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"  So Newt Gingrich thinks President Obama is &amp;quot;so outside our comprehension that only if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior can you begin to piece [him] together.&amp;quot; The question is, which Newt Gingrich? If you listen to the liberal media, the answer seems obvious: &amp;quot;Newt Gingrich used to be just vile,&amp;quot; The Progressive said. &amp;quot;Now he&amp;#039;s pathetic, desperate and vile.&amp;quot; In the Washington Post, Jonathan Capehart said Gingrich&amp;#039;s comments &amp;quot;are so beyond the pale that the only time the presumed presidential aspirant should ever come close to the Oval Office in the future is either on a tour of the West Wing or as a guest of the next Republican president of the United States.&amp;quot; Speaking from the White House, Robert Gibbs said Gingrich was &amp;quot;trying to appeal to the fringe of people that don&amp;#039;t believe the president was born in this country.&amp;quot; Many conservatives had the same reaction, though none put it as vividly as former Bush speechwriter David Frum. Writing under the provocative headline &amp;quot;Gingrich: Obama Wants Whitey&amp;#039;s Money,&amp;quot; Frum asked, &amp;quot;When last was there such a brazen outburst of race-baiting in the service of partisan politics at the national level? George Wallace took more care to sound race-neutral.&amp;quot;  But there are two Newt Gingriches. One is famous for dreaming up &amp;quot;five new ideas a day,&amp;quot; many of them wild and imaginative stabs in the dark that are quickly abandoned. This is the Gingrich who seems to have a Tourette&amp;#039;s syndrome that blurts out nutty attacks on Democrats, like the time he blamed them for making a woman named Susan Smith kill her children. Speaking as a member of the Republican establishment, longtime RNC honcho Eddie Mahe told me for my recent profile on Gingrich that the former Speaker confuses his colleagues, too. We were talking about Gingrich&amp;#039;s peculiar support for compulsory health insurance, the pillar of Obamacare. &amp;quot;Some of us don&amp;#039;t always agree with him on everything,&amp;quot; Mahe said. &amp;quot;I consider the whole concept of compulsory insurance so out of line ... so, I regret some of those positions he took.&amp;quot; Mahe was also distraught by Gingrich&amp;#039;s enthusiasm for shutting down the government, which earned Gingrich a rebuke yesterday from his old friend and fellow Contract-With-America plotter Dick Armey. &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t conceive of why Newt could ever take positions like that,&amp;quot; Mahe told me. &amp;quot;You can only take those kinds of positions when you have little responsibility and visibility.&amp;quot; The other Gingrich, however, is a canny political thinker who stays up late trying to calculate and manipulate the long-term trends of America&amp;#039;s political psychology, and this is the Gingrich who first caught Mahe&amp;#039;s eye back when the RNC was looking for up-and-comers in the early 1980s. &amp;quot;He has a flair with language and the way that language ties to people,&amp;quot; Mahe told me. &amp;quot;He still has the best instinctive capacity to understand rhetoric as it relates to circumstances and paint a picture that has strong appeal.&amp;quot; From the Republican establishment&amp;#039;s point of view, this is the talent that makes Gingrich an asset. Mahe quickly agreed: &amp;quot;I have no doubt that many Republicans steal his language all the time.&amp;quot; During the election, Gingrich did this with an oil slogan \u2014 Drill Here, Drill Now \u2014 that Sarah Palin polished and turned into a major campaign theme. In this New York Times story, Matt Bai describes how Gingrich instructed Republican leaders on the night of Obama&amp;#039;s inauguration: Dinner was well under way by the time Gingrich arrived, but he proceeded to hold forth for hours, rallying the Republican troops who sat rapt in their chairs. Gingrich was fascinated and impressed by Obama&amp;#039;s address (&amp;quot;Those could have been our words,&amp;quot; he told the group), and he advised them to laminate it and keep it close by, so that they could hold the new president to his pragmatic rhetoric. He urged them to go after the nomination of the incoming Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who had been one of the architects of the bailout plan Gingrich found so odious and who was now in trouble over unpaid taxes.  The next day, at Geithner&amp;#039;s confirmation hearing, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate and one of the dinner guests that night, ripped into Geithner, calling it &amp;quot;incomprehensible&amp;quot; that the nominee for Treasury hadn&amp;#039;t known whether he had fully paid his income taxes while he was at the International Monetary Fund. At a Republican retreat two weeks later in Virginia, Peter Roskam, an Illinois congressman who also attended the dinner, showed up with laminated copies of excerpts from Obama&amp;#039;s inaugural address and handed them out to his colleagues.