Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Presidential politics Newt Gingrich: A history of the despicable
Posted by Max Brantley on Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 5:56 AM
Gene Lyons this week rounds up just some of the many reasons why it's almost laughable that Gingrich is in ascendancy.
UPDATE: Norma Bates also recommends Gary Kamiya as essential reading in Salon on Newt, "the creepiest huckster in American politics," and, generally, the "infantile style" of GOP politics.
Gene Lyon's piece begins:
Newt Gingrich is the Jimmy Swaggart of American politics, a confidence man so transparent as to test the faith even of True Believers. Paradoxically, that’s precisely why the disgraced former Speaker looks a good bet to secure the GOP presidential nomination.Not seeing through Gingrich’s bare-faced mendacity requires an effort of the will so profound it can only be accomplished with the aid of strong countervailing emotions—essentially the envy, resentment and fear which right-wing media have fomented among the faithful ever since the election of President Clinton and the 1994 “Contract with America.”
Metaphorically speaking, Gingrich’s candidacy is the love child of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, with Fox News throwing the baby shower.
This only makes the horror of intellectually-inclined conservatives at the prospect of Newt’s ascendancy more remarkable. Where have they been all this time? Back in 1994, Gingrich and Frank Luntz circulated a list of hurtful words conservatives should always call liberals. “Traitors” was at the top, also some that sound particularly ironic today: “waste,” “corruption,” “self-serving,” “greed,” “cynicism,” “cheat,” “steal,” and “patronage.”To the Washington Post’s resident Tory George Will, Gingrich “embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive.” To his colleague Charles Krauthammer, it’s Newt’s faculty lounge-lizard side—his half-baked intellectual pretentiousness—that’s most disturbing.
Not himself a particularly modest fellow, Krauthammer writes that “Gingrich has a self-regard so immense that it rivals Obama's—but, unlike Obama's, is untamed by self-discipline.” He finds Newt’s “[t]hinking of himself as a grand world-historical figure, attuned to the latest intellectual trend” downright comical.
Will too lampoons Gingrich’s “intellectual hubris” and “enthusiasm for intellectual fads.” He levels the ultimate insult, correctly asserting that Newt “would have made a marvelous Marxist, [believing] everything is related to everything else and only he understands how.”
To his credit, Will focuses upon what’s perhaps Gingrich’s single most despicable moment, a 1994 election eve attempt to blame a South Carolina mother’s drowning of her children on Democrats. Never mind that Susan Smith allegedly turned out to have been abused by her Republican stepfather. Politics had nothing to do with the tragedy.
What Will calls Gingrich’s “grotesque opportunism—tarted up as sociology,” has been his entire stock in trade for years. He made similarly absurd observations about the 1999 Columbine High School tragedy. To him, two teenagers who massacred 13 of their classmates with automatic weapons became somehow the fault of liberal Democrats.
And so it goes. In 2010, Gingrich wrote a book arguing that the Obama administration “represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.” Earlier this year, he told a Texas church gathering that he feared his grandchildren would grow up “in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”
Because the President of the United States, of course, is secretly a radical Muslim whose “Kenyan, anti-colonial” views lead him to seek revenge on behalf of the African father he hardly knew. Newt said that too.
Two thoughts: First, it’s a straight line from this kind of intellectual promiscuity to the other kind Newt’s also famous for—serving divorce papers on Wife 1 while she was hospitalized for cancer in favor of Wife 2, whom he subsequently abandoned for the bejeweled Callista, his mistress of the Clinton years, who, as Wife 3, hovers over him relentless as a bird of prey. A 68 year-old Catholic convert, Gingrich once blamed his misbehavior on too much hard work motivated by patriotism. They practically dare you to laugh, those two.
Second, the Chicago Tribune’s estimable Steve Chapman captured the essence of Gingrich’s appeal to the GOP’s propagandized base: “Demonizing adversaries is what he does best. Some on the right don't want a conservative so much as they want a hater. Gingrich is their dream come true. Romney shows no flair for irresponsible hysteria and crude smears—and many count that as a serious flaw.”
