Newt’s toy dinosaurs

In a New York Times op-ed  Bill Keller confesses that he’s not entirely appalled by Newt Gingrich, mainly because Newt is not afraid of Big Ideas.  Charles Pierce responds:

…oh, dear lord, not this again. This is what happens all the time. For some reason, and I will never figure out why, people seem compelled to insist that, if we just look past his Dickhead Tourette's, Newt Gingrich has an interesting mind. (And, no, he really doesn't. He has a mental steamer trunk full of Rube Goldberg contraptions, some history he bought cheap off the "Irregular" pile, and toy dinosaurs.)

Comments

[Earl Bockenfeld]

I had looked on Newt as a rather comic figure for years. had no idea he was this disliked so much among Republicans as well. He has so many long knives out for him.

1. “Gingrich … embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive…. There is almost artistic vulgarity in Gingrich’s unrepented role as a hired larynx for interests profiting from such government follies as ethanol and cheap mortgages. His Olympian sense of exemption from standards and logic allowed him, fresh from pocketing $1.6 million from Freddie Mac (for services as a “historian”), to say, ‘If you want to put people in jail,’ look at ‘the politicians who profited from’ Washington’s environment.” —George Will

2. “As president, Gingrich would be forced to repudiate his previous views out of strategic necessity. But those views demonstrate a disturbing tendency: the passionate embrace of shallow ideas.”
—Michael Gerson

3. “[N]o one other than Callista Gingrich thinks her husband can prevail in a general election. No. One…. Instead of rallying to support him, former colleagues are going out of their way to politely say, ‘He can’t lead.’…. Another insider speaking to me privately was blunter: ‘He’s unstable, and everybody knows it, but no one wants to say it.’”
—Kathleen Parker

4. “The other night while having drinks with some prominent conservatives, I said I thought there was a significant chance that Gingrich will not only win the nomination but that he might be the next president. Going by their expressions, I might as well have said I put a slow-acting poison in their cocktails.”
—Jonah Goldberg

5. “As nearly everyone who has ever worked with him knows, he would severely damage conservatism and the Republican Party if nominated. He would severely damage the Hamilton-Theodore Roosevelt strain in American life.”
—David Brooks

6. “Newt Gingrich is a bad bet because he will embarrass the Republican party. He will do so through things he has already said and done, and in ways we cannot predict except to be sure—because character will out—that they will happen.”
—Mona Charen

7. “He is not a nice human being. He is a bad person when it comes to demonizing opponents. When he puts on his political helmet he is a terrible person…. Let me tell you something: the Republican establishment will never make peace with Newt Gingrich. They just won’t. They won’t. This is an important point. Because the Republicans I talk to say he cannot win the nomination at any cost. He will destroy our party. He will re-elect Barack Obama, and we’ll be ruined.”
—Joe Scarborough

shorter Newt: I pledge to be faithful to my wife starting today, and right NOW!

[Rana]

Newt Gingrich always provokes the same reaction in me whenever I hear someone touting his credentials: I really wish my profession had the ability to revoke degrees. That man is not a historian, no matter what his PhD says. He's an asshole who didn't merely forget what good historical practice entails; he's one who gleefully and deliberately pursues everything that's wrong about bad amateur history and the use of the past as propaganda.

He offends me on so many levels, but this one is the one that makes me resent him.

[actor212]

The funniest line about Gingrich was from Al Franken which compared to Gingrich to someone who smoked a lot of dope and once read an Alvin Toffler book

[Earl B ockenfeld]

Serial adulterer and blow job aficionado Newt Gingrich says that gays can choose to be straight just like someone can “choose to be celibate.” ...or they can choose to be mendacious, sociopathic, serial adulterers just like Newt.

Well we certainly know that Newt is not one to preach to anyone about restraint of anything, greed, ego or lust.

[El Jefe]

Lance,

Pierce is on fire like Mencken at the Monkey Trial with this whole campaign season.

Rana,

As a lapsed historian: word. You got a witness :)