Rhetorical Nationalistic States Rights

Sorry for missing that Republican debate last night. I took my wife out for dinner which was infinitely more enjoyable.

I found a good summary on the Atlantic website. It points out one of the serious intellectual flaws of the modern Republican Party. States Rights are OK for things you don't like everybody to have like health care, but you need national power to force people not to be atheists and follow your version of the cultural wars.

They seem to want to emphasize the unalienable rights granted by the Creator to each individual but only in the individual way they interpret them. Once again, it's a divine right to their version of power and authority. How is that any different than a divine right of a king or a slaveholder? Will someone please explain this to me?

Sorry for the rhetorical questions, but this is really disturbing me. I simply cannot understand how Newt Gingrich could be at the top of the Republican polls. Herman Cain dropping out for his reasons, yeah, that's understandable. But Newt Gingrich as front-runner?

I suppose there is good news as the Newtonians Newtists have this fantasy that he is some kind of brilliant intellectual on the right. They look forward to a Lincoln/Douglas debate between their mental giant of a champion and this poser of a president who can only read teleprompters and is a product of affirmative action (southern strategy, anyone?) Douglas had a lot of hype too. He even won that election. He didn't win the debates. Read them some time.

As we've already seen several of the Republican candidates implode, it certainly can be expected of Gingrich. He even did already, and rather famously, on the national stage in 1999 when fell from his pinnacle as  Speaker of the House. To imagine a current comparable, think of Nancy Pelosi formally charged by the House with ethical violations at the same time she was doing some very un-family-values-type, disgusting things with someone not her husband while going after her political opponents for the same thing.

So it would seem that Gingrich will likely implode. If he somehow gets the nomination before that happens, he would be an easy opponent for the President to beat. But then, how in the world did he become the front-runner?