Newt Gingrich: Voice of the GOP Vacuum, master of the hyperbole

[steven johnson]

Gingrich is a GOP attack dog with doctrinaire conservative hyperbole disguised as 'new ideas.'

“For Newt, hyperbole isn't merely a predilection or a tick, it's his fundamental mode of argumentation.”

An intellectual vacuum in a political vavuum -- what a disappointment.

Newt Gingrich is back, and he’s here to stay. “It’s Gingrich time,” Paul Waldman writes for  the American Prospect. That’s not a good thing, for the Republicans or the country. “This is Newt's time again not only because there's a leadership vacuum in the GOP but because the Republicans are back in opposition, and nobody opposes quite like Newt,” Waldman writes. “He is a master of the contemptuous sneer.”

Gingrich is an attack dog with little to say. He’s “often described as a ‘man of ideas,’ though one seldom hears what those ‘ideas’ actually consist of,” Waldman writes. “But ideas are in such short supply in today's GOP that possessing the image of having them is nearly as good as actually having them.” And Gingrich can talk up a storm. “For Newt, hyperbole isn't merely a predilection or a tick, it's his fundamental mode of argumentation.”

http://www.newser.com/story/60247/hyperbolic-newts-antics-highlight-desperate-gop.html

It's Gingrich Time
The return of former House speaker is not only due to the leadership vacuum in the GOP. Republicans are back in opposition, and nobody opposes quite like Newt.

Sane Republicans have to be a little nervous when the two most visible representatives of their party are the reviled former vice president and the disgraced former speaker of the House. But while Dick Cheney is likely to slither back to his subterranean lair sometime soon, it seems that we'll be seeing more and more of Newt.


This is Newt's time again not only because there's a leadership vacuum in the GOP but because the Republicans are back in opposition, and nobody opposes quite like Newt. He is a master of the contemptuous sneer, the over-the-top insult, the apocalyptic warning. He knows how to undermine, to discredit, to destroy -- and after all, as a minority party without anything resembling an agenda, Republicans can do little more than throw a monkey wrench into the administration's plans.

For Newt, hyperbole isn't merely a predilection or a tick, it's his fundamental mode of argumentation. Nancy Pelosi wasn't just wrong when she said the CIA had misled her, for doing so she was guilty of "the most despicable, dishonest and vicious political effort I've seen in my lifetime."

Republicans are certainly working in the Gingrich style. From the feigned outrage over the fact that Pelosi said some uncomplimentary things about the CIA (this, coming from a party that practically called the agency a bunch of terrorist sympathizers when it declined to provide the Bush White House with "evidence" for the imagined connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda) to the panicked pictures being painted of Guantánamo detainees being released in our neighborhoods (listening to them, you'd think Khalid Sheik Mohammed was going to be teaching gym at your local elementary school), the Republicans are reading right from the Gingrich playbook.


http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=its_gingrich_time

[Gabi Hayes]

1. catch him on Daily Show rerun tonight at 11PM EDT:

WHAT an ASShole!