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Matthews: America needs many things but not Gingrich

Think about Newt Gingrich with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons at his disposal.

Think about Newt Gingrich with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons at his disposal. Interesting thought isn't it?  A man known to be a bomb-thrower with real-live bombs in his hands.  

You know, as I do, that the genius of our constitution is making the president the commander-in-chief.  It ensures that the top person in the military is the person the American people elect. The other part of this constitutional requirement is that we, the people, elect as our president, make commander-in-chief, someone who has the temperament to handle this extraordinary power.  

Newt Gingrich has thrown around words lately that are classic bomb-throwing.  He ridicules the highly-nationalistic Palestinians, dismissing them as an invented people, that they are terrorists.  So what do you think of having this guy out there in the Middle East debate throwing bombs like that against people on the other side, in a region where certain people who are not our friends talk much the same wild way, throwing insults and accusations around for the single purpose of taunting the other side. 

Newt Gingrich would be at home in this world of crazed, wildly agitating rhetoric where words are meant to anger, to insult, to enrage. Newt would be good at stirring things up, at causing trouble, at lobbing grenades over walls and into the narrow, winding streets of the Mideast. He'd threaten.  He'd incite.  He'd show 'em that a wild westerner could be just as crazy as the craziest of them.

Now Newt's asking Republican voters to give him the presidency, to give him not just the bully pulpit but the army, navy, air force, marines and all the weapons conventional and nuclear in the world's greatest arsenal. His old associates say he can achieve results even if he is erratic. Yet when they had him as a leader, he was out as speaker long before they were.  They knew what they were dealing with. Newt was hardly the sort of individual you give license over the world's greatest stockpile of nuclear weapons. 

You don't give WMD to someone known even by his old, former allies to be - in the crunch or even whenever things get edgy - to be himself weapon of mass destruction.

America needs many things but a nuclear-armed Newt is not one of them.