Who Cares about Jimmy Carter?

"Careless" speech is in the eyes of the beholder. When Jimmy Carter chastised George Bush for being "the worst" foreign policy president in American history and engineering "an overt reversal of America's basic values," he was expressing conventional opinion on the failure of the Bush presidency. Yet, Carter caught so much grief that he was forced to backtrack and refer to his own remarks as "careless or misinterpreted."

But there has hardly been a peep from either the left or the right over Newt Gingrich calling for military tribunals to lock people up for opposition to the war in Iraq. Gingrich is like Carter in the sense that Gingrich is expressing a conventional wisdom. It's just that Gingrich's conventional wisdom is the cw of the right where Carter's was the cw of the broader American population. However, Gingrich's advocacy of military tribunals for suppressing domestic dissent is far more significant for the future of American democracy than Carter's personal attack on Bush.

Gingrich is the one who should be controversial here not Carter. One of the fatal weaknesses of both moderates and people on the left is our underestimation of the enormous disgust that the right-wing has with American culture and American political institutions.

We need to pay a lot more attention to Newt Gingrich and people like him.