Former Speaker Newt Gingrich Eviscerates Bush, Calls War on Terror “Phony”

BY FRANK J. RANELLI
Friday, August 03, 2007

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The contentious and conservative, erstwhile Speaker of the House bemoans how Bush has helped America become a country that is “no longer serious”, harshly criticizes the Bush administration's handling of terrorist groups, calling the war on terror “phony”, and claims hyper-partisanship is a “stupid way to run a country”.


In an extraordinary and stinging repudiation of Bush’s phantom war – the so-called “War on Terror” – former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, justifiably pronounced Bush’s apparent and failing exercise of nation building in Iraq as a “phony” war.

Quoting Gingrich, who was attending and speaking at the National Conservative Student Conference in Herndon, Virginia on Thursday, “the Bush administration is waging a ‘phony war’ on terrorism”, and “there is no evidence that we are winning this war”.

Gingrich, the architect of the Republican Revolution in 1994, which swept Republicans into Congressional power for thirteen years, before the historic, mid-term election of 2006 thrust Democrats back into control, is no ally of the left. However, Gingrich, due do his deep conservative roots, makes his admonishment of Bush’s failing foreign policy and flawed, mock war especially cutting and acerbic.

Signifying just how out of touch Bush’s energy policies are with Americans, and especially his own political party, the former Speaker declared, the U.S. needs a “national energy strategy aimed at weaning the country from its reliance on imported oil and some of the regimes that petro-dollars support”.

In his strongest chastising and chiding of the Bush years, Gingrich, referred to the autocracy years from 2001-2007, when the Republicans controlled both branches of Congress and the White House, as a time where “I don't think you can look and say that was a great success”.

Further illuminating on Bush’s crippling and abortive war of futility in Iraq, Gingrich lamented on how America “took on Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany” and “beat all three in less than four [years]”, yet somberly, Gingrich staidly pointed out that “we're about to enter the seventh year of this ‘phony war’...and we're losing”.

Whilst Newt Gingrich is an antithetical ideologue of a progressive America, who once shut down the government for 28 days during the Clinton years, he has managed a small, token gift to the left; he has properly proffered the best analogy for what Bush’s seven-year ‘war on terror’ is: “Phony”.