Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina Republican primary on Saturday.  He accomplished this feat by winning an overwhelming majority of conservative and religious voters in spite of the fact that he is neither, and by convincing South Carolinians that a former Speaker of the House and longtime lobbyist is a Washington outsider.

Face it, the Republican nomination process is an embarrassing mess.

Republicans have voted in three different states and produced three different winners.  Rick Santorum won Iowa on January 3, Mitt Romney won New Hampshire on January 10, and Gingrich won South Carolina on January 21.  Ron Paul has been hanging around collecting votes, too, and because primaries are not necessarily winner-take-all, the delegate count is very confusing.  For instance, Iowa sends 28 delegates to the Republican convention, and third-place Paul collected the same number (7) as Santorum, the winner, and Romney, the second place finisher.  Even Gingrich, the fourth-place finisher, ended up with 7 delegates from Iowa because he won 4 and collected 3 more from Rick Perry when he quit.  In other words, Santorum’s victory in Iowa wasn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.

Here’s the delegate score so far, broken down by state:



Notice one thing about the delegate count: Romney is in first place because of “Superdelegates,” not because of his election success.  If that smells an awful lot like the fix is in from the Republican establishment, well, it should.  Superdelegates are unpledged delegates to the Republican convention who are chosen based on their positions within the Republican Party hierarchy.  Insiders.  These are the people who have been destroying the Republican Party for decades by ignoring the American people and so far in this election cycle they’re going for Romney 16-2.

It doesn’t just smell.  It reeks.

But the most irritating part of the selection process is the way the mainstream media mislabels the candidates.  According to the media, Romney is a “moderate,” Santorum a “social conservative,” and Gingrich a “conservative.”  In fact, Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum are all liberals except in very narrow areas.  Romney is a pro-choice, big government meddler who believes that government can (and should) fix unemployment and Global Warming... but promises to end Obamacare the first day he’s in office.  Santorum is a career politician who actually defends pork barrel earmarks by Congress... but also a Catholic who is strongly pro-life and anti-gay marriage.  And Gingrich is a typical academic whacko who thinks the smart people—like him—can fix any problem imaginable if they simply concoct the perfect government program... but promises to lower taxes, drill for oil, and get government out of the economy’s way.

Paul is the only limited-government conservative remaining in the race.  Unfortunately, he’s an out-of-touch, borderline-racist, isolationist nutjob and too old to be running for president which leaves us with the Hobson’s choice of Gingrich, Romney, or Santorum.

It’s almost too depressing for words.

There’s no point committing suicide because Gingrich won in South Carolina.  After all, none of the three viable candidates are truly conservative so it doesn’t really matter who wins.  The only hope for 2012 is electing another boatload of conservatives to congress so they can control whatever liberal president we have... and there’s a lot of truth in the widespread opinion that anybody would be better than Obama.

Meanwhile, for the next time you hear a media nitwit calling Gingrich a conservative, here’s a little refresher course in who and what the man represents: click on the image to see a PDF listing Gingrich’s history as a weasel-like phony-baloney, big-government liberal.  (Every line is backed up by a link.)  Once you look at his history, there won’t be any doubt in your mind that Gingrich believes in government solutions for nearly everything, even solutions for problems that don’t actually exist.

Whatever the various roles the man has assumed in life, he is at heart an academic who thinks he’s smarter than the average bear... exactly like the current president.  Government by academics has been a catastrophic failure—Obama is another academic at heart who appointed an unprecedented wave of academics lacking practical experience to run our country.  (Obama even appointed a man who never owned a car to be his Car Czar!)  It's been obvious how poorly prepared these people are for running things in the real world.

The last thing we need is another lying pseudo-intellectual meddler in the White House.


From Reno, Nevada, USA        Tweet

January 25, 2012 - Elliott Abrams wrote something for National Review today titled, "Gingrich and Reagan." Turns out Gingrich was a vicious little thorn in Reagan's side:

"As a new member of Congress in the Reagan years — and I was an assistant secretary of state — Mr. Gingrich voted with the president regularly, but equally often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides, and his policies to defeat Communism. Gingrich was voluble and certain in predicting that Reagan’s policies would fail, and in all of this he was dead wrong... Here is Gingrich [March 21, 1986, on the floor of the House]: “Measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire’s challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing, and without a dramatic change in strategy will continue to fail. . . . President Reagan is clearly failing.”"

Yet now, as you know, Gingrich constantly talks about how he and Reagan worked together to change Washington and defeat Communism, a lie which is egregious (and creepy) even by Newt Gingrich standards. - Peterson, California

January 25, 2012 - Yuck. I hate all of our options. If Palin would run I'd be thrilled! - Hardcase, Michigan

J.P. replies: I still dream about a Cain/Palin ticket.

January 24, 2012 - Thanks a lot, I was just coming around to liking Gingrich until I read this. - Bev, Reno