Charles Blow Attacks Newt Gingrich's Imaginary War on Children

I predicted this the other day when I wrote:

Newt will be hammered as the right's public policy Ebenezer Scrooge who's also an epic hypocrite adulterer with the moral backbone of a snail.

And barely 24 hours later, here's Charles Blow with an attack on Newt at the New York Times, "Newt’s War on Poor Children":

Newt Gingrich has reached a new low, and that is hard for him to do.

Nearly two weeks after claiming that child labor laws are “truly stupid” and implying that poor children should be put to work as janitors in their schools, he now claims that poor children don’t understand work unless they’re doing something illegal.

On Thursday, at a campaign stop in Iowa, the former House speaker said, “Start with the following two facts: Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s illegal.” (His second “fact” was that every first generational person he knew started work early.)

This statement isn’t only cruel and, broadly speaking, incorrect, it’s mind-numbingly tone-deaf at a time when poverty is rising in this country. He comes across as a callous Dickensian character in his attitude toward America’s most vulnerable — our poor children. This is the kind of statement that shines light on the soul of a man and shows how dark it is.

I've taken after Charles Blow before for his truly epic mendacity. But I had no idea I'd forecast this idiotic attack so accurately. Ebenzer Scrooge is, of course, the tight-fisted old meany in Charles Dickens's 1843 novel, A Christmas Carol. Being Christmas season that's the literary image that first came to me, but a variation of the Scrooge attack is inevitable if Newt manages to win the nomination. At that point I'll of course be putting aside any differences I might have with Gingrich. Indeed, I'll be bending over backwards for his victory over Barack Obama, who he has rightly hammered as "Legitimately and Authentically a Saul Alinsky Radical."

Meanwhile, check out this penetrating essay at William Jacobson's, "Don’t play the “baggage” game." And a key passage there:

The purest of personally pure candidates will be faulted for being a religious nut and not hip enough to be president, someone from the white bread 1950s. Policies advocating personal responsibility and empowerment will be portrayed as cruel and favoring the rich. Advocacy of treating people according to the content of their characters rather than the colors of their skin will be protrayed as racially insensitive or racist.

Exactly.