The GOP has brought Newt Gingrich’s plan of disunity and love for vandalizing our civil democratic system of government into the pure viciousness of a grudge match with nothing to lose and so much left to destroy.
May 19, 2023 #msnbc #gop #newtgingrich
Alex Wagner looks at how Newt Gingrich’s encouragement of his Republican colleagues to be more nasty has come to fruition over the years, making the party more difficult for subsequence speakers to lead and more dangerous to the stability of the United States.
Here are some links down memory lane, though the list could be many times longer, it’s a reasonable summary of the GOP vandals’ love of hatred for civility, and fundamentally for a half to two-thirds of this country. As though liberal progressive people don’t deserve to exist in their eyes, so their War Against America knows no bounds. Sadly our people seem to have become too much of a herd of sheople, (rather that intelligent engaged stakeholders) for most to care enough to notice. What’s sad is ignoring it, will only make this juggernaut of self-destruction stronger.
Nov 16, 2011, Erik Kain
But as Michael Brendan Dougherty notes, Newt Gingrich is the worst possible candidate for conservatives looking to replace Mitt Romney as front-runner. Too angry, too petulant, too prone to react at small perceived slights, Gingrich is hardly even the conservative that many Republicans think he is, let alone the intellectual.But he is a lot of other things. …
The Chameleon.
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On numerous past issues, Gingrich has taken a far more moderate stance than he does today. Dougherty lists several:
- He promoted the return of the Fairness Doctrine.
- He was for a federal individual health-care mandate, the lynchpin of ObamaCare.
- He was practically spooning Nancy Pelosi in commercials about the need for government action on global warming.
- He supports green energy projects [Solyndras] and farm-subsidies.
- Even as late as this year he was pitching for more government intervention in the health-care system at the progressive Brookings Institution.
When it all comes down, Gingrich is every bit as disingenuous as Rick Santorum, every bit as likely to flip as Romney, and every bit as popular as Jon Huntsman.
What we have is a candidate who represents the worst qualities of all the other candidates. Newt Gingrich is beyond mediocre, he’s downright awful.
He’s the perfect candidate, in other words, if you’re a Democrat.
Update: After Newt’s latest debate I revise my opinion of him somewhat, discovering that at his best Gingrich can be a decent sort of moderate Republican. The problem is you can’t believe a thing he says and he’s too quick to couple his reasonable ideas with absurd, over-the-top rhetoric. Read the post here.
The Millennial’s Guide to Newt Gingrich
Who is Newt Gingrich, and why do people get so worked up about him? Here’s your primer.
By JULIA IOFFE - July 14, 2016
… For a guy like Trump, that would be very helpful.” He’d be the link, the thinking goes, between the rodeo that is Trump World and the stuffy Washington establishment. … But hold up. Seriously? Newt Gingrich? For anyone who lived through his first, scorched-earth tenure in Washington, the idea that he’s reemerging as some kind of reality-based, ambassadorial elder statesman is nothing short of bewildering. Gingrich, former Obama adviser (and Gingrich friend) Van Jones told me, “was a bomb thrower’s bomb thrower.”
“He’s always been on the edges of what was acceptable,” said one former Hill staffer from Newt’s congressional heyday. “Donald Trump is making Newt look like a fairly conventional politician,” the staffer said. …
November 1, 2018
This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. “The Man Who Broke Politics” is the headline of an article about Newt Gingrich written by my guest McKay Coppins, a staff writer for The Atlantic magazine. It’s about how Newt Gingrich pioneered a style of partisan combat, replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories and strategic obstructionism, that paved the way for today’s divisive politics. Coppins says few figures in modern history have done more than Newt Gingrich to lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise. …
Timothy McNulty & Brendan McNulty - Published Aug. 11, 2019
Excerpted with permission from The Meanest Man in Congress: Jack Brooks and the Making of an American Century
Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia was a rising star in the GOP by 1987, either despite or because of his aggressive political tactics toward other members. Almost as soon as the Georgian had entered the House in 1979, he began making ethics charges against colleagues for alleged improprieties, notably against Barney Frank and Charles C. Diggs. In addition to personally spearheading these investigations, he transformed the speech of the political right from pointed rhetoric to sheer vitriol, referring to past and present Democratic speakers of the House as “crooks,” “traitors,” and “thugs.” This kind of personal attack against the opposition and even fellow Republicans would be seen again and again in the rise of other ambitious politicians in the years ahead. …
By Jennifer Szalai - Published July 4, 2020
It’s a tried-and-true strategy in the frantic trajectory of American politics since the 1970s. As Julian Zelizer shows in his briskly entertaining (if politically dispiriting) new book, “Burning Down the House,” an ambitious and impatient Republican from Georgia by the name of Newton Leroy Gingrich long ago figured out that corruption was a useful charge for a young upstart to deploy against establishment politicians — a way of turning their vaunted experience against them. More political experience meant more connections with powerful constituents, which meant more of a chance that some of those connections smelled bad, or could be made to seem that way.
Gingrich’s lasting innovation, Zelizer says, was to turn a rhetorical gambit into an actionable weapon. “Burning Down the House” looks at Gingrich before his lofty Contract With America and his down-and-dirty government shutdown, before he became President Bill Clinton’s archnemesis as a gleefully obstructionist speaker of the House. …
BY MATTHEW GREEN AND JEFFREY CROUCH, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 08/22/22
Pundits and scholars looking for someone to blame for the dismal state of our politics often end up pointing their fingers at the same man: former U.S. representative and speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank argues in a recent column (and in his new book “The Destructionists”) that Gingrich “bears a singular responsibility for precipitating the ruin of the American political system.”
It’s an appealing argument, especially to those of us who worked on the Hill when Gingrich was there and witnessed his incendiary style of politics first-hand. But while Gingrich did help change the way congressional parties operate, his critics greatly overstate his influence on American politics. …
Still, Gingrich did not singlehandedly coarsen our political oratory. Radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, for example, was a master of provocative language and was heard by far more people than Gingrich. By 1990, Limbaugh’s show aired on close to 300 radio stations and boasted more than 5 million listeners weekly. His success helped boost the careers of other conservative commentators, like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, who are watched by millions of Americans every day. …
In short, Gingrich should rightly be credited (or blamed, depending on your perspective) with helping to mold both parties in Congress into more unified entities that emphasize partisan position-taking over bipartisan legislating. Still, despite his lasting influence, no one person – not even Gingrich – can be held singularly responsible for all that plagues our political system.
Who claims he did it all? I’m just expecting people not to forget about all the damage he’s done, in collusion with others. I didn’t notice Murdoch media mentioned in the article.
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