The Shame of Our Nation

There are times when I wonder what it might have been like to have lived through some of the most egregious moral failures of our history. What would I say to my grandchildren when they asked me about America under Jim Crow, or the days before women's suffrage, or indeed any era in which an institutional fact of our national life would in hindsight be exposed as a brazen and incontrovertible injustice? Had I been there, living it, would I have felt that something wasn't right? Would a sinister normal have seemed somehow acceptable? I wonder, because I only have this era to live in, and here I am, and something feels terribly wrong.

When I heard Newt Gingrich chide the president recently for what he described (borrowing a term from the imbecilic conspiracist Dinesh D'Souza) as "Kenyan, anticolonial behavior," my first thought was that it sounded exactly like something a racist person might say. Gingrich, fresh from the set of his recent documentary detailing the impending Islamic attack on America, is arguably the most successful Republican politician of the last twenty years. He is also an unapologetic parasite on our great national conversation, the note-perfect embodiment of the malignant tumor on political discourse his party has opted to become since the election of President Obama.

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