Newt Says God (R-Heaven) Is for a Tax Cut

Every time I hear Newt Gingrich talk about God, as he did the other day, I think of the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. For reasons I can’t remember, I once interviewed the head of the cheerleaders’ Christian consciousness-raising group, who impressed me with her conviction that God wanted the Cowboys to win the Super Bowl because they were the morally superior team.

So it is with Newt, who evidently believes that God is a Republican. In a joint appearance with Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott in the Capitol last week, he assured an assembly of college student conservatives that belief in a deity was the difference between them and the dreaded tax-and-spend liberals: “How many of you believe in God, just raise your hands,” he asked, and when they dutifully responded, the speaker pronounced, “OK, that is the core cultural issue of this society: Are we in fact endowed by our creator, which then implies a whole range of implications about the nature of life, or are we randomly gathered protoplasm temporarily together seeking, in some situation-ethics rational way, to temporarily make sure we’re not in pain? Now, those are two radically different world views.”

Huh? Not that I have the direct line to the thinking of a deity that the speaker claims, but it is reassuring to know that God is so forgiving that a man who walks out on his wife when she has cancer and who owes $300,000 to Congress for an ethics violation is still among the anointed.

Gingrich’s claim to the highest moral ground is based on the notion that the government’s use of taxes in any way that redistributes wealth from the rich to the poor interferes with man’s relation to his maker. “What is our relationship to God?” is the historical question that Gingrich posed to the youths, and after some rambing he answered, “There is a moral virtue to lowering taxes.” While it is one thing to urge a tax cut that bestows one-third of the benefit on the richest 5%, it is quite another to insist that those who disagree are somehow ungodly.

The gospel according to Newt is an offense to the church folk of every denomination, including the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops, who oppose the Gingrich revolution because of its dire impact on the poor. Just last week in New York City, the First Presbyterian Church, the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, the Franciscan Sisters and the Convent Avenue Baptist Church banded together with scores of other religious organizations to brand the workfare mandated by Gingrich’s so-called welfare reform akin to “slavery.” It would be pretty tough to convince these folks that their opposition to Gingrich’s shredding of the safety net for the poor was motivated by a protoplasm fetish uninformed by divine guidance.

And there are bound to be plenty of heathens, even libertines, to be found on the Gingrich side of the fence. Surely, as Congress and the president now gird for the budget battle, there are many godless globs of protoplasm that have benefited from the run-up of the stock market who welcome Gingrich’s proposal for a break on capital gains and inheritance tax.

Indeed, the Lott-Gingrich sermon really took off when Lott went after the real devil--the IRS. “I’ll never be satisfied until we eliminate the Internal Revenue Service,” Lott thundered while Gingrich nodded in emphatic agreement to what might have seemed a non sequitur.

On the other hand, maybe that was a related topic. Without divine intervention, there’s no way we can eliminate the IRS and still raise the billions to pay for the Aegis destroyer and other ships not requested by the Navy but ordered by Congress, bypassing the bidding process. These ships, which no longer have a military need, will be built at Ingalls Shipbuilding in Lott’s hometown of Pascagoula, Miss., where Lott’s father was employed and which is the state’s top employer, thanks to Lott’s skill in siphoning federal funds.

Has Lott thought this through? Without the IRS, who will collect the taxes to pay for those and all the other government projects he has forced upon us? Or for that vast array of government financed boondoggles for which Gingrich has elicited funding, making his district the biggest consumer of the federal dollar of any suburban community in the nation?

These guys are something. They label Washington a den of iniquity, but they have almost never lived or worked anywhere else, supported most of their adult lives by federal funds, as were their fathers before them. Lott has been in Congress for 25 years, Gingrich for 20, and their constant refrains about the godliness of smaller government suggests the confused priorities of a preacher drunk in a brothel.