All three columnists agree that Newt would prove a fatally-flawed candidate in the general election. “Even if Gingrich can win over most Republicans,” Chapman writes “he is bound to repel everyone else.”
Indeed, faced with him as the nominee, many conservatives would privately hold their noses and vote for Obama. “Bigfoot dressed as a circus clown would have a better chance of beating President Obama than Newt Gingrich, a similarly farcical character,” one anonymous Republican told Washington Post blogger Jonathan Bernstein.
Certainly welcome, this principled scorn comes a bit late. Few on the right have been willing to confront the reality that conservatism in the classical sense scarcely exists anymore in the United States. It’s long been replaced by the Yahoo dogmatism of a huckster like Gingrich, and it looks increasingly as if we’re all going to have to live with the consequences.
Speaking of Newt Gingrich
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Guns for everyone
April 25, 2012When he wasn't at the St. Louis zoo getting bit by a penguin last week, Newt Gingrich was across town berating the National Rifle Association for being too timid in its advocacy of gun ownership and gun use. /more/
- More »
Comments (22)
Showing 1-22 of 22
Don't write off Huntsman yet Max, he may be the next new shiny thing.
My post from a previous thread:
Ever more desperate republicans must be whispering in Huntsman's ear because he is abandoning his role as the sane, reasonable one in the slog to the nomination, aka republican speed dating.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/06/h…
Perry has his knickers in a twist over Secretary Clinton's UN speech and President Obama's announcement connecting foreign aid to civil/human rights for all. In 2011, it is astounding that blatant homophobia is acceptable to the majority of republicans. At some point, they will have to resort to dog whistling and code to signal their contempt for our GLBT brothers and sisters. The dog whistles regarding race are much more subtle today than Reagan's "Cadillac driving welfare queens" and "young bucks buying t-bone steaks with food stamps". Reagan couldn't get away with that today, so I guess that is progress. We will be able to measure progress in the GLBT struggle for equal rights by how republicans talk about it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/06/r…
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Go ahead and root for Gingrich all you want, but remember that George W. Bush got sorta elected twice.
The quote is attributed to Krugman: "Newt is a stupid person's idea of what a smart person sounds like."
Howard Beale: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"
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Coulter backs Romney. I don't believe Gingrich will be elected but I also don't believe we'd be sunk as a country. We've survived other Titanics: Buchanan, Harding, Nixon, Carter, Bush II.
Bachmann, Perry, and Cain all lasted around a month before imploding. There's still time for Gingrich to do the same.
At least Dubya was just glad to be there. Newt would think he was there to do something. He's too dangerous to laugh off. American is strong but, this is difficult time to play around with.
So Democrats have bailed out or downright rewarded criminal looters with no prosecutions and over a hundred trillion dollars in cash and promises. Raised health costs, forcing millions into buying the most expensive profit insurance and pharmaceuticals in the known universe, while denying tens of millions care. Turned up the dial all the way on abuse of executive and war criminality. Raised defense spending... continuously beat the drum for more needless war from Africa to the Middle East... even declaring the "homeland" a part of an emotional (terror) battlefield. Continue to abuse the first and fourth amendments and Geneva Conventions. Do nothing about the corrupt bribe electoral system.... while cutting SS, threatening to cut the hell out of medicare, extending the tax cuts for the rich.... and presenting no jobs plan, no energy plan, no internet plan, no infrastructure... and presenting and passing three new job killing, income lowering, tax haven for the rich free trade agreements.
But as long as Gingrich or any R doesn't get to do these things...
Facts, Eureka Springs, or Repub talking points? How have the Democrats raised health care costs, defense spending, have no jobs plan? This is Republicans projecting what they did and are doing. You bitch about buying into a health care system that doesn't exist yet, so how does that drive up costs?
