took that cat to the woodshed, and it cost Gingrich his speakership.
If you can’t win when you’re ahead, then you can’t win
. That’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory!
For a while, people forgot what a nasty dude Newt Gingrich really is. He may not have originated the principle of making political fights personal, but he sure as fuck mastered it. He did everything he could to take down Speaker Jim Wright, and he eventually succeeded. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, so he tried to pull the same political dirty tricks with Bill Clinton. He even said that there wouldn’t be an interview where he wouldn’t bring up the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Meanwhile, dude’s fucking his mistress in his office. I don’t get how you can be that intellectually bright and still have a little bit of Lil Wayne in you. It doesn’t make sense to me.
But politics is based on building coalitions in the population and alliances in the seats of power, and Newt Gingrich alienated even his closest allies. During his speakership, he was giving the Republican Party a very bad name. The House majority leader and the majority whip and several other major Republican congressmen all gottogether. Their plan was to oust Gingrich from power in the name of helping the party. Then Dick Armey got cold feet and turned snitch, and it all fell apart. If your entire team is plotting against you, that doesn’t speak well of you as a person. Even Nixon had Republicans backing him until the very end.
Gingrich likes to talk about how President Obama is a dictator and how the presidency is becoming imperious. At the same time, he himself scored points with the Republican Party by lecturing reporters when they asked him questions. He even wagged his finger at them during debates, when he knew perfectly well that he signed up to be asked questions he might not like. What the fuck is he expecting them to do, throw him flowers and sing “Hosanna”?
In a technical debate, he probably is as bright a politician as we have on the scene.
But no one likes him
. He’s the smart dude who thinks people hate him because they’re intimidated by his intellect. But sometimes people hate you simply because you’re a nasty asshole who doesn’t know how to talk to others.
I don’t blame the Republicans for hating Newt Gingrich. Forgetting their political positions, who’s a worse person: Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney? Mitt Romney is tapioca, but Newt Gingrich is
evil
. He bragged about his role in imposing supply-side economics on this country, the very philosophy that is the reason we’re in trouble now. But even that is not the worst of his evil. I don’t call him evil for marrying his side piece, taking on her religion, and publicly parading her around in Tiffany’s jewelry. I’ve always thought the First Lady should be a
lady
, but maybe I’m old-fashioned that way. I don’t know what the fuck
that
whole thing is about. Because Gingrich thinks of himself as a man of science, he saw the dangers of climate change, an issue that is much bigger than any party or even any country. Trying to do the right thing, he cut an ad withNancy Pelosi, and in a bipartisan, apolitical way tried to do something about the crisis. As a presidential candidate, and in an act of blatant political hypocrisy, he said that ad was the dumbest thing he’d done in recent years. But even
that
isn’t why I call him evil.
I call him evil because of how the man ran his life.
I don’t consider it anyone’s business how a politician acts in the bedroom. If Bill Clinton wants to shove a cigar into a fat intern like it’s some kind of bizarre Cuban tampon, that’s his business. I like cigars myself, but I prefer to
smoke
them. But unless President Clinton’s actions affected how he treated the tobacco industry, his kinky ways were his affair (literally and figuratively).
One of the most overlooked stories about Newt on the long list of horrors on his résumé is this one. A
Russell James
Joyce Dingwell
Kamery Solomon
K. A. Stewart
Sonia Sotomayor
K.T. Fisher
Harri Nykänen
Kim Desalvo
Katlyn Duncan
Vera Calloway