Read the rest at Salon
Newsmax, a nutritional supplement sales organization and expensive email list with a right-wing news website attached, is hosting a Republican presidential debate, “moderated” by fictional television clown tycoon Donald Trump, set to air on a television channel you probably don’t actually know you have that spends most of the broadcast day airing paid programming. Historical fiction author Newt Gingrich — a disgraced serial adulterer with a still-unexplained $500,000 credit line at Tiffany and Co. who is also for some reason the current frontrunner for the party’s nomination — could not be happier. For some crazy reason, Republican campaign strategist Karl Rove is not particularly thrilled with all of this.
Rove v. Trump: The Unlikely War for the Soul of the GOP
by Alex Pareene
From the economic point view, this is a duel between two wings of the GOP, the tradition fiscal conservative wing that regards debt as immoral and seeks to balance budgets and the Bush/Cheney/Laffer "deficits don't matter" wing that Poppy Bush called "voodoo economics" when running against Reagan for the nomination. Fiscal conservatives believe that it was Bush's extravagance that lead to the election of Barack Obama, whom they regard as a Kenyan Marxist/Keynesian socialist.
2 comments:
Nahh, economics has nothing to do with it. The rubes are supporting the Catholic because he's not the Mormon.
Economically, they're both moderate Republicans, having supported individual mandates, climate change legislation, payroll tax cuts and both only paid lip service to supporting Paul Ryan's budget.
If anything Romney should be the social conservative choice, like Trump (and unlike Gingrich) he's endorsed tougher trade and immigration controls. What' more, he's still married to his first wife and is by all accounts a decent guy. Gingrich traded in two wives while they were ill (the first with cancer, the second with MS) for a younger Mrs. Gingrich and is more or less despised by his former colleagues.
Conservatives like MSNBC talk show host and former Florida Rep. Joe Scarborough stomach the student who married his high school geometry teacher now about as much as they did when Gingrich was in Congress, which is not saying much. Former Speaker of the House Gingrich left Capitol Hill under a well-earned cloud of disgrace in the 90s after being found guilty of ethics violations, including lying and theft.
http://www.examiner.com/political-buzz-in-washington-dc/morning-joe-blasts-gingrich
I agree that's the politics, Beowulf. It's dominated by Romney and anti-Romney. But the economic kerfuffle is as I described it, IMHO. Behind the scenes, it's Norquist as the champion of fiscal conservatism v. Rove as "Bush's brain" and "deficits don't matter" Cheney.
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