Lord Gingrich

"One of my new year's resolutions was to ignore the Republican primaries in the United States, but I have broken it already. They have a horrible, irresistable fascination, not unlike watching a funnel web spider crawling across your lounge-room carpet. All those spray-on tans, spay-on first names - Mitt, Newt, Rick, Ron - and worse, those spray-on opinions confected out there on the lunar right. These people have spun so far off any rational policy axis that they make George W. Bush look like a Roosevelt liberal." (A field so scary that you can't turn away, Mike Carlton, Sydney Morning Herald, 21/1/12)

What more is there to say than that?

Plenty! Did you know, for example, that Newt Gingrich is a reincarnation of Britain's Lord Balfour? Allow me to explain.

I sort of half suspected it when Lord Gingrich blithely declared last month that the Palestinians are an "invented" people (See my 19/12/11 post Newt Gingrich, 'Historian'), an utterance, need I tell you, which took me back to the Balfour Declaration's "existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine" (who just happened at the time - 1917 - to make up over 90% of Palestine's population), and Lord Balfour's later, blithe announcement that, as far as these barely discernible non-Jews were concerned: "[W]e do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of [Palestine]." (See my 11/11/11 post Guilty As Hell.)

And then when I learnt that Gingrich has a Zionist in his ear, one Sheldon Adelson, a multi-billionaire casino mogul, Bibi buddy, AIPAC and Gingrich campaign donor, I thought immediately of Chaim Weizmann (who was surely worse than any flea in Balfour's). Oh, and there was also Lord Gingrich's blithe promise to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem with quite cavalier disregard for the implications of same. But that still wasn't enough to catapult me into the ranks of those who believe in reincarnation. No, it was the following revelation that did it:

"The Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has promised to establish a permanent base on the moon by 2020 if elected... 'By the end of my second term [!], we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American', Reuters reported the presidential hopeful as saying. 'We will have commercial near-Earth activities that include science, tourism and manufacturing, because it is in our interest to acquire so much experience in space that we clearly have a capacity that the Chinese and the Russians will never come anywhere close to matching', he said... 'If we do it right, it'll be wild and it will be just the most fun you've ever seen', he said." (Gingrich pledges to relaunch space race, Sydney Morning Herald, 27/1/12)

No, that didn't really have me thinking of a Balfour-style Gingrich Declaration: Lord Gingrich's Government view with favour the establishment on the moon of a space base for the American people... etc. What really persuaded me were Lord Gingrich's words: 'If we do it right, it'll be wild and it will be just the most fun you've ever seen'.

Pure Balfour, my dear!

I mean, listen to Lord Balfour defend (in the House of Lords on 21 June 1922) what he called the "great ideal" of establishing on the moon - sorry - in Palestine a National Home for the Jewish people: "It may fail. I do not deny that this is an adventure. Are we never to have adventures? Are we never to try new experiments?"

Pure Gingrich, my dear!