EMP or Not to Be

Remember Dr. Strangelove. United States Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) sets off nuclear Armageddon to ward off the Russians who are responsible for  the fluoridation that is attacking “precious bodily fluids.” The Kubrick classic was based on a book by Peter George called Red Alert or Two Hours to Doom. Now according to an article in the Times ("Amongt Gingrich's Passions, A Doomsday Vision," NYT, 12/11/11)New Gingrich is warning about EMP, electromagnetic pulse. The Times piece reports that Gingrich has worked with William Forstchen on historical novels and has written the forward to his doomsday thriller One Second After. “Millions would die in the first week alone,” the Times quotes Gingrich as writing in his forward. The idea is that a nuclear weapon hefted into the atmosphere “would set off a huge and crippling shockwave of electricity.” Like Jack D. Ripper Mr. Gingrich favors preemptive action. “We are on the verge of catastrophic problems,” the Times quotes him as saying. “I favor taking out Iranian and North Korean missiles on their sites.” When you think of it, doesn’t Gingrich look like a character out of a Kubrick film? He has the brilliance of  the professorial Strangelove (Peter Sellers), suffers the delusion of Ripper and demonstrates the xenophobia of General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott). Gingrich is really a throwback to another era in which people named their children Newt and future cold warriors showed off their latest trophy wives to their congressional colleagues. Weapons of Mass Destruction? Fiddlesticks . Newt has bigger fish to fry.

Monkey Business

One thing the current Strauss-Kahn scandal illustrates is how sex is an issue that crosses party lines. The man who a short time ago was the likely future president of France shares something in common with a man who could rightly be his political arch-enemy, Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire Italian premier. Berlusconi has also been in court recently on a sex crime allegation. Here in the U.S., Newt Gingrich, who once led the charge to impeach Clinton, now finds himself defending his own past extramarital behavior as he seeks the Republican nomination. Here is a 2004 quote from ethically-challenged former Senator John Ensign: “Marriage is the cornerstone on which our society was founded. For those who say that the Constitution is so sacred that we cannot or should not adopt the Federal Marriage Amendment, I would simply point out that marriage, and the sanctity of that institution, predates the American Constitution and the founding of our nation.” This of course came before he had an affair with the wife of one of his aides. Desire and instinct are the great levelers. Gary Hart was a Democratic hopeful before his misadventures on the Monkey Business, and former California Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger gave up his hope of becoming a lifetime member of the Kennedy clan when he fathered the child of one of his domestic employees. At least he didn’t pop out of the bathroom nude, drag her down a hallway and force her to perform oral sex.