Newt Gingrich lectured the Republican National Committee yesterday on the follies of being only against the Democrats and never for anything.
“We are caught up right now in a culture — and you see it every single day — where as long as we are negative and as long as we are vicious and as long as we can tear down our opponent, we don’t have to learn anything," he said, calling the phenomenon "a very deep problem."
Good advice for someone who is actually interested in the future of the GOP, right? Yet consider who was dispensing it.
You readers may still be kittens, but we cats well remember the days when Newt Gingrich, bomb thrower, became Speaker of the House and promptly tried to destroy everything Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson worked for.
The only things that stopped him were his own tantrums and his party's overreaching. Congressional Republicans impeached President Clinton for actions they themselves were guilty of (hello, Bob Livingston, Henry Hyde and, yes, Newt Gingrich). Gingrich himself threw a fit when he didn't get the best seat on Air Force One. And of course there was that government shut-down disaster — for them, not for Clinton. (Funny how they're flirting with that idea again today.)
In other words, in the last 15 to 20 years the Republicans have learned exactly nothing. And have gotten even worse. So bad are they, in fact, that the former House Speaker who started the whole "culture" of being "negative" and "vicious" is now some sort of eminence grise.
We cats are always amazed that Newtie never seems to get called on his unctuousness. We can understand the 168 glassy-eyed RNC chairs not seeing the hypocrisy, but — journalists? Many of you were around in the '90s. Where are you now? We cats HISS.
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