Gee look at that, a Golden Newt

So after decades after Ron Paul calls for a return to a Hard Money and a gold standard the Republicans find Hard Money via Newt Gingrich - WTF?

I think the Monty Python team summarize the situation the best:

Sir Bedevere: What makes you think she's a witch?
Peasant 3: Well, she turned me into a Newt!
Sir Bedevere: A Newt?
Peasant 3: [meekly after a long pause] ... I got better.
Crowd: [shouts] Burn her anyway!

Link to The Witch scene on youtube

From The New York Sun:

The call by Newt Gingrich for the creation of a commission on gold to examine how America can return to a system of hard money is a step forward for him and the Republican Party as we go into the most formative months of the campaign. The former speaker issued his call at Columbia, South Carolina, at a policy forum on American global leadership. He used the phrase “hard money” to speak of a gold standard of the kind the Founders of America had in mind. It would mean, he said, “you can’t just hide from your problems. You’ve got to solve them.”

Mr. Gingrich’s call is the most clarion yet among a Republican field that has been dancing around this issue since the start of the campaign. We’re delighted — thrilled — to see it, because we have been stressing the centrality of the monetary issue since before this campaign began. Let us say, though, that our country is way past the point where we need another commission. A commission, as President Reagan learned in 1981, is a recipe for burying an idea, not putting it into law. It will be important for Mr. Gingrich to get past the commission idea in a hurry.

The fact is that we know how to get back to a gold standard. This has just been outlined by Lewis Lehrman in a new book, issued in October, on exactly this point. It is called “The True Gold Standard: A Monetary Reform Plan Without Official Reserve Currencies — How We Get From Here To There.” Mr. Lehrman, a businessman turned scholar, is not just any gadfly. He was a member of the United States Gold Commission set up under President Reagan in 1981. The commission, in a historic blunder, recommended sticking with the old system of fiat paper money.

It’s most noteworthy achievement, still widely discussed today, was the minority report, which was written by two of the commission members — Mr. Lehrman and a relatively new member of Congress named Ron Paul. Their minority report, later issued as a book called “The Case for Gold,” recommended a return to hard money. But it was swept aside in the tumult of the early Reagan years. That was a time when the supply-side measures of Mr. Reagan were combining with the tight-money policies of a Federal Reserve headed by Paul Volcker to bring us back from the precipice. We had been teetering on the brink because of the inflation unleashed by Lyndon Johnson’s campaign of guns and butter and President Nixon’s abandonment of Bretton Woods.....read more