Scary monsters: the growth of government threatens freedom much more than mosque-building Muslims do.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top

IN JULY, while publicizing his new book To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was challenged by NBC's Matt Lauer to name federal government programs "you would be willing to cut right now to cut deficits:' After some throat clearing about his record in the 1990S, Gingrich offered up this weak sauce: "I would start and I'd go through this budget pretty dramatically and I would eliminate a great deal of federal bureaucracy. I would reform unemployment compensation. I would reform workman's comp at the state level. I would have a very pro-jobs, very pro-savings, very pro-take-home-pay policy."

You may recall candidate Barack Obama's pledge to go through his budgets "line by line" to eliminate wasteful programs and enact a "net spending cut" while also lowering taxes of the middle classes and "reforming" various programs in ways that would magically reduce the deficit. We have seen how that movie played out.

The interview got worse. "Would you make cuts in Social Security and Medicare?" Lauer asked.

Gingrich: "No, no."

The former GOP revolutionary is still able to flip the switch from foggy bureaucracy cutter to wonkishly specific policy chef when it comes to taxes. He wants to eliminate capital gains and inheritance taxes, reduce the corporate rate to 12.5 percent, and temporarily cut Social Security and Medicare taxes by 50 percent for both employers and workers. Some or all of these may be good ideas, but in the year 2010 if you're not talking about hacking down the size of a government that every credible economist acknowledges will continue growing rapidly unless reformed, particularly via the entitlement programs that Gingrich refuses to touch, then you are not worthy of being taken seriously.

Unfortunately, Gingrich's frivolity is not the exception on the Republican side of the aisle. In July NBC's David Gregory put the same question to two allegedly rock-ribbed Texas conservatives, Rep. Pete Sessions and Sen. John Cornyn: "Name a painful choice that Republicans axe prepared to say we have to make."

Sessions went first: "Well, first of all, we have to make sure as we look at all we spend in Washington, D.C., with not only the entitlement spending, but also the bigger government we cannot afford anymore. We have to empower the free enterprise system."

An exasperated Gregory tried again with Cornyn, who replied: "Well, the president has a debt commission that reports December the...