&amp;quot; I noticed another small instance last week. When I was tagging along with Gingrich in the spring, he was flogging a new slogan: 2+2 Equals 4. He said it got it from Albert Camus and the leaders of Solidarity, but in his mouth it seems to mean that the solutions to America&amp;#039;s problems are so obvious only a socialist from Kenya could deny them. Five months later, guess who started using the phrase on TV?  This is what should scare Democrats \u2014 and Republicans, too: Five-Ideas Gingrich isn&amp;#039;t the one who was talking to The National Review and saying those things this weekend. It was the Psychohistorian Gingrich, the Hari Seldon Professor of Manipulative Rhetoric That Taps the Lizard Brain. He&amp;#039;s been attacking Obama for being soft on &amp;quot;radical Islam&amp;quot; ever since the election, warning that Obama isn&amp;#039;t man enough \u2014 or capitalist enough \u2014 or Christian enough \u2014 to take on the jihadists. He has often accused Obama of insulting America&amp;#039;s friends \u2014 principally Israel \u2014 and coddling its enemies. When I met him, for example, he was fixated on how the Obama administration was trying to downplay the linkage between Islam and terrorism. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re rewriting the national security documents to take out jihad in Islam,&amp;quot; he told me. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s a level of either self-deception or confusion that I find deeply troubling.&amp;quot;  Of course, George W. Bush&amp;#039;s administration did exactly the same thing at the urging of Bush himself, who repeatedly warned against making Al Qaeda synonymous with Islam. But Gingrich has studied the trend lines and come to the conclusion that the Obama-Islam-Kenya-Socialism connection is going to be a winner for Republicans. In the last month, he&amp;#039;s become the prime mover of the fight against the Ground Zero Mosque and also launched his latest instant &amp;quot;documentary,&amp;quot; America At Risk \u2014 like all his movies, a rabid piece of shameless propaganda weirdly similar to the kind of movies Big Brother would have made in George Orwell&amp;#039;s 1984. You really should go check out the trailer, but here&amp;#039;s the description: Today, Washington refuses to tell the truth about the war we are fighting. According to experts, we are at war with radical Islamists \u2014 and it is a war we are losing. The Global War on Terror has been renamed the &amp;quot;Overseas Contingency Operation&amp;quot; by the Obama Administration. They have removed &amp;quot;Islamic extremism&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;jihad&amp;quot; from national security strategy documents. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has suggested we replace the word &amp;quot;terrorism&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;man-caused disasters.&amp;quot; But how do we win a war with an enemy the Obama Administration refuses to identify? A measure of how committed Gingrich is to this ridiculous argument: He describes America at Risk as the first in a trilogy. And please note the a big silence from the Republican establishment. Despite the quick reactions of Card and Frum, few others deigned to comment. And the mice working away in the sewers of the Internet instantly gave Gingrich the quiet support that comes from changing the subject to something more respectable. Here&amp;#039;s the only Gingrich headline in yesterday&amp;#039;s CNS News, a hard-right website: Newt Gingrich Predicts House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Will Retire.  For me, though, the real mystery is the third Newt Gingrich \u2014 the troubled young super-nerd who married his high school math teacher and once described himself, with startling accuracy, as &amp;quot;a psychodrama living out a fantasy.&amp;quot; This is the troubled guy who bubbles up in the outbursts of Newt One and masters himself through the calibrations of Newt Two, the guy who responded to the moral stress of cheating on his wife with a young Congressional staffer by attacking President Clinton for cheating on his wife with a young White House staffer. Psychologists call this projection, which is short for &amp;quot;putting your ugly-ass baggage on someone else&amp;#039;s back,&amp;quot; and it seems to be at work once again in the words Gingrich chose to describe Obama: This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con ... I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating, none of which was true ... he was being the person he needed to be in order to achieve the position he needed to achieve ... he was authentically dishonest. READ COMPLETE COVERAGE OF NEWT GINGRICH ON THE POLITICS BLOG &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a8418/newt-gingrich-obama-kenyan-quote-091410/>