Newt Gingrich Can Utter Absurdities, Because only a Liberal Democracy Protects Free Speech! And, the "Liberal Media" Carries it!

Conservatives Call Upon Fear, Distrust, Cynicism, and the Devil in Attempt for Power.

Another typical Republican scoundrel that blames liberalism for anything that goes bad. I bet you, in won't be long before the conservatives will blame the liberals for the global warming and adverse climate change! This disgraced former Speaker of the House, and possible presidential candidate, blamed the liberals for the tragedy at Virginia Tech, and for not allowing students to carry arms in order to defend themselves! Wow! I suppose the liberal academic elite has brainwashed most students! When I asked my college students (OK, this is New York) whether they would feel safer if most students carried guns, they emphatically replied, NO! [guess I've obtained some measure of success in making students think]

Gingrich condemns the liberal culture that questions the notion that all rights originate from God! Hmmm, I wonder which God... Probably the one that says gun owning & gun carrying is a god-given right! Maybe our legal system should be based on the 10 Commandments, though I wonder which of the three versions Gingrich prefers. Nevertheless, all three versions have something to say about adultery--and the thrice married Gingrich is an admitted adulterer. Yes, our liberal system let him get off easy! Tsk, tsk.

Wait, there's more. Gingrich condemned this culture for allowing kids to wear improper Halloween costumes! I didn't know; was this a big concern? I'm not making this up. Check the video from his appearance on ABC's This Week. These absurdities would just be funny--stemming from a pathetic attempt of a conservative politician to stir up a conservative base--if they were marginal and not given serious consideration by the so-called "liberal media."

It's a common strategy--when appealing to the ignorant and those with highly impressionable minds--to beat up a straw man, like the "liberal media." I happen to be teaching a course on politics & media this semester, so this subject was discussed in class. It's a misconception that the media has a liberal bias--unless of course we accept John Colbert's definition: the truth has a liberal bias!

I will write more on this subject in the near future, but for now, I'd like to surmise these points:

• Liberal democracy is the only free & open political system we have today.


• The conservatives of the Old Regime wanted to preserve ascribed status and religious conformity until liberalism replaced the old regime and most of them conservatives. The modern-times conservatives (most, like Reagan & Thatcher) have accepted the basic ideas about individual freedoms that liberalism advocates.


• The US has one of the most conservative cultures of a western democracy. The Church and Republicans are responsible for it, and the latter for much of the pervasive violence in this country.


• Although Gingrich and other self-appointed moralists decry all this immorality and excesses of modern culture, it is arch-conservatives like R. Murdoch who own the big media that put out this stuff.


• Mr. Gingrich deserves much ridicule because instead of advancing the dialogue with serious conversation, he peddles the ridiculous instead. It is the same "liberal media" [which hounded former president Clinton] that gave him the platform to say in 1994, people should vote Republican so no Susan Smith could drown her children; in 2006, he said that the Republicans didn't try to restrain fellow Republican Mark Folley's pedophilia because they'd be accused of "gay-bashing"!!!!!

Does Newt Gingrich's rhetoric and actions make for a better America? Or, should the "liberal media" take a hint from him and put the lunatic fringe where it belongs, in the margins of our society?...