Newt's tea party

The former GOP speaker has latched onto the movement as the key to his political fortunes.

Tim Rutten
LA Times
May 22, 2010

Ever since he resigned his speakership and House seat in disgrace nearly 12 years ago, Newt Gingrich has prowled the margins of electoral politics like a wolf, hungry and opportunistic.

He's tried on a variety of ideas and ideological colorations in those intervening years, but this week, with the publication of his new book, "To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine," he explicitly linked his fate to the "tea party" movement. Given the fact that Gingrich has said he is weighing a presidential bid, it's a safe bet that others, similarly ambitious, will carefully watch how he fares.

Gingrich, a onetime history professor, always has had a fondness for big ideas and checklist politics, as evinced in his famous Contract with America. The overarching idea in his new book is that, "for the first time since the Civil War, we as Americans have to ask the most fundamental question possible: Who are we?" That existential dilemma, the former Georgia congressman contends, has been forced by a relentless and intricate conspiracy of "secular socialists" that includes Democrats, big business, most of the academy and nearly all of the media. "And that's why saving America is the fundamental challenge of our time," Gingrich writes. "The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did."

He argues: "In the 20th century, hundreds of millions of people were killed by the totalitarian ideologies of Marxism, Nazism and fascism" for whom "religion was enemy No. 1 and the first to go.... There are many parallels between the anti-religious governments of the 20th century and the anti-religious elite of the United States in the 21st."

(More here.)