Newt: Ronald Reagan is as Dangerous as Neville Chamberlain

Thursday, 26th January 2012

There are many reasons why Newt Gingrich remains a preposterous candidate for the Republican party's presidential nomination. Among them the fact that just about anyone who has ever had dealings with him - including a majority of his wives - hate him. Here's Elliott Abrams ~~dredging up some gems~~ settling some scores from the 1980s back in the days when Newt thought Ronald Reagan a dangerous pinko-namby-pamby:

The best examples come from a famous floor statement Gingrich made on March 21, 1986. This was right in the middle of the fight over funding for the Nicaraguan contras; the money had been cut off by Congress in 1985, though Reagan got $100 million for this cause in 1986. Here is Gingrich: “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.” Why? This was due partly to “his administration’s weak policies, which are inadequate and will ultimately fail”; partly to CIA, State, and Defense, which “have no strategies to defeat the empire.” But of course “the burden of this failure frankly must be placed first on President Reagan.” Our efforts against the Communists in the Third World were “pathetically incompetent,” so those anti-Communist members of Congress who questioned the $100 million Reagan sought for the Nicaraguan “contra” rebels “are fundamentally right.” Such was Gingrich’s faith in President Reagan that in 1985, he called Reagan’s meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.”

Gingrich scorned Reagan’s speeches, which moved a party and then a nation, because “the president of the United States cannot discipline himself to use the correct language.” In Afghanistan, Reagan’s policy was marked by “impotence [and] incompetence.” Thus Gingrich concluded as he surveyed five years of Reagan in power that “we have been losing the struggle with the Soviet empire.” Reagan did not know what he was doing, and “it is precisely at the vision and strategy levels that the Soviet empire today is superior to the free world.”

The Cult of Reagan is a tedious thing but I submit that while you can be many kinds of Republican and hope to become the party standard-bearer you cannot be the type of Republican who encourages folk to think Ronald Reagan was a kind of Californian Neville Chamberlain and still expect to win the presidential nomination.

Nor, I think, can you be the kind of chap who argues that "it is precisely at the vision and strategy levels that the Soviet empire today is superior to the free world." Can someone please fetch this from the C-SPAN archives?

[Chamberlain, of course, is being traduced by Newt. That is a different matter.]

UPDATE: Bob Dole piles in - Gingrich had a new idea every minute and most of them were off the wall.

Filed under: 2012 (154 more articles) , Americana (462 more articles) , Chamberlain (5 more articles) , GOP (309 more articles) , Newt Gingrich (47 more articles) , Reagan (10 more articles)

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Augustus

January 26th, 2012 7:56pm Report this comment

I'm not sure this retrospect on the Reagan cold war policies is relevant today. Fortunately, Reagan, like all individuals, was a one of a kind type of guy who was right for America (and the world) at that moment in time.

boneill

January 26th, 2012 10:36pm Report this comment

It isn't so much that Newt is bashing Reagan here. What Romney should hit is just how wrong Newt was about everything, about how strong the Soviets were and how weak America. And not just wrong, but how sure of himself he was. Tie that into exactly how he sounds today- So grand, so bloated, so pompous, so world-historic, so clear and visionary, seeing light where every other eye goes blind, but being totally and inarguably wrong. Of course, I'm not a fan of either, but that to me is more damning than insulting a mediocre President.

Jan Cosgrove

January 27th, 2012 4:11am Report this comment

I heard somewhere that when Chamberlain was ?Chairman of Birmingham's housing committee hen oversaw the construction of 40,000 homes to replace private landlord slums. If so the man had some good points. Newt? He has nowt. A mountebank. Please someone newter him.

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