Newt Gingrich

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Newt Gingrich was Republican Speaker of the House from 1995 to 1998 (during the Clinton administration). He was succeeded by Dennis Hastert (Bob Livingston was initially chosen for the position, but resigned in the wake of a sex scandal before serving).

Gingrich is possibly best remembered for originating and promoting the Contract with America, now being reprised as the 21st Century Contract with America.

[edit] Descriptions & Comments

Dick Meyer, editorial director of CBS News said, in Good Riddance To The Gingrichites:

More than the others, Newton Leroy Gingrich lived out a very special hypocrisy. In addition to the above biographical dissonance, Gingrich was one of the most sharp-tongued, articulate and persuasive attack dogs in modern politics. His favorite target was the supposed immorality and corruption of the Democratic Party. With soaring rhetoric, he condemned his opponents as anti-American and dangerous to our country's family values — "grotesque" was a favorite word.

Yet this was a man who was divorced twice — the first time when his wife was hospitalized for cancer treatment, the second time after an affair was revealed.

Gingrich made his bones in the party by relentlessly attacking Democratic corruption, yet he was hounded from office because of a series of serious ethics questions. He posed as a reformer of the House, yet championed a series of deforms that made the legislative process more closed, more conducive to hiding special interest favors and less a forum for genuine debate.

And he did it all with epic sanctimony.

David Brin said here:

Okay folks, I admit it. I had been nursing illusions about Newt Gingrich being some kind of retro "sincere neoconservative" figure who had been exiled because he would not go along with the extreme drop into madness.

Perhaps the fact that he considers himself to be a sci fi guy kind of influenced me. Also respect for the brilliant polemics of the first Contract with America.

Okay, enough. I will now wipe those illusions away. (A modernist must be willing to revise, under the glaring light of citokate.) The fellow has gone completely bonkers.

Not only the things he says, but for idiotically imagining that the masters will bring him back into their good graces, just for saying $%#*! like he's been saying.

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  • 2008-05-29 /S/D/ Gingrich quips Bush should have allowed some 'reminder' attacks “"This is ... one of the great tragedies of the Bush administration," Gingrich continued. "The more successful they've been at intercepting and stopping bad guys, the less proof there is that we're in danger. And therefore, the better they've done at making sure there isn't an attack, the easier it is to say, 'Well, there never was going to be an attack anyway.' And it's almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us."” (1) Hypocrisy: the success at interception has been through regular police methods, not through Bush's elevation of presidential powers. (2) Whenever someone says something like this, it gives yet more credibility to the still-incredible-seeming idea that a US president might have deliberately engineered something like 9/11 in order to increase his personal power.
  • 2006-11-16 /S/D/ Good Riddance To The Gingrichites “The iconic figures of this era were Newt Gingrich, Richard Armey and Tom DeLay. They were zealous advocates of free markets, low taxes and the pursuit of wealth; they were hawks and often bellicose; they were brutal critics of big government. .. Yet none of these guys had success in capitalism. None made any real money before coming to Congress. None of them spent a day in uniform. And they all spent the bulk of their adult careers getting paychecks from the big government they claimed to despise. Two resigned in disgrace. .. Having these guys in charge of a radical conservative agenda was like, well, putting Mark Foley in charge of the Missing and Exploited Children Caucus. Indeed, Foley was elected in the Class of '94 and is not an inappropriate symbol of their regime. .. More than the others, Newton Leroy Gingrich lived out a very special hypocrisy.” Commentary: Teresa Nielsen Hayden wonders pointedly why, if Meyer knew all this, he didn't point it out when it would have done some good – and gives evidence that this failure is part of a pattern of complicity by the mainstream media.

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