To the moon, Newtie!

By Rod Dreher • January 25, 2012, 8:07 PM

To the surprise of exactly nobody who has the faintest inkling of what a nut Newt Gingrich is, the GOP frontrunner today made a solemn ~~outrageous pander~~ promise to the people of Florida:

Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich is promising to colonize the moon.

Speaking in Florida, hit hard by the loss of a large number of space-affiliated jobs, Mr. Gingrich said Wednesday that if elected, “By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American.”

Comedians of America, you know what to do.

But seriously, isn’t this just so … Newtish? The idea that this broke-a*s country of ours ought to be spending money to build a colony on the moon is so far from reality, especially anything remotely connected to conservatism, that it ought to wake some pro-Newt Republican voters up. Newt might want to go to the moon, but he’s apparently already living on another planet.

21 Responses to To the moon, Newtie!

An Anachronistic Apostle says:

January 25, 2012 at 8:28 pm

Comedians of America, you know what to do.

Rod, I thought you’d never ask.

Although I have to tell ya … the current crop of rascals running for the GOP, do constitute a difficult act to follow.

But anyhoo…

“By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American … ”

Of course, then I’m thinking … what’s wrong with National League expansion?

“By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American … ”

Although frankly, when it comes to cheese, my globial warming consultants inform me that it could be Provolone.

“By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American …”

And the second permanent base, my fellow Floridians, will be on Cuba.
W.E.B. Dupree says:

January 25, 2012 at 8:31 pm

Newt is a forward-thinking visionary. Once we have a moon-base full of folks mining for lunar whatever, we can begin selling them weapons. That means manufacturing jobs for American robots!
J Curry says:

January 25, 2012 at 9:04 pm

Ahhh……the self-proclaimed “shaper of civilization”! Grandiosity on a grand scale.
Rob says:

January 25, 2012 at 9:57 pm

This is a good point at which to mention Newt’s once very explicit interest in “futurism.” I encourage all to do a quick Google search on Newt’s former (and brief) academic career.

Perhaps I am mistaken, but futurism isn’t a terribly conservative notion.
Pleasure Cruise says:

January 25, 2012 at 10:08 pm

I’m somewhat surprised that Mr. Gingrich proposed colonizing the moon before establishing that the current inhabitants are friendly to Israel. That aside, it is an exciting opportunity. I wish him the best of luck and look forward to his departure.
Noah says:

January 25, 2012 at 10:18 pm

“Once the colony is operational, the arc of American and human civilization will be on a fundamentally different trajectory. My second act as President (after moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem) will be to enact a free-trade agreement with the moon colony, so that what is left of American manufacturing will finally be offshored. It will be a fundamental transformation in our economic paradigm, as when President Reagan signed into law the Kemp-Roth tax plan which I championed in Congress.

“I will work with our closest allies in the galaxy, the Israelis, to ensure that no “invented people” will be permitted threaten our lunar colony’s right to exist. Let me be clear, however, that I fundamentally reject the nativism of those saying that our lunar colony cannot be a satellite of freedom and American greatness to the entire galaxy. We will deal with the issue of undocumented aliens in a fundamentally compassionate manner, and transform these aliens into assimilated galactic Americans, just as President Reagan did with the 1986 IRCA, which I championed in Congress.

“Just as the Obama administration has failed to deal with the threat from the Castro regime in a fundamentally decisive manner — as Ronald Reagan did when I worked with him on national security — the administration has also failed to respond to the Russians putting Yuri Gagarin in space before we had a man in space, and the threat that this fundamentally poses to the security of every decent American. I challenge Mr. Obama to twelve, three-hour Glenn-Aldrin-style debates on the future of interplanetary American civilization. I will offer transformational solutions that will fundamentally shift outer space into an arena of American dominance, where our values reign supreme in a fundamental way.”
Charles Cosimano says:

January 25, 2012 at 11:10 pm

It is the human adventure.
The Mighty Favog says:

January 25, 2012 at 11:20 pm

Remember the 1970′s syndicated show “Space: 1999″? The one where we had a moon base, as well as a massive lunar nuclear-waste stockpile, and then Something Happened?

OK, here’s the deal. We colonize the moon. We also dispose of every bit of our nuclear waste there, too.

We send Newt and Callista for a vacation on our moon colony. All the other colonists suddenly leave, a few hours before the nuclear-waste dump goes all fissile.

