Sunday’s Sermons: The Rise of Newt, and the Fall of Frank. Why God?

That title might be slightly misleading. Newt Gingrich’s “rise” to the top of the Republican (scrap) heap probably has as much to do with them exhausting all the other candidates (Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain) in one embarrassing flub after another as it does with anything Newt is doing. And the second slightly misleading thing is that congressman Barney Frank isn’t falling so much as retiring.

Still though, it makes you wonder if you’ve fallen through the cracks of some dark parallel universe. The fact that two men so different (one kind-hearted and open, the other loathsome and bigoted) are having contrasting fluctuations in power really makes you wonder about the state of affairs today.

In one corner, you’ve got Massachusetts representative Barney Frank, one of the longest serving and strongest voices for progressive politics in America. He’s not only one of congress’s few Jewish members, but one of the only non-closeted gay ones in history. But Frank isn’t meant to be merely a symbolic victory for open-minded tolerance. He’s been an unwavering champion for it. For an ailing liberal wing of the Democratic Party (which has already lost Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, and John Edwards to sex scandals, and Alan Grayson to election loss), Frank represented one of the last voices we really have in politics.

In the other corner, you’ve got Gingrich. He is an arrogant, close-minded, dirty-fighting blowhard…and that’s just what people that like him think. Gingrich ushered in a new era of nastiness in late 80’s and 90’s politics. One where he didn’t just want to beat his enemies, he wanted to destroy them. He rose by making sure the opposition failed, and clawed his way to the top of the pack by climbing over the defeated bodies of his Democratic rivals. The fact that such a nasty fighter has returned to the Republican spotlight truly says something about the ugliness that is driving GOP politics. They don’t feel they can beat President Obama either way, and would rather have a bastard like Gingrich (who Barney Frank correctly summed up with “his chief asset to his party is as a character assassin”) be extra foul in his campaign against the president than someone like Romney who will try to run a cleaner race that pulls some punches.

Gingrich has called Obama a Muslim, a socialist, a Kenyan foreigner, an “anti-colonialist” (uhhh, isn’t that a good thing?), an unpatriotic enemy of the United States, a radical, an atheist, and everything but a horse thief. There is no card, no matter how ugly he won’t pull out whether it’s religion, class, or, especially, race (just this past week, he went into a tirade about how “kids in the ghetto” don’t know how to work because their parents don’t work, unless it’s in an illegal industry).

So here we are, looking down the barrel at an Obama vs. Gingrich presidential race, and the reinvigoration of the culture wars. [“Culture Wars” is a term used to describe blue state values vs. red state values, but too often it feels like the battle between people who are cultured and people who aren’t.] And unlike when they flared up against Bill Clinton in the mid-90’s, Barney Frank (one of Clinton and Obama’s best defenders) won’t be in the House to fight in them.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that I’ll miss Barney Frank and salute his years of service. Almost as much as I won’t miss Newt Gingrich when he returns to obscurity, where he’s been for almost 15 years and will hopefully return for another 15. Barney Frank deserves to have his reputation live on, but Gingrich deserves to be relegated to the D-list, perhaps joining his buddy Donald Trump on Celebrity Apprentice.