Newt's Doing a McCarthy Impression

Don’t you wish American judges would quit imposing harsh Islamic sharia law? Eugene Robinson, for one, thinks all these stonings and beheadings are really getting out of hand. Where did he get the crazy idea? “Why, Newt Gingrich told me,” he writes in the Washington Post. This weekend, Gingrich gave a speech in which he declared, “We should have a federal law that says sharia law cannot be recognized by any court in the United States.”

This met with thunderous applause. Never mind that this “imminent threat exists only in his fevered imagination—or perhaps, his political machinations.” But that’s not all. In July, Newt warned us of “stealth jihadis” who “use political, cultural, societal, religious and intellectual tools” to impose sharia. “I suppose,” Robinson muses, that these stealth jihadi “must be like the ‘known communists’ on the list in Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s hand.” (More Eugene Robinson stories.)