The moon gets blasted out of orbit, making the Gingriches the rest of the universe’s problem, not ours. I am hopeful the Klingons will understand that we had to do what we had to do.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

January 25, 2012 at 11:37 pm

Newt has been reading the greatest science fiction work of all time: Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. He had in mind establishing a massive penal colony, which will reduce prison overcrowding, remove political dissidents before they have a chance to file pesky appeals, and alllow him to crow that he fixed President Obama’s problem over how to shut down Guantanamo. However, Newt isn’t looking far enough into the future: he doesn’t see that when he faces all kinds of new corruption charges in the middle of his second term, he will be shipped up there as warden, where he will be the prototype of “Mort the Wart” when the inevitable revolution and Declaration of Independence occurs.
Rob Stove says:

January 26, 2012 at 1:25 am

As early as the 1980s, if memory serves me, Gingrich was trying – without success – to sell this demented moon- colonizing project to Thomas Fleming (of Chronicles, then rather newly established). Dr. Fleming naturally pointed out the more obvious flaws with Gingrich’s notion – notably the moon’s comparative lack of gravitational pull, compared with the earth – and suggested that a slightly less insane idea might be to send the ghetto kids (for whose outer-space future Gingrich purported to be concerned) to Antarctica, or, failing that, to Central Australia. Whereupon the poker-faced Dr. Trifkovic interjected: “Welcome to Alice Springs. Ebonics spoken here.”
johan says:

January 26, 2012 at 1:37 am

But it will be only a matter of time before illegal immigrant Moonians become a national problem…
JonF says:

January 26, 2012 at 6:01 am

Well now, let’s just make Newt God Emperor of the Moon. There’s a joke about “luney-tunes” in this somewhere but I just woke up and not firing yet on all cylinders.
tbraton says:

January 26, 2012 at 7:50 am

“Newt might want to go to the moon, but he’s apparently already living on another planet.”

Are you suggesting that Newt is a dead Mormon? I thought Romney was the only Mormon remaining in the race, and he appears to be still living, although the NY Times’ Dining section yesterday ominously carried a Mormon recipe for “Funeral Potatoes.”
Edward Hamilton says:

January 26, 2012 at 8:27 am

This just goes to show how small-minded and cautious Newt has become since emerging as the front-runner. The bold Gingrich of the 90s would have proposed skipping over both the moon and Mars to carve shimmering crystal palaces in the ice-fields of Europa.
Al-Dhariyat says:

January 26, 2012 at 9:37 am

I actually love the idea! But I’m a sci-fi loving nerd and maybe some of you other commenters are as well but I say dam the torpedoes and full speed delusion ahead!

Make it a mix of public and private sector competition… new industries and technologies would be created, employment for people to service those industries, manufacturing jobs, science research jobs, blah blah blah… can I go? can I go? can I go? can I go?

And back in reality, even in a good economy, this wouldn’t happen. sigh.
John E says:

January 26, 2012 at 12:03 pm

Newt has been reading the greatest science fiction work of all time: Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

… and decided to go looking for another …
David J. White says:

January 26, 2012 at 12:15 pm

“By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American … ”<

Good grief, the first permanent low-orbit space station isn't even American, or not solely American, and now we can't even get there under our own power; we have to hitch rides from the Russians.

I think our days of grand American-only ventures in space are behind us. It's just gotten too expensive, perhaps even for any one nation to so something like this on its own. (Unmanned exploratory probes are another matter, but of course they seldom provide grand occasions for breast-beating and flag-waving.)

I'm reminded of a first-season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the Enterprise encounters a space probe from about our current era, containing three cryogenically frozen people, whom they then revive. One of them, a wealthy businessman, assumes that the Enterprise must be an American ship, and is somewhat deflated when he is told that, not only is it not American, it’s not even solely Terran (it’s from the Federation).
Stef says:

January 26, 2012 at 4:18 pm

Desperate attempt to pander to retired old ex-NASA and gov’t-contract employees and their spouses. It’s all part of the play to the old folks game which has become our current presidential-election pastime.

I’m about ready to join with Hillary Clinton in a movement to amend the constitution to eliminate the electoral college. It’s ridiculous that the presidency is held hostage by the geriatric crowd in a few states.
TTT says:

January 26, 2012 at 7:18 pm

Until there’s a workable self-contained human colony under, oh, 100 feet of water, I won’t waste brain cells imagining one on the moon.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

January 26, 2012 at 11:37 pm

Keep ‘em coming John E.
Lord Karth says:

January 27, 2012 at 12:21 am

Does the word “spinoff” mean anything here ?

This idea is probably the most important one that’s been raised in any of these debates. We know other nations, especially Red China, are making efforts in this area. We know that the Moon has military potential—if nothing else, the Moon’s surface can be used as a launching site for missile attacks, as can the Lagrange points, and even LEO (Low Earth Orbit)—and the UN Space Treaty can and will be thoroughly ignored when that time comes.

Not to mention the prospect of access to resources, solar power and all sorts of commercial spinoffs; the half-hearted attempts to go into space back in the ’60s literally produced half an economy by themselves, in all sorts of different areas.

Reject this one out of hand, and you might want to start thinking about learning Mandarin. Because while there may not be signs of intelligent life in the Throne City, there are such signs in Beijing.

Your servant,

Lord Karth