Jon Alter and David Corn are on Hardball right now working their way through Newt Gingrich’s history of ferociously crazy and borderline eliminationist rhetoric going back 30 years. And it’s almost comical: because watching, you can sort of see that they are defeated by the sheer volume of completely clownish and wildly intemperate statements. Where do you possibly start?
In recent history we know Obama as crazed machete-waving Luo tribesman, and the secular socialist, anti-colonialist version, the constant comparisons of Democrats to Nazis and Gulag operators.
But for me it all goes back to that epic moment on the eve of the 1994 GOP congressional blowout when Gingrich took that horrible tragic example of the Susan Smith murders — the young woman who murdered her little kids down in South Carolina — and used it as an example of the results of Democratic social safety net programs and the need to vote Republican to keep crazy young mothers from murdering their children and blaming it on black men. It was somewhere around then when he said that Democrats were “traitors” and the “enemy of normal Americans.”
At some level this is what I almost admire about Gingrich — in the face of the universe, in almost every waking moment, he announces that he is balls-up to shame. It just ain’t his bag. ‘Admiring’ isn’t the right word. It’s more like the way that even though I don’t like slasher films I can sort of get that there’s a level of art or gory sublimity to it. And that’s Gingrich, not a politician or even a mere huckster, but something much more than that, a right-wing performance artist who for a critical decade or so overlapped with the real world of electoral politics and ascended to the highest echelons of power. The almost appealing slasher barging in on the carefree picnic day of our political life.