The U.S. Congress under Republican control (including 40+ senators) is where good ideas go to die so they can make "Obama a one term President." "Job creators"? Ha! Job creators created what jobs when the rich are hording money? The middle class creates more jobs and the Republicans don't make money off the middle class, so it can go away, for all they care, not to mention that 95% of Republicans are "middle class."
The American Dream is dying at the hands of the Republican party, and we can't seem to do anything about it. That's where Democrats fail.
I don't like Newt either, but I am also reminded that you guys also defend Barney Frank. So it's kind Ironic you dogg Newt, but praise a scum bag like Barney.
Good ol' Gene. He can say less with more words than any blogger. No wonder he was canned.
If you can't admit 40 in the senate is not R controlled without such difficulty.... then additional facts wont do you any good.
US congress and white house were all controlled by D's for the first two years of this administration. The fact the D's lost the House so quickly after what R's did says far more than you D defenders will ever admit.... now control by D's in both Senate and W.H... and nevertheless, what they are asking and achieving is an abomination, an abrogation of the best laws we have and a continuous criminal looting spree while millions fall by the wayside.. an R and D neoliberal bipartisan dream. Face it.
We won't have Newt to kick around anymore....soon. Even with all the dirt we already know about Newty, there's a Titanic sinking iceberg of dirt yet to hit the fan. Actually, I think most of it is out there already, just kinda buried by the sands of time. Ever since Newt was heavily fined and disciplined back in 97, the Republican powers have hated him. Hate him for so dumbly showing their cards. His behavior & greed was so bad that even fellow Republicans were disgusted and went ahead to vote with the Democrats to punish Newt.
It was Republicans who told Newt to hit the bunny trail when he resigned in 1999. Newt has trouble around money. He and current prisoner Tom DeLay came up with all kinds of crooked schemes to feather their nest while feathering Republican politicians around the country. Newt is as dirty as they come, but he's depending on half the population who hates black folks, have no memory of the 90s, and forever are uninformed to vote him in as the loser who goes against Obama next year.
Newt knows how to make tons of money out of a losing campaign and that interests him more than worrying about his future Wikipedia entry. He'll see the smiling faces looking up at him from the millions of greenbacks he's fixing to stash away to bolster future sales of Newt books, movies, T-shirts & coffee mugs. So win or lose, it's a win for the Newtster.
And hey, that sparkly Jim DeMint might throw his hat in the ring! And could be Jon Voight might pull a Ronnie Rayguns and throw his hat in too. Why wouldn't the estranged father of Brangelina be great for America?!?! The Republicans are in full-throttle fantasy mode anyway.
Liberals, what can Obama run on? Run has he done to help the economy?
And Diogenes, great rant. But here is the better version:
http://youtu.be/I9W-smdTVjA
Gary Kamiya’s amazing piece in Salon spans the writings of Richard Hofstadter in the 60s to Theodor Adorno in the 50s (me neither) to Matt Taibbi today, in a devastating, hysterical, alarming and brilliant deconstruction of the psychopathology that underlies and motivates the entire GOP.
I, Norma Bates, believe me, know about psychopathology.
You think you know what you’re in for in the first few paragraphs. Then, suddenly, Kamiya takes you on an altogether different journey.
ONE of my favorite pullquotes:
“Adorno et al. listed nine characteristics associated with the 'authoritarian personality' (a concept first posited by the psychologist and sociologist Erich Fromm). The nine traits were: rigid adherence to convention; submission to the authorities of the in-group; aggression against those who deviated from convention; opposition to imaginative, subjective or soft-hearted experience; superstition and rigid belief categories; obsession with strength and powerful father figures; generalized hostility and anger at humanity; the tendency to believe that wild and dangerous things are going on in the world, a projection of repressed emotions; and an obsession with sex.”
One more:
“Far-right American politics has become a theater of projection. To win the nomination, the candidates must exactly mimic the impulses, idée fixes and biases of the faithful.”
