Beck is Right! Gingrich and Romney are RINO Establishment Candidates

By Roger F. Gay

Glenn Beck says that Newt Gingrich is the only candidate he will not vote for and has issued a challenge to Tea Partiers.

You read his record. You read his words. [Gingrich] Not just the happy parts like you read about Theodore Roosevelt. Look into his record. See what he believes. This man is a progressive. He knows he's a progressive. He doesn't have a problem with being a progressive.

Personally, I know Newt Gingrich and his record well enough to know that Glenn Beck is right. In my commentary, I haven’t used the word “progressive” because I don't think it's all about political ideology. (Hint: It's corruption.) I'll leave that for now. Sticking with the political description, Glenn Beck is right.

Andrew Breitbart focused on Beck's follow-up to the challenge (link: ET TU, BECK? – PART III: ERRATIC MULTIMEDIA STAR PULLS RACE CARD AGAINST TEA PARTY!), accusing him of “pulling the race card against the Tea Party.” Beck continued:

So if you've got a big government progressive and a big government progressive in Obama, one in Newt Gingrich, one in Obama, ask yourself this, Tea Party: Is it about Obama's race? Because that's what it appears to be to me. If you're against him but you're for this guy, it must be about race.

Oh, if we could all have the wisdom of Glenn Beck. It's easy to erase the superficial rhetoric if that's what you want to do. Obama did it to himself in the last election when it was to his advantage. Failing to convince many people that having tea with terrorists was good foreign policy, he insisted, during debate on foreign policy, that he was being advised by the same people who advised George W. Bush and had the same policy; which was also the same policy that his Republican rival John McCain espoused. (Yes, that was before Obama received a Nobel Peace Prize as a backlash against Bush. What was that about?)

The Democrats are knowledgeable about Newt Gingrich's record. It will be easy for them to strip away the superficial rhetoric and make the match any time and in any way that they choose. (I think they'd very much like to have Gingrich win the nomination. See: link: DNC Backs Gingrich as Republican Nominee) And … is there any possibility that you missed it? Democrats play identity politics and they've accused Obama's opponents (especially the Tea Party) of racism quite regularly since as long as I can remember knowing his name. If you think forward, and imagine the two on stage, facing off in debate, seeing through Gingrich's fake conservative rhetoric, stripped down to his record and his actual policy preferences (a tiny bit more on that below when I get to Romney), what's the difference? Why switch horses in mid-stream if they'll both pursue the same agenda? Do you get it?

I'm left wondering though, why Newt Gingrich is the only candidate Glenn Beck wouldn't vote for. The only difference between Mitt Romney and Newt is that Mitt channels Ronald Reagan like a licensed fortune teller while Newt conjures up images of the oval office with his feet on the desk while chatting with The Gipper to help envision the next great expansive big government social engineering adventure and ways of selling it as a conservative sounding idea. “When Ronald Reagan and I … welfare reform … blah, blah, blah.” (He was actually Bill Clinton's go-to guy in Congress during most of his time as Speaker of the House, not Ronald Reagan's. He helped get things done in Washington through bipartisan cooperation.)

Perhaps it's only because Romney and Gingrich served in two different spheres of government. Mitt was a state governor and Newt was a US congressman. They both play the same state-federal shell game to promote big government with a conservative sounding package. They both claim that universal big government at the state level is Constitutionally fine and cost free, while it's not at the federal level. Neither one is suggesting anything different than the Democrats; federal funding and mandates with funds dispersed to states through block grants. The Democrats promote these schemes by saying government (federal) is finally doing something about this and that, while RINOs say it's being left to the states (to implement the mandates).

Magical "block grants” offered as a solution to big government by Gingrich and Romney do not offer states the option of accepting or rejecting federal mandates, nor do they reduce spending. Quite the opposite. The Constitution gives states the right to reject over-reaching federal "mandates". Acceptance is only mandatory if a state opts in to receive federal funding. What block grants do is bundle a larger number of "mandates" together (in a “block”). States cannot opt out of particular mandates without losing all of the funding offered for the entire block. Block grants give the federal government greater leverage in forcing states into compliance through the power of the purse.

Time after time, the federal courts have gotten involved in Constitutional challenges that follow over-reaching federal mandates, for aside from unnecessary and inappropriate federal meddling in state issues, federalization of law intrudes on individual rights. Federalization changes the Constitutional perspective on the law. It must then be treated as if it's part of the area in which the federal government is allowed to act (See: Enumeration of Powers; Article I, section 8 of the US Constitution.) And time after time federal courts, noting that states accept the change and are receiving money for their acceptance, have allowed the transition. It's a bad time to be a person!

Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, etc. etc. etc. know all of this. They all understand that they're playing the same game, pursuing the same agenda, and targeting different segments of the population with different rhetoric to sell it. They are “the establishment.” They are The Political Class. And Mitt Romney is just as much a RINO as Newt Gingrich.
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