Today In Village Idiocy

Today's intellectual dishonesty in the Village Media comes from the "liberal" NY Times, gleefully squealing about Newt Gingrich talking in front of a couple hundred people, and how that proves he is "resurgent" in politics.

There he was last month in Akron, Ohio, telling an audience of 300 people that President Obama was out of touch. Why? Because the president did not understand the gut-level appeal of the pickup truck at the center of Scott Brown’s winning campaign to wrest a Massachusetts Senate seat away from the Democrats.

“What if I have to haul a moose?” Mr. Gingrich said, to laughter. “You cannot put a gun rack in the back of a Smart car.”

The audience was enraptured, and many called out for Mr. Gingrich to run for president in 2012. He said in an interview that he was considering it and would make a decision by this time next year.

Of course, Mr. Gingrich, 66, carries substantial political baggage from his downfall as House speaker after the 1998 elections, and even some allies are skeptical that he will run (he opted out in 2008). But even if he is merely playing to the truism that potential presidential candidates garner more attention than noncandidates, he is clearly enjoying a moment back in the limelight.

Shortly after his visit to Akron, Mr. Gingrich spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. He waded to the lectern across the ballroom floor to the throbbing beat of “Eye of the Tiger,” with lights flashing and thousands of well-wishers shrieking his name. No one else made such a rock-star entrance.

Like Sarah Palin and others who have discovered that they can command a political platform and a good income without running for office, Mr. Gingrich remains relevant by having built himself into a one-man industry churning out speeches, books, films and policy positions. And as the architect of the Republican takeover of the House in 1994, he is much sought after for advice on how to replicate that feat this year. 

Hurrr, Smart Cars and gun racks!  What a statesman!   The missing piece in the puzzle as to why Gingrich is "resurgent" is because his one-man limelight-generating industry relies heavily on the Village to give him that limelight.  If the media ignored Gingrich, he wouldn't matter.  Period.  But the Village continues to treat this failed GOP heretic as a force in politics.



It's the same deal with Sarah Palin.  Here's a woman who quit her job as Governor of Alaska because it was too difficult for her to handle, and yet now she goes around the country selling herself as a political product. She is able to do so because she as treated as relevant news.

Both of them are eager to portray how out of touch Obama is by saying he doesn't understand what real Americans go through (as if these two, a beltway insider and a walking book tour on Oprah know what it's like to have to pay the bills every month.)

Obama, they say, is out of touch because he's been in Washington too long.  That's FOX News's position this week.

President Obama told a fundraising audience in St. Louis this week that "it's nice to get out of Washington." 

But when the president found time to leave the nation's capital last year, his destination often wasn't just another city, but another country.

Obama made more foreign trips during his first year in office -- 10 trips involving stops in 21 nations -- than any U.S. president before him. Now, with the fate of health care reform, his top legislative priority, so uncertain, a number of prominent Democratic strategists have begun questioning whether Obama's aides should have scheduled more domestic travel during his first year in office, starting soon after Inauguration Day.

"They made a decision to go fix the image of the United States overseas and use [the president's] popularity right then and there to do it," said Joe Trippi, a former campaign manager for Howard Dean.

"I think that turned out to be a mistake," he said. "If that current tour that he's doing on health care had occurred with that popularity, he might have been able to get health care passed right then and there with the votes that he had, and carried that momentum into other domestic agenda items."

Obama didn't visit America enough, he didn't go into the heartland enough to promote his agenda, that's the right wing complaint NOW.  Of course, when Obama did visit American cities outside Washington, he was attacked for not staying in Washington to work on domestic issues when he went to Hawaii, attacked for daring to spend time with his wife in New York City while Americans were in a recession, and attacked for being in permanent campaign mode when he did promote his domestic agenda.

When you attack the President no matter what he does, and change the reasoning for those attacks to match the situation, that's intellectually dishonest.  The right wing has been doing it for decades now.  And the Village helps them time and time again.

Yes.  They think you are this stupid.  They always have.