I didn’t watch the debate last night, but I gather that this fell flat for Mitt Romney:
Asked where he and Gingrich differed, Romney said, “We could start with his idea to have a lunar colony that would mine minerals from the moon. I’m not in favor of spending that kind of money to do that.”
… On moon mining, Gingrich doubled down — “I’m happy to defend the idea that America should be in space and should be there in an aggressive, entrepreneurial way” …
Amazing — Gingrich not only defended this, he wrapped it in the last refuge of a wingnut scoundrel, entrepreneurialism.
But that’s the thing about people like him: if you have that particular combination of screws loose, yes, you’re going to make manic, half-schizophrenic pronouncements about space colonization and the like, but you’re also going to have the cornered-rat instinct to jujitsu any direct attack on such pronouncements, so the attacker is the only one who winds up flat out on the mat. What I’m saying is that, with Gingrich’s particular brand of crazy, it’s futile to go at him head-on.
Far better to lull him into making even crazier pronouncements on the spot. Try doing it like this:
Romney: “We’ve suffered greatly in the three years of the Obama administration, and, well, it would be nice if we could just go into a time machine and turn back the clock to a moment before all that damage was done. Unfortunately, going back in time is just impossible — right, Newt? It’s really a shame that we can’t reverse all this damage with a time machine — isn’t it, Newt?”
Gingrich: “Well, in fact, Mitt, there’s been some extraordinary work done on time travel at a laboratory in Belarus, and it’s my belief that the United States would benefit tremendously from a massive program of research not only into time travel, but also into related possibilities, including astral projection….”
Now you’ve got him going.
Newt’s going to ambush you (his attack last night on Romney as a would-be career politician who just couldn’t manage to build a lengthy career was, I see, quite effective), and Newt’s primed to rebuff most direct attacks (though attacking him for supporting child labor, as I see Romney did, is a waste of time, because the stance is one of punishing the weak, which means it naturally appeals to the right). In short, I’d say you can’t actually defeat Gingrich — you have to find a way to get him to defeat himself. Which really shouldn’t be all that hard.
(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)
Benjamin Franklin
GAWD ! Hurry, 2012
MattF
One way to get Noot to go ballistic (which I’ve actually seen happen) is to say something non-negative about unions. His face turns red, his hair stands on end, steam comes out of his ears, etc. It’s not something his rivals in the Republican Clown Car Party are going to do, but Obama could and certainly should do it.
Bago
If you Only want humanity to occupy this planet…
Benjamin Franklin
Just heard Hunstman say to Zakaria (GPS) that he
“likes the Ryan Plan. We need to cut $6 Trillion from spending….it’s
NUTZessary…”
I swear, that’s what he said.
Rhoda
Romney has a BIG problem that I have no idea how he even begins to solve: he’s losing ground to Newt Gingrich with no time to actually play catch-up before the Holidays freeze the race.
When Romney couldn’t even make the lunar attack stick; well hell it was almost as bad as Rick Perry tripping over his own tongue and to his team probably just as painful to watch. That was a gimme attack to destroy Newt Gingrich’s credibility; and all that happened was Gingrich flipped the script and took charge of the debate from that moment onward.
Davis X. Machina
There’s more than a few mini-Newts out there. Check out this beaut from Steve M.’s comments.
I don’t think it’s parody….
John Weiss
I favor Lunar exploration. Strange, though, that he would mention it in an election campaign.
When you think of it, makes more sense than an international space station: there’s no doubt stuff on the moon that’s valuable. Getting there from NEO could be accomplished with electric engines or solar sail.
The moon would be the perfect place for heavy industry. Lots of solar and no ecosystem to screw up.
DougJ
Tonight I’ll Meet You On The Astral Plane or Astral Weeks would have been good title here.
pseudonymous in nc
Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit seems relevant here, because Newtie is a true bullshit artist. The appropriate response is condescension, I think, because that ego’s soooooo huge that it doesn’t need much tweaking to blow.
amk
@Benjamin Franklin: huntsman has always been a rwer and will always be despite the wishful thinking of some on the left.
wrb
If we send Mexicans to the moon. they won’t just come back, and mining is the kind of work those people like.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Exactly. And nice to see you at the top of the page.
catclub
@John Weiss: “The moon would be the perfect place for heavy industry.”
