentators recently was like watching “The Sound of Music” and once again hearing the nuns lament the difficulties they were having with Maria. Only this time they were singing “How do you solve a problem like NewtGingrich?” (Apologies to Rogers and Hammerstein).

What problem?

The man is, in a word, brilliant.  Its not hard to imagine a college professor from an obscure college in north Georgia getting elected to Congress.  [...]

Several months ago when the SEALS took out OBL, I asked a friend of mine who was a reservist stationed in the area: “What happened?”  He gave a similarly simple answer: “He took his eye off the ball.”

Certainly there was more to it than that but the unraveling of our No. 1 enemy’s security had to start somewhere.  A failure on his part to follow up on something; a failure to adequately cover his or his household’s tracks after an outing; a failure to shut the blinds.  [...]

The GOP debate on September 22 in Tampa, like the others before it, was as entertaining as it was enlightening.  There’s nothing staid about these nine candidates.  And again, in my humble view, Gingrich comes out as the most thoughtful and provocative in many respects.

Newt, for example, in response to a Mike Wallace question about who of the other candidates would make a good running mate, puts the question in its place: “this isn’t a Hollywood game show” (or something to [...]

“Warren Buffet’s secretary shouldn’t pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett.  There is no justification for it,” thus spoke President Obama in a Rose Garden campaign speech a/k/a deficit reduction speech, whatever.

And just to make sure what walks like a duck also talks like a duck, he added, “It is wrong that in th eUnited States...a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should be pay higher tax rates than somebody pulling in $50 [...]

"The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers," Dick, one of Shakespeare’s more unremarkable characters in Henry VI suggests to Jack Cade, a schemer trying to bring about a semi-communist social revolution in Henry VI’s England. Dick wants to make sure that his fellow butchers and tradesmen are protected from the parchment pushing class who might insist on the rule of law rather than the rule of class warfare.

How little has changed over the past 420 years.

The [...]