The rest of us had pictures of Linda Ronstadt. Draw your own conclusions.I literally had a picture of Gingrich on my dorm room wall in college. Alongside Reagan and Churchill. Also Uma Thurman.
— Gregg Nunziata (@greggnunziata) January 23, 2022
Newt was "brainy" the way Scalia was "smart." Because he told everyone so. He was “combative” the way an internet troll makes a cogent argument. Newt was a back-bencher who tossed the sitting Speaker out on a minor technicality that Newt developed into a major scandal and cause celebre. It became his modus operandi for gaining power, until he was brought down hoist by his own petar.Newt, a brainy and combative former professor, led the GOP to recapture Congress for the first time in nearly 50 years. He (rightly) proclaimed that Congress, not the WH, should drive policy.
— Gregg Nunziata (@greggnunziata) January 24, 2022
Newt was the tipping point, however. He was the fulcrum between the resentment of the crazies who thought Goldwater was robbed (and was a squish, to boot) and Trump. He was the bridge. He was the reason Trump could run, and win.This could have been a historic tipping point in American politics, but then circumstances and Newt's personal failings evaporated that moment.
— Gregg Nunziata (@greggnunziata) January 24, 2022
The first thing Newt Gingrich did when the GOP won the House and he was acclaimed Speaker, practically carried into the Capitol on the shoulders of his cheering minions who credited him with the GOP's success in the elections, was to invite Rush Limbaugh to speak on the first day of Congress. Limbaugh, of whom Molly Ivins said:Still, though he didn't change history on the scale to which he aspired, he changed our politics and revivified the GOP and Congress. Something to be proud of, something to retire on.
— Gregg Nunziata (@greggnunziata) January 24, 2022
I have been attacked by Rush Limbaugh on the air, an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt. It doesn't actually hurt, but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle.
Her choice of animal in the metaphor was not accidental.
Newt didn't "revivify" the GOP; he locked them to the rails that would allow the Trump train to run over them. He put them on the Snowpiercer with no way off, racing hell-bound through a frozen horror of their own imaginings, fueled by the racist resentments of their base. His "brainy-professor" schtick made them think they had intellectual credibility, not unlike Scalia intoning about "originalism" as he argued for whatever outcome in a case most suited him, precedent and stare decisis be damned.
What's funny is how many of that generation realize now they chased the car Newt set them on, and they've caught it. They haven't the foggiest idea what to do with it, or how to explain why they wanted it in the first place. What they certainly don't want is the responsibility for it.
That hell-bound train finally reached the station.And now it's 2022. https://t.co/ORJ4BgX7f3
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) January 24, 2022
Reagan, Churchill, Uma Thurman AND Newt Gingrich? Sounds like the little brother of my next door neighbor in grad school who used to try to get me to go out to the disco with him and his Republican buddies, the one who said, "All work and no play makes Anthony a dull boy." The one I told I didn't care if I was boring, an insight into one of the benefits of not being in high school anymore I didn't know I had had till I said it. Words to live by ever since.
ReplyDeleteNewt Gingrich was one of those clues as to the depravity of the Republican Party twenty years after they'd allegedly learned lessons from the Nixon debacle, depths already obvious from the Reagan and Bush I crime sprees. That party and the media that supports it are irredeemably criminal and corrupt and the American system can't be cleansed of it. Our reliance on the courts and the media to do that doesn't work when they are as corrupt as the politicians are.