Let me know when the cost to get off the earth is less than $3000/lb. Getting off the moon would be much less, except for all the stuff you have to send to the moon to build the launching pad.
catclub
@pseudonymous in nc: And relevant to MattF @ 2, ask him how many illegal aliens there are working in union shops.
John Glowney
Mr. Mxyzptlk
wrb
@catclub:
Ask him how he’d respond if the Mexican Moon Miners attempt to unionize.
Jewish Steel
It’s starting to look like Newt is the only real politician of the bunch. And I don’t mean that pejoratively.
So, all the rest are just lucky ideologues?
Bill Murray
Mining the moon isn’t very useful, as most all the minerals there don’t contain metals we use on Earth, and most of the minerals are reasonably abundant on Earth. Also, it currently costs $100,000+ per pound to get from the Earth to moon, probably less to come back, so the capital costs will be even larger than they are on Earth. Economical extraction of useful mineral values for use on Earth isn’t likely to happen.
Small asteroids brought to near Earth orbit are more likely but not for quite some time.
Michael Scott
I particularly like that when Mittens attacked the lunar colony idea as a potential waste of taxpayer money, somehow Gunga-Rich flipped that around to an attack on “entrepreneurialism,” even though nobody had brought up private investment in the project before.
But this is a GOP base that doesn’t even know what non sequitur means . . .
beltane
Back in the ’90s there was a comedian, possibly Al Franken, who claimed that Newt Gingrich got all his ideas from watching The Jetsons while stoned. This does seem like a plausible theory.
Mino
Totally off topic, but I wanted to alert you guys to a new virus that goes through McAfee like butter and commandeers Explorer till you give it your credit card number for Vista Security blah blah blah 2012 @ $60 per annum whereupon it charges 500 bucks to yur card. I’m sure this is not news to the savvy on the blog, but untechies like me could use a heads up.
jwb
@amk: All of the candidates running for the GOP are likely to do incredible damage to both the economy and social fabric of the country. For me that leaves two related questions in determining the least bad alternative: (1) which, if elected, is least likely to go full fascist when the shit hits the fan, which it will? (2) which will avoid making crazy decisions that will ignite a major war?
Mino
@Bill Murray: Google rare elements on the moon. Not totally pie in the sky.
jwb
@Mino: Maybe this would be a good time for you to give up Explorer.
Nutella
Or as Krugman said this morning:
Mino
@jwb: I tried google, but it screwed up my toolbar. I am a total un-techie.
Frankensteinbeck
@Mino:
I’ve seen that. My brother got it. I was up all night wrestling with it until I managed to use some other program to get through to Firefox without being intercepted by the virus, downloaded Avast, and ran THREE SCANS to get rid of it. It took the register with it, but that was a small price to pay.
It tried to block Avast running, too, but Avast is a clever little program and overrode the virus’s override with a ‘Do you REALLY want to prevent this scan?’ box.
Canuckistani Tom
So Newt is pro-spaceflight? Huh, broken clock.
Frankensteinbeck
@Canuckistani Tom:
No, Newt is pro-claiming-to-be-pro-spaceflight. Just like George ‘Mission To Mars’ Bush.
Xboxershorts
We should remember that the Moon is a harsh mistress
Cain
@Frankensteinbeck:
Us, linux users and our 4% of the desktop market are living the high life with the lack of anything resembling viruses.
If you have a relatively updated computer, I would suggest running Linux in a virtual machine and do all your browsing and what not there. While using windows to only go to trusted websites.
I have never gotten a virus on my windows box because I simply am not well travelled.
lamh35
I actually surprised that more focus isn’t paid to Gingrich’s “Teddy Kennedy” line to Romney early in the debate. I’m no fan of Gingrich at all, but when I heard that line and the nasty delivery even I thought “Damn” straight to Romney’s gut. I actually think that was the what put Romney off his stride a bit. I know Mittens came up with some NFL line, but seems to me the damage was done.
