Newt Gingrich attacking Mitt Romney for speaking French? How gauche!

Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney

I’m under no illusions about the weapons-grade insanity we’re all referring to as the Republican primaries this year, but a recent Newt Gingrich attack ad on Mitt Romney hit a particularly stupid note.

Titled “The French Connection”, Newt puts the hammer to Mitt by tarring him with the Massachusetts liberal brush, but reaches for a curious case in point: He speaks French.

Quoi?! For all Romney’s faults – the fact he is a money-mad robot, for example – picking his ability to speak French is trop bizarre, to say the least. Never the mind the fact Romney learned French as a Mormon missionary, and the clip they showed was a promotional video for the Winter Olympics he was organising in Salt Lake City. I mean, doing things, even speaking a foreign language, to keep Jesus and the investors happy is very Republican indeed.
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Stranger than the line of attack though is the man carrying it out, the man who is to hypocrisy what Jeff Gordon is to NASCAR, Newt Gingrich. Newt did his doctoral thesis on education policy in the Belgian Congo, a field of study which requires, to say the least, un petit peu de Français. And he carried out his studies in New Orleans, where not knowing French would be like going to Conemara without a cúpla focail. “A Massachusetts moderate cannot beat Barack Obama”, claims his attack ad, but neither can an arrogant Georgian blowhole.

Maybe it’s my Irish aversion to pomposity talking, but I’ve always found American exceptionalism to be an extraordinary dumb concept, especially in the way articulated by the American right and stoked and pandered to by their leaders. Not just Gingrich but throughout the campaign Romney, Perry and most of the rest have all smugly articulated their “The way I love America is the only way to love America” views, like hipsters without the massive headphones or obscure band t-shirt, claiming with varying degrees of falsehood that President Obama apologises for America and such. It’d be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous.

Being proud of your country is not necessarily a bad thing, but thinking your country is blameless, infallible or exists on a higher level just because is plain stupid. Worse yet, blasting your opponents – or even people who articulate basically the same thing differently or more moderately - is the mark not of a citizen of a great country, but of a barbarian. Americans have of course not been the only transgressors on the world stage when it comes to coarse, unthinking nationalism and have a lot to be proud of too, but a country that purports to be the greatest ever should really have more class and grace.

It may be easy to rip on France or Europe in general, but we’re a continent of culture, history, diversity and broad horizons. The French have a saying: “Qui n'entend qu'une cloche n'entend qu'un son.” He who hears only one bell hears only one sound. High-handed would-be leaders like Newt and Mitt would do well to listen to some of the voices of the people who reside beyond their coasts. They’d also be well advised to take heed of a phrase common round the part of the country I came from: Wind yer’ neck in.

The view from over here: the GOP’s true primary colours

Apart from having a long-term interest in US politics I also have the sleeping patterns of a musician, so that means watching coverage of the Republican Primaries isn’t such a taxing thing for me to do. From a sleep point of view that is, in pretty much every other way it’s tough going.

On one hand there’s something almost cathartic about actually having primaries as it beats the merry band of ruffian nominees ranting into hysterical space, but CNN’s bombastic reportage would nearly make you cry with laughter.

The Best News Team In The Known Universe, or whatever they fancy themselves as, seem to take excessive pride in the extent to which they muck about gadgets, tables, virtual reality rooms and zoom-in maps with colours bursting out of them. Stranger than that though, especially for Irish viewers, is the promethean curiosity with which they treat their “ballot cams”, which watch people counting and then announcing what they’re counting. A tad pedestrian for Irish eyes, who are seasoned hurlers on that particular ditch.Stranger yet though were their overkill squad of reporters, one of whom was reduced to asking a selection of voters and associated hangers-on what their name was and who they voted for, with the grim monotony of a faulty Terminator.
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But the reporters got a welcome break when the results were declared – as if anyone was in any doubt – and the cameras focused on their victory/heck I’m claiming this as a victory/laughably defiant speeches.