“The GOP has given its hardcore supporters exactly the presidential candidates they asked for: empty vessels into which the party faithful can pour their anger and resentment. And such candidates, by definition, will not possess any real knowledge of the world, of the political process, of the messy, fallen world we live in. If they do possess such knowledge, they must conceal that fact. Anyone who has actually had to work with opponents and make compromises to get things done — in short, a practical politician — will inevitably fail to live up to the rigid fundamentalism, religious, economic and moral, of the Tea Party. This is why Romney, who is a practical politician and is deeply mistrusted by the GOP faithful for that very reason, must pretend to be stupider and more intolerant than he is.”
Believe it or not, Kamiya’s piece gets BETTER.
Or worse, for America, depending on how you look at it.
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/05/the_infant…
Deathbyinches,
You may not have heard that Gingrich was cleared by the IRS in 1999 of all those nasty accusations. None of the mainstream television networks ever reported it so it is no surprise that you missed it.
No BlueDickHead, Gringrich WAS NOT cleared of all those charges. He was fined
$300,000 for unlawfully benefiting by taking money from a foundation.
He's on his THIRD MARRIAGE to boot. How many times has America elected a thrice married man?
Elwood,
You can't rewrite history. Making false accusations like that ruins your credibility.
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/199…
Your profane name calling doesn't help your credibility either. :-)
Erich Fromm, mentioned above by Norma, was a longshoreman-philosopher, who wrote a great little book, something like 300 pages, titled "The True Believer," which was published in the early 1960s. In that book he traced the history of fanaticism, and tried to provide, as Norma said, a psychological analysis of fanatics, such as those in the Republican Party today. It is an important little book, and everyone should read it. It is non-partisian, because he condemned fanatics on the right and left equally. In fact, he became a favorite target of the radical left during the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations of the late 1960s because he was basically a patriot and felt that these demonstrators were anti-American, and said as much in interviews. He worked all of his life as a longshoreman, and read philosophy at night. He probably was in his 40s or 50s when he wrote his book. I don't think he ever wrote another one, but it is a jewel. I would recommend everyone read it
I apologize profusely. Everything I said above was bullshit. I was thinking of Erich Hoffer. Erich Fromm was a scholastic German psychoanalyist. However, I still recommend Erich Hoffer's book on the same subject.
". . . The Internal Revenue Service has cleared an organization (Progress and Freedom Foundation) of charges that it violated its tax-exempt status when it helped fund a college course taught by former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) . . . WaPo 2/4/99
That was a clearing of the Progress and Freedom Foundation by the IRS not Newt Gingrich.
" . . . The House on Tuesday voted overwhelmingly to reprimand House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and order him to pay an unprecedented $300,000 penalty, the first time in the House's 208-year history it has disciplined a speaker for ethical wrongdoing. . . "Newt has done some things that have embarrassed House Republicans and embarrassed the House," said Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.). "If (the voters) see more of that, they will question our judgment." . . . 395-to-28 vote . . . 1/22/1997 The Tech M.I.T.oldest and largest newspaper & the first newspaper published on the web
The attribution of clearance by the IRS to a person instead of the actual investigated group is standard practice by Newt Gingrich.
For example, in 1962, he married Jackie Battley, his former high school geometry teacher. In the spring of 1980, Gingrich left Battley after having an affair with Marianne Ginther. In 1984, Battley told the Washington Post that the divorce was a "complete surprise" to her. According to Battley, in September 1980, Gingrich and their children visited her while she was in the hospital, recovering from surgery, and Gingrich wanted to discuss the terms of their divorce.
Newt Gringrinch disputes Jackie Battley's version of events. In 2011, their daughter, Jackie Gingrich Cushman, an author and co-author of a book with Newt Gingrich, conservative columnist, and political commentator, said that it was her mother who requested the divorce, that it happened prior to the hospital stay, and that Gingrich's visit was for the purpose of bringing the couple's children to see their mother, not to discuss the divorce. . . Jacqueline "Jackie" Sue Gingrich was sixteen when Gingrich left Jackie Battley Gingrich and only eighteen when the hospital event occurred.
However, Jackie Battley has never retracted her statement and story of the events in the hospital.
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