Everyone has been desperate to learn what sort of Intellectual Foment you'd get when Gingrich meets Althouse! Pop Rocks and Pepsi! At best!
Even by Althousian standards this is Notably Dopey. She references an op-ed by Jonathan Capehart, who thinks Gingrich is an asshole because he blathered the following to Fox News:
GOP hopeful Newt Gingrich defended his stance against certain child labor laws during a campaign stop in Iowa Thursday, saying that children born into poverty aren’t accustomed to working unless it involves crime.
“Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday,” Gingrich claimed.
“They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of I do this and you give me cash unless it is illegal,” he added.
Ha ha, Capehart doesn't actually call Gingrich an asshole. But let's be clear: Newt Gingrich is an asshole. On purpose.
In America it often takes a parent three jobs just to be poor.
Nobody works harder in America than poor people. Poor Mexicans risk death and deportation to work shit American jobs.
And then Althouse...
Now, obviously, it's Newt's style to provoke people like Capehart, and, indeed, Capehart's denouncement of Newt in the pages of WaPo leverages Newt's message for him. Capehart lambastes Gingrich for his wealth and for his disrespect toward "the overwhelming majority of those children and their families who live their lives with far more integrity and far less cash than Gingrich ever will." Capehart is doing what he is hired to do, and he gets some cash for that.
Which has nothing to do with anything. Gingrich said something patently absurd and offensive. Capehart's salary is not at issue.
Both Gingrich and Capehart probably care to some extent about poor children. It's impossible to say how much.
No it isn't. Gingrich wants to make their lives worse.
There's nothing about Capehart's liberal orientation that guarantees that he's more caring, though it's liberal style to pose as if you are. It's conservative style to offer love in "tough love" form, and that's what we get from Gingrich.
"We'll feed you" as opposed to "you go starve" is about where the moral rubber hits the road. "Style"? Fuck you.