I know Newt was giving this speech at a conservative christian college, but I find the enitre speech very scary consdiering

it is rumored thet Newt is planning a run for the president.

However did anyone else noticee that Newt is starting to look a lot like Falwell. Is this a peronality transfer or reincarnation?

(7th Commandment Newty) gets it wrong; George Washington’s best statement was in a letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport Rhode Island:

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support. (http://www.tourosynagogue.org/GWLetter1.php)

I especially like the liberal part. Not only is the “Professor” a thrice married Republican hypocrite (tied for first place with Giuliani) he is a piss poor student of history.

What a crappy Commencement Speech! Yes, the school’s founder just died, so a good portion of it would have to be devoted to that. But then there was the second third of the speech explaining how Iraq is just like fighting the Nazis in World War II or the Communists in the Cold War, which is a completely specious assertion.

A Commencement Speech should examine the work of the graduates’ lives thus far and tell them to go out into the world and do great and meaningful things. Gingrich finally gets to this point in the final third of the speech. Apparently, the great and meaningful thing the graduates must do is increase the power of religion in politics and public discourse to prevent the modern-day persecution of Christians. Apparently, they’re practically being fed to the lions in our modern, secular-led society. Although I’m sure Gingrich would be hard pressed to name a single non-Christian president, atheist Supreme Court judge or secular Congressional leader or committee head.

Gingrich says,

We are accustomed to having the truths of the Declaration challenged from without. But what is new, is that for the first time in our history, those truths are now being challenged from within. A growing culture of radical secularism declares that the nation cannot publicly profess the truths on which it was founded.

Why Newt, this isn’t new! The Declaration of Independence may espouse “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” but the Declaration is just that—a declaration. An important, powerful, and beautifully written declaration, but it isn’t law. The Founders didn’t include God anywhere in our Constitution. Why do you think that was, Newt?

And so this was Liberty University’s Commencement Speech: a Jerry Falwell Eulogy, a false comparison to the Iraq War, and a call to the graduates to “be like the Founding Fathers and legislate your personal faith.” Dear God. Heaven help the graduates.

P.S. bernbart, Gingrich said many of the same things on Meet the Press this past Sunday, so it’s not just because he’s at Falwell’s university.

The struggle that Ntwit invokes is an eternal one--the immortal struggle between spiritualists and realists/pragmatics. Sending a bunch of wide-eyed bible-toting kids in this manner is the equivalent of the "retired" SS General enlisting 14 year olds in the Spring of 1945.

The conflict he so passionately speaks to, and which this nation currently finds itself at war over, is merely a conceptual error, resulting from the perceived irrelevance of his once-mighty opinion.

How the author could bear to sit thru this is beyond me. I would have lit myself on fire 3 minutes in.

How could one possibly get history so wrong at a commencement and not be thrown off stage?

Bow-chica-bow-bow

It sounds like bad porn. Why do all of these religious nuts phrase everything in such a lurid fashion? Its like they're so sexually repressed they turn their labidos to god

Of course a con man like Gingrich is just serving up the overheated Jesus stew to the braindead multitude. You know he doesn't believe a word of it. Neither does bush. Have you ever seen him sitting in church with that smirk on his face? Religious, my ass. He may have traded a scotch on the rocks for Jesus on the rocks, but now its just a cottage industry for him.

One day the "flock" will wake up and figure out Falwell, Haggerd, Robertson, Gingrich, Bush, etc. have taken them for a big fat ride. Then they'll...well they just turn to the next charletan ready to feed their bitterness and bigotry with another line of bullshit.

Nice try, Mr. Gingrich! Pandering to the Christian fascists at Liberty University with your ludicrously pie-eyed dreams of presidential glory, wrapping yourself up as a stern Defender of the Faith(tm).

What plays at Liberty University will win you no friends among the majority of Americans. You have even less of a chance than motley assortment of the other GOP also-rans who're running.

What you and your ilk don't get is that the harder you run on the GOP strengths, the further right you skew, the further away from the majority of Americans you take yourself, decreasing your electoral prospects.

No wonder your party has worked so hard to sabotage elections, to gerrymander districts, to challenge, harass, and intimidate voters, to suppress votes, to miscount ballots -- you realize in your hard little hearts that you can't win in free and fair elections. For a supposedly faithful movement, you folks sure don't have much faith in elections, or democracy, for that matter.