Gingrich is just a nasty dude, and Romney is just not equipped to go as nasty on Newt as Newt was obviously willing to go on Mittens.
If any of the other candidates are running for anything but VP, then actually hitting Romney hard and quick seems to discombobulate the Rom-bot circuitry enough for him to be open for slips like the $10k line.
Definitely an unforced error on Romney’s part.
Bubblegum Tate
No deal, McKutcheon, that moon money is mine!
Mino
@Frankensteinbeck: I had to call Microsoft Support three times to find someone who knew what was going on. She used Malwarebytes to get rid of it.
c u n d gulag
Wow, Steve M, you’re certainly getting around! :-)
As for Newt, he’s turned reading “Future Shock” 40 years while stoned ago into a career as a grifting political pseudo-intellectual.
When Newt get all sciencey and technology, he’s not pulling stuff out of his ass, he’s ‘mining Uranus.’
Judas Escargot
@Bill Murray:
You’d never mine the moon to bring the minerals back to Earth. You’d mine the moon to use the materials there, or in space somewhere else (if you live in Earth orbit, your cheapest potential source of water is, ironically, lunar ice).
That said, two things about Gingrich’s moon “policy”: One, he still has deep deep ties to Lockheed, and to him, missions to the moon are just another way to funnel money to a big supporter/donor. Most Republican politicos don’t give a crap about actual space exploration, to them it’s just another trough of cash to fight over, which is why they keep mucking up the direction. “Moon colonies!” fits Gingrich’s bill of making him sound smart, while simultaneously enriching his friends. This probably surprises no one.
And two, to someone as (some would say quixotically) pro-space as me, Gingrich doesn’t help matters when he talks like this. Even if the general public wanted it, you’re not going to have lunar mining colonies for a long, long time– certainly not within the scale of a single Presidency. It’s a stupid thing to promise. It makes space advocates sound like cranks.
Any politician serious about the space industry would be focusing on using the mistakes and lessons of the Shuttle and ISS to learn how to provide cheaper access to orbit. You do this by building a commercial launch sector so that NASA can use the exact same vehicles as the private companies, reducing costs for both, and growing the sector. Think of Lincoln, the railroad lawyer, and the Pacific Railway Acts (a big Federal program which could only pass because the Southern Senators were…. otherwise occupied at the time).
BTW, Mr Gingrich: One of the few politicians who seems to get this happens to be the gentleman in the White House.
Frankensteinbeck
@Cain:
Actually, with a decent free virus program – currently Avast – I haven’t seen a breath of virus risk on my Windows computer. My idiot college age brother was running his computer for two years without a virus program.
Jay S
I’ve been thinking that Newt will be prone to a honey trap. That trap could be baited with crazy ideas just as easily as a future Mrs G. Maybe a combo deal? Of course he’s so likely to self destruct without any assistance that it would be hard to tell if someone set him up.
SteveM
@DougJ: Agree. Regret the error.
Or maybe “We Find Ourselves in Moontown.”
wrb
@Frankensteinbeck:
hmmm… I’ve been doing that for 26 years.
Is it a bad thing I do?
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
Absolutely nothing could go wrong with that idea, of course.
FMguru
That’s Romney’s problem in a nutshell – most of the really crazy things Newt believes in are also tremendous right-wing applause lines. Because the right-wing has gone nuts, Newt just takes their favorite subjects and cranks it up to eleven. Replacing schoolteachers with (non-union!) robots or strip-mining the moon to end environmental degradation sound like a spectacularly dumb ideas to anyone outside the 27%, but within the 27% it sounds visionary and motivating and the natural next development in conservative policy.
