Newt Gingrich doubles down on calling the Obama administration "radical" and does a good deal of harping about them heaven forbid passing some bills that they want to get through, as though that should not be allowed by a party that won by huge majorities the last election. He then goes onto compare Henry Waxman to Hugo Chavez and in the next breath say that Democrats are using language they should not be and showing "hostility". Yeah Newt, there's nothing inflammatory about comparing a member of the House of Representatives to the right wing's favorite villain, Hugo Chavez.
He also plays concern troll for the bused in teabaggers that his buddies from these astroturf groups like Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity brought in to disrupt town hall meetings. Oh my god... someone trying to have a meeting with their constituents dared to ask if the people there screaming at them were actually, you know, their constituents. And some of them got tired of receiving death threats and canceled their town hall meetings. It's all their fault for reacting to those threats, right Newt? Give me a break.
Gingrich wraps up the interview with this.
Gingrich: I think if you look at the language they use, if you look at the hostility they show to town hall meetings, I mean, the town hall meeting where a Democratic Congressman asked somebody to prove that they were a citizen in their district. Now this is from a party that normally doesn't care whether you're here legally or not. It's a party that normally doesn't care whether you're registered to vote or not. I mean, to suddenly, they were under such enormous pressure, they just quit holding town meetings. Now there's something... when elected officials can't go back home, you know, there's something wrong with the model of what they're doing and I, but I think what they decided was that they were going to pass, this was the highwater mark of modern left wing thought, that they're not going to have this many Senate seats, this many House seats again in the near future and they're going to drive everything they can through this year, take a beating this fall if that's what it involves and try to leave so much wreckage behind that they will have accomplished their goal of moving the country towards a European style Socialist welfare state.
Wow. Socialist huh? Really? And the Democrats are going to leave wreckage behind? That's one major bit of projection right there Newt. The Democratic Party has their problems as well, but someone please tell me one thing the Republican Party has done for the last thirty years that's done nothing but destroy the middle class in the United States.
As Robert Parry at AlterNet noted, Newt's strategy of destroying the Democratic Party goes way back, so this is nothing new. Same game, different era, but now he's got ClusterFox to help promote their agenda.
The Only Republican Plan Is to Destroy Democrats, Not Solve Problems:
Washington’s conventional wisdom for explaining the intensity of Republican obstructionism toward President Barack Obama breaks down one of two ways: either it’s a philosophical disagreement over the role of government or a desperate need to stay in line with a radicalized right-wing base.
But there is another way to view the GOP political strategy, as neither principled nor reactive to the rantings of Tea Partiers, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. It is that the Republicans are following a playbook that has evolved over more than four decades, to regain power by sabotaging Democratic presidents.
In this analysis, the Republicans believe they can reclaim the lucrative levers of national authority by making the country as ungovernable as possible while a Democrat is in the White House, essentially holding governance hostage until they are restored to power. Then, the Democrats are expected to behave as a docile opposition “for the good of the country” (and usually do).
The “destroy Obama” game plan tracks most closely with Newt Gingrich’s strategy for undermining Bill Clinton 16 years ago. But today’s strategy also traces back to Richard Nixon’s sabotage of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks in 1968 and Ronald Reagan’s October Surprise gambit against President Jimmy Carter’s Iran hostage negotiations in 1980.
In all four cases – covering the last four Democratic presidencies – the Republicans did not behave as a loyal opposition but rather as a single-minded political enemy that viewed the White House as its birthright and Democratic control of the Executive Branch as illegitimate.
