Folie de grandeur

Robbie is a semi-regular poster on another message board I frequent. My old band played with his old band out in Colorado a few years ago. Nice guy.

http://www.robbierist.com/

I blame his parents. Naming a kid Newton Leroy is just asking for trouble. We're lucky he decided on Congress as a career, rather than disgruntled postal work.

Okay, it's a clunker. It also reveals yet again that Newt has a teeny-tiny too much self-regard.

Fine. But that doesn't all necessarily mean that he is wrong. So far as I can tell, he is the only major figure in American politics who realizes the scope of the problem facing us. As he put it last month:

Over the 42 years since the beginning of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the rise of an elite establishment that imposes political correctness, the increasing power of public employee unions and the emphasis of bureaucratism, the growth of lawyers, and the development of complex regulatory legalism have created a system that cannot work.

I want to make this clear – this is not about reform.

This system cannot work and cannot be reformed from within. Bureaucratism values process more than achievement, legalism values follow the rules more than achievement, and political correctness values avoiding embarrassment more than telling the truth about failures.

When you understand the intellectual framework and the interest group structure of the permanent government, whether in Washington, Sacramento, Trenton or Albany or other centers of power, it in fact works for the governing class and the elite establishment even if it doesn’t work for most Americans or for the country.

"This is not about reform". That is frankly an amazing statement to come from a guy who was Speaker of the House. But if you believe, as I do, that our failure to prosecute the war, our inability to properly respond to a massive natural disaster, our seeming powerlessness to effectively enforce our immigration laws, our naive and childish diplomacy, are all due to a systemic failure, then...

...who other than Gingrich is there to turn to at this time?