Republican voters DON’T CARE about electability. That was Democrats who got burned in 72 and 80/84/88 and who now worry choose their candidates with an eye towards the mainstream and the general election. Conservatices know in their hearts that Americans support them 100% down the line and the only reason they lose elections is if their candidate is a squish or ACORN/Soros/the Black Panthers steal it. It’s a crazy party with a crazy base. Pointing out that one guy is crazy doesn’t faze the base, it fires them up. He’s one of them!
Lojasmo
@Mino:
Did the obama administration make this request to the senate finance committee personally? If so, it had to have been organized by the DHS.
Bill Murray
@Judas Escargot:
yes I know I’ve worked on that with NASA. Well you wouldn’t mine the minerals at all, you would scoop up the free rocks on the surface.
The lunar ice is mostly near the South Pole, while the most useful mineral(s) are much more equatorial, which would necessitate a lot of moon buggy travel, or I suppose multiple robot landing sites
Lojasmo
@jwb:
Fix’t
trollhattan
I’d be afraid President Newton would abandon the moon for a younger, better looking satellite.
The whole lot have the combined depth of my kid’s Spongebob wading pool.
Mino
@Lojasmo: Was it the blah, blah, blah that confused you?
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@trollhattan: Are you sure you want to slight the Spongebob wading pool with that?
RossInDetroit
Malwarebytes and Microsoft Security Essentials take care of all of my virus infections. I think…
I have a friend who’s a pro PC tech for Ford. He carries Malwarebytes around on a thumb drive and swears it’s all he needs for 95% of the viruses his users stumble into.
Billy Rae Valentine
@Frankensteinbeck:
when you say Avast “took the register with it”, what does that mean? what is the register?
John Weiss
@catclub: Well, what you say is true: it’s too damned expensive to get into orbit from the earth. I suppose the lunar projects will have to wait for the beanstalks. I hope civilization can hold out long enough.
sharl
@c u n d gulag:
This is an excellent point, and makes me reconsider my opinion that this fine Datarock number would be a good theme tune for FrothyMixture; perhaps the Newtster has earned the right to use it (with Datarock’s permission, of course).
rikyrah
@Rhoda:
I agree with you, Rhoda.
what always made Newt a danger is that his business is out in the street. it’s obvious, he’s scum. So, if you’ve decided to vote for him, you have disregarded the scum. there are no ‘Cain-like’ surprises that you can pull with Newt.
People talk about Willard’s money and Paul’s ground game in Iowa….
Who needs money and ground game if the Holy Rollers have decided that you are their man….THEY will give you the ground game you need.
I’ll remind folks….Huckabee won Iowa with 10% of the money that Willard had, and the Holy Rollers gave him his ground game.
RSA
@Frankensteinbeck:
That’s what I was reminded of. Apparently there’s no downside for Republicans to propose outrageously expensive projects (IN SPACE) while simultaneously complaining about the deficit. Unless those projects involve actually helping non-rich people, of course.
BTW, welcome to the front page, SteveM. (Maybe belated, but I haven’t kept track.)
Michael Scott
@trollhattan: trollhattan FTW!
Mino
It’s been instructive to see the horror on the Republican side at the idea of Newt. It suggests they recognize him for what he is. But we see a lot of Newt in almost all Republicans. And they don’t.
bcinaz
Newt Gingrich sees himself as Hari Seldon.
http://hnn.us/articles/newt-gingrich-galactic-historian
Marcus
If newt is hari seldon then BO is the Mule which should frighten the living daylights of the GOP.
grumpy realist
Well, so did the Aum Shinrikyo people as well. One of my friends (newspaper reporter in Tokyo) was freaked out when he realized that the cult had been working off the Foundation novels…
Paul in KY
@John Weiss: What exactly is on the moon that’s valuable? It is all the light shit that ejected into space when that planet hit the Earth. No heavy metals (in any appreciable amounts) up there. Just lots of blasted & charred volcanic rock/dust.
I guess you might be able to use some ice (if it is there) as a fuel for a trip to Mars or somewhere.
Paul in KY
@FMguru: Kinda hard to get rid of an incumbent Democratic president in 1980.
And Dukakis was quite electable (voters tired of Reaganomics), till he rode in that fucking tank.