Newt Gingrich just keeps on talking, and it doesn’t seem to matter that what he says doesn’t make much sense.

Last week, in an interview with the National Review, he hit one of his favorite themes - that America is being brought to a kind of condition that combines secularism and socialism.

He’s on a tour to push his new book, To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine, and, like others on the political right before him, reverts to name-calling and unsubstantiated warnings of impending collapse. Collapse might come, but it won’t be because Americans have become “secular,” as he describes it.

Television producers and newspaper reporters and editorial boards have given this man a free ride. His opinions are considered legitimate, apparently, because he served as speaker of the House of Representatives for a few years.

He taught history for a time, yet he clearly doesn’t know what socialism is or he wouldn’t call President Obama a socialist. He doesn’t have a clear idea of the meaning of religious beliefs, or he wouldn’t say Obama is a secularist. But he and others on the right keep making the rounds of any news or commentary program that will have them, giving their dire warnings about the direction of the country.

Unbelievably, Gingrich claims that it has been the left that has caused all of the problems of America. And, he doesn’t miss much when he ticks off the list of U.S. institutions that have been taken over by the left, which has “tightened (its) grasp over America.”

He names the federal bureaucracy, the union movement, academia, Hollywood, and big business. The left has taken over big business? Newt surely is stretching for that one. Corporate America is firmly in the grasp of those who mostly would agree with Gingrich on matters of economics, politics, and social structures.

As for consolidation of power in the federal bureaucracy, the eight years before Obama was a fertile period for social and economic control over the people. The Bush-Cheney Administration borrowed and spent - even keeping its wars “off-budget,” so the cost wouldn’t show up as part of the alarmingly growing national debt - and it was able to pass draconian laws that strip Americans of many of their cherished civil liberties. To its shame, the Obama Administration has not been able or willing to reverse the decline in our freedoms and, in fact, is continuing the same policies.

Gingrich and others of his political bent don’t seem to care what Bush-Cheney did to the nation. Rather, they are satisfied that control of the rabble that, in their view, make up the American body politic is justified through policies of the right: cutting government (public services and regulations that protect the people and the environment), slashing the tax rate for the rich and corporations, consolidating control of Congress by those very corporations, and making war on any nation that disagrees with the right’s policies for global hegemony.

He’s comfortable with all of that. He didn’t speak out against either the Iraq War or the Afghanistan War and the occupations that continue until today and with the prospect that they will continue for some time.

For someone with such strong expressions of rights and freedoms for “the people,” he has no problem with the destruction of those possibilities for other peoples, such as Iraqis and Afghanis. Or, for that matter, he had no problem with his hero, Ronald Reagan’s, crushing of the Nicaraguan people’s quest for self-governance through revolution, as America did. Reagan’s support for the thuggish “Contras,” both political and material, may have been an international crime, but we’ll never know the truth, because no one has officially investigated, let alone brought charges.

So it was with much of the daily life of the Bush-Cheney Administration. It is unlikely that anyone will ever be brought to justice, because there has not even been any investigation, let alone charges. However, some members of that administration, along with members of previous administrations, are reported to be very careful about where they travel, because of the possibility of arrest and indictment.

One would think that Gingrich would be at least a little grateful to Obama for not ordering an investigation of the crimes of Bush-Cheney, starting with fraud in the 2000 election, which gave us that enterprise. In the same way, one would think that he would be a little grateful to Bill Clinton for not investigating the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan-Bush Administration. All of that allowed the decline of America and it is in decline.

The nation’s decline caused by those on Gingrich’s side of politics is something he routinely ignores. He doesn’t rail against the transfer of America’s wealth to other countries. He doesn’t rail against development of an economy that leaves tens of millions of Americans unemployed or underemployed, while we re-import cheap goods made by children and people paid a few cents on the dollar, compared to wages of Americans (when they had wages).

He doesn’t rail against the disparity in wealth between the richest 2 percent of Americans and the rest of us. It’s this disparity and what it means to the economy that is bringing the nation lower and lower, economically and in the strength of its political structures, out of which come our freedom and liberties.

For him, “big labor” and religious groups are just “socialists,” just looking to redistribute wealth. So, for him, a large portion of the body politic - unions and religious people - are driven by a political agenda and pushing hard for “secular-socialist values.”

Amazingly, even for Gingrich, he has claimed that they “[reject] American traditions of hard work, self-sufficiency, and honesty, they encourage Americans to learn how to game the system - sucking the maximum resources out of our country while contributing the minimum.”

What he has described in that very passage is not union people and people of faith, but Corporate America, a group he desperately wants to join. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have anywhere near enough money to join, and has lost any vestige of power that he once had as Speaker of the House. He can, though, continue to disparage the American people, by describing them with such language. He just has it backwards, as if he doesn’t know the history of his country.

If there is a small minority controlling the vast majority, it is the moneyed few and their powerful friends in Congress and the state legislatures who are in charge. That should not take much imagination for Gingrich to understand. He is just a “wannabee,” trying to make it into the ranks of the elite group that does exercise control in America.

He’s trying, though. He keeps writing books and making the rounds of news organizations, such as they exist today. And they are willing to listen, give him a forum to make his pronouncements, and then write about him. Usually, what comes out of these sessions is just stenography. They don’t catch him up short on his inconsistencies or errors of fact, or outright errors. What comes out is usually an advertisement for his latest book or speaking engagement. It helps him keep selling books and lectures.

His ideas are old and what he seems to seek in his “contracts” with this or that group or with the nation has already come to pass and we’re dealing with the consequences to this day. Deregulation and privatization, the central theme of Newt and his hero, Reagan, have come to pass and we now deal with a runaway financial system that nobody controls, environmental disaster such as that in the Gulf of Mexico, a nation empty of its manufacturing and industrial base, and a political system that is as widely divided as the chasm between the very rich and the other 95 percent of us.

If those are seen as disasters, then Gingrich has achieved his goals. His side has won and they should be celebrating, instead of conjuring up ways to further consolidate their power over the people.

A few years ago, Gingrich wrote a book - don’t laugh - about how to save the environment, A Contract With the Earth. If it were assigned to a freshman class in psychology 50 years ago, it likely would have been described as full of “glittering generalities.” But at least, he sees the destruction of our environment as a problem.

To underscore his concern for the environment at the time of publication of his book in 2007, he visited a polar bear cub named Knut (pronounced ka-NOOT) at the Berlin Zoo, and a wag writing for the online journal Grist, Alex Roth, asked, “But is Gingrich’s cuddly new environment image fitting? Environmentalists who remember the former speaker of the House primarily for his “Contract With America” may find a more appropriate animal mascot in Taricha granulosa, also known as the rough-skinned newt - one of the most poisonous creatures known to humankind. Just one of these newts, less than eight inches long, contains enough toxin to kill 12 members of the Sierra Club’s board of directors.”

Of course, Roth was kidding, but, reporters, editors, and producers who keep recycling old and worn ideas through their interviews of Gingrich might keep that warning in mind.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.