Joan Walsh has compiled a laundry list of the unbelievably despicable behavior Newt Gingrich has engaged in over the years:

• Shutting down the government in 1995 at least partly because President Clinton allegedly snubbed him by seating him in the rear of Air Force One on a flight home from Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral. No, really, he told reporters the “snub” was “part of why you ended up with us sending down a tougher continuing resolution.”
• Advocating that the children of welfare recipients be taken away from their parents and raised in orphanages.
• Leading the drive to impeach Clinton over lying about adultery when he was himself lying about adultery, cheating on his wife with a staffer, Callista Bisek, who became his third wife.
• Insisting President Obama suffers from “a Kenyan anti-colonial mindset” like his Kenyan father, even though he barely knew his Kenyan father.
• Denouncing Paul Ryan’s radical budget (that was actually smart) as “right-wing social engineering,” then flip-flopping and warning that “any ad which quotes what I said Sunday is a falsehood.”
• Railing against Obama’s alleged “class warfare” when he’s run up a $500,000 tab at Tiffany’s.

Amazingly, Gingrich is now in a position where he actually has a shot at winning the Republican primary, not through any virtue of his own mind you, but virtue of the shocking crowd he's up against. Gingrich has billed himself as the thinking candidate, which might actually be appropriate given he's probably the only one capable of it.

It's an indictment of the modern GOP that Gingrich is even deemed a viable candidate – a party so tired and uninspired that is has to dig up dinosaurs like Newt to inject 'ideas' into the debate.

The problem is he's so flawed as a character that his meanness is actually palpable. Gingrich unfortunately looks like a douchebag – an unforgivable trait in the modern media era, and the reason he will never get elected President.

Thank God. 

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Cornel West's tirade against Obama has irked much of the liberal media, largely it seems because West framed much of his critique in terms of race. Writes Joan Walsh of Salon.com:

The most tragic thing, to me, about West's meltdown was the way he tried to frame it as a universalist defense of poor and working-class people — who in fact haven't gotten enough help or attention from this too-close-to-Wall Street administration — but then somehow descends into personal attacks on the president as "a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats." If that wasn't bad enough, West claims Obama's problem is that he is afraid of "free black men" due to his white ancestry and years in the Ivy League…..

Give Brother West credit for consistency: On MSNBC's "The Ed Show" Tuesday night, he repeated his criticism that Obama is too close to "upper-middle-class white brothers and Jewish brothers."

Oh no, the Jews again. Haven't we been here before?

It has become fashionable in middle class intellectual circles to pretend that skin color and racial background doesn't matter any more in America, and anyone who brings it up is living either a racist or living in a time warp. West is not allowed to bring up race when it comes to Obama because it isn't polite to do so, and liberal intellectuals are not comfortable with the idea that race still defines much of American politics.

While it is fine for Walsh to dismiss West's attack on Obama because she doesn't like listening to racial politics, the reality is that the Princeton professor speaks on behalf of a significant segment of black America dismayed at Obama's seamless integration into the institutions responsible for structural poverty and racial discrimination.

Personally, I still like to believe that Obama has a long game up his sleeve, that his ability to mingle with "upper-middle-class white brothers and Jewish brothers" is a tactic to mask subtle shifts in government policy that will result in substantive change somewhere down the line. Whether this turns out to be true or not remains to be seen, but West is right to criticize Obama because so far we have not seen much of the change he based his campaign on. There have been victories, no doubt, but for many languishing in poverty, joblessness and crippling debt, the long game seems awfully slow.

We can pretend that "upper-middle-class white brothers and Jewish brothers" are not massively overrepresented in government, and that policy isn't framed largely in their interests, but you only need to look at the statistics to see how much race still matters in America.

As an upper middle-class-white, Jewish brother, I can attest that life isn't so bad for me and my kind. And until I've lived as a poor black man, I will refrain from dismissing the racially tinged lens through which Cornel West still sees America. 

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