It figured that a Republican presidential primary race defined by nothing so much as a taste for cruel and unusual politics would eventually see Newt Gingrich emerge as the cruelest and most unusual contender. And so he has, emerging as the default choice of a new breed of Republican so extreme it would scare the bejeezus out of Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan.
Last week, he stepped up with a proposal to fire school janitors and replace them with child laborers. Blaming “the core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization” for “crippling” children, Gingrich told a Harvard audience, “It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, in child laws, which are truly stupid.”
Even in a party where shamelessness is now considered a virtue, it’s unsettling that a man who collected $30,000 a month for an hour of counsel to Freddie Mac administrators would attack school janitors, who according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics earn a mean wage of $13.74 an hour, or $28,570 a year.
In response to Gingrich, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees said, “The people you want to fire and replace with kids? A lot of them are parents. That job puts a roof over kids’ heads, food on the table, and provides them with healthcare and the chance to get an education. That job is the only thing between a kid and poverty.” But Gingrich has never been bothered by the human costs of right-wing social experimentation.
Should GOP disdain for Romney be so overarching that Gingrich prevails, he will then be the beneficiary of the largesse that Karl Rove, the Koch brothers and others are accumulating to pay for an anyone-but-Obama campaign in the fall.
The full article is available here