You could tell an awful lot, in fact all you’d ever need to know, about the candidates judging by the speeches they gave on Tuesday night. Mitt Romney is a cross between Troy McClure and Patrick Bateman’s sleazy dad, who will say literally anything to get elected. Ron Paul is a principled and likeable gent but with a polemic speaking style that makes Castro look like the model of brevity, and an issue profile that would send a man in to anaphylactic shock. John Huntsman is the last sane man in the whole godforsaken saloon, and is a man of considerable class.

Rick Santorum is a kind of turbo-Dana, mixing populism with strident, pro-life views. Unless you're an Iranian scientist, in which case he kinda hopes the US government is secretly killing them. He made a point of continually referencing his coalminer grandfather and told of his emigration from Italy to the US in the twenties, which struck me as nice but a bit odd. For starters, my grandfathers were a farm labourer and a jockey, but I couldn’t pretend to have had a life anything remotely like theirs. And its lucky his grandfather wasn’t Mexican in the present day.

As for Newt, I switched off before he started, for the good of my own health. It's going to be a long year. But, God help me, I still wouldn't miss it.

Margaret Thatcher, Meryl Streep and The Iron Lady's true legacy - VIDEO

Meryl Streep and Margaret Thatcher

While walking round Dublin of a crisp, pre-Christmas morning, you couldn’t help but be taken aback by some of the posters adorning the city buses. As if the sharp Arctic air wouldn’t take the breath out of you easily enough, seeing Meryl Streep made up uncannily like Margaret Thatcher for her latest film would wind a man for sure.

The film in which Streep plays "The Iron Lady" is being released this very week, which is as intriguing as Meryl Streep’s makeover is terrifying.

She’s a fascinating character, a woman who more than anyone in the last few decades molded the political landscape into her own graven image, who prompted die-hard loyalty and incandescent rage in equal measure, and the manner in which she relinquished power is worthy of Shakespeare.

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It was inevitable given Thatcher’s propensity for evoking strong feeling that a film would be made about her career one day, and as she gets increasingly old and frail thoughts on her legacy are coming into sharper focus. Ironically enough though, the increased publicity and focus a film provides may only serve to distort.

The Iron Lady is being publicised as the story of a no-nonsense woman who made it in a man’s world, whereas in reality Thatcher was no vanguard feminist. In fact, save for herself, the only other woman at cabinet in the eleven years she was in power was paleo-conservative Baroness Janet Young.

Discussion about whether she was Britain’s savior or Satan’s own envoy on earth will probably never cease, but Thatcher’s objective legacy boils down to a single statement: she knew her own mind, but little else.

She was a conviction politician without parallel, but she had a disregard for nuance that was terrifying. No matter what the issue, be it Northern Ireland, the Falklands, inner-city discord, economic theory (and accompanying strife) or Europe, she almost made being closed off to ideas that weren’t hers into an art-form. And some of her ideas, for example suggesting “The Cromwell Solution” to Northern Ireland, were insane.

Most damning of all though is that she failed in her driving mission. Thatcher wanted a return to a Great Britain that was essentially Victorian: frugal, modest, respectful, upright, rebelling in private enterprise. Instead, what she helped create, along with Ronald Reagan and monetarist economists, was a world order that codified selfishness, glamorized wanton materialism and, with her abysmal claim that there was no such thing as society, detached a social bedding that has set in motion a range of problems we grapple with today.

Margaret Thatcher was without doubt a towering presence on the world stage and an immensely influential figure for longer than that, but while she may be seen by supporters as a wondrous counterweight for morally bankrupt politicians with malleable ideals, she ran right past steadfast and careered towards wrong-headedness. On matters of political delicacy, be it the Unions of the far left she detested or the “wet” Tory moderates in her own cabinet she dismissed, she destroyed what needed to be finessed. Her binary world view is summed up by some of her most well-known statements when in power: “Out, Out, Out” in reference to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, “Crime Is Crime Is Crime” on the issue of political prisoners, and “No, No, No” on Europe, the position which would be her undoing.

Influential as she was, memorable mantras and a simplistic world view do not a successful political leader make, irrespective of personal drive. It is that simple truth that ought to shape the Thatcher legacy: for a woman with such vision, she was incredibly short-sighted.

Here's the official trailer for the movie: