“If you said to me that I could only consult with one individual, and my job was to bring the party back, Newt Gingrich would be the guy,” says Frank Luntz, the pollster who has worked with Gingrich going back to the 1994 Contract With America, the 10-point agenda that Republicans waved around on their way to the majority. “This guy would be the perfect ‘Behind the Music’ story, because he was on top, and then he lost it all, and now he’s back and bigger than ever. It’s perfect.”
[….]“I don’t actually build oppositions,” Gingrich told me, as if this business of salvaging a lost party were something he undertook every couple of months. “I build the next governing majority. I have no interest in being an opposition party.”
Remember when Joe Gibbs came out of retirement to lead the Redskins back to greatness? Mutatis mutandis.
TheOfficialHatOnMyCat
The only thing I see Newt building is his image in his own eyes. He ain’t about to build any "governing majority" anywhere any time soon.
Newt is just an anachronism at this point.
Comrade Stuck
That was then, this is now. And Newt, that Contract on America thingy, how’d that work out?
joeyess
Re: "Mutatis Mutandis"
From Wiki
Do you mean to say that Newt is a mutant?
Chuck Butcher
I kind of thought that by now we’d have gotten used to the idea that Republicans will say any old thing if it makes them feel better – or angrier.
WereBear
I always hoped that Newt was a mutant.
Not in a "wow, superpowers" kind of way, but in a "hope there ain’t more where you come from" kind of way.
Wile E. Quixote
I have to stop looking at this sentence because the idea of a Newt Gingrich ‘Behind the Music’ episode is making teh brane hurt.
Comrade Stuck
@joeyess:
Yes. a human Salamander with white hair and hermetically sealed sphincter.
jl
Oh please oh please oh please.
Mitch McConnell
Johnny Boner (Yo, homey, is he jiggey widda teabags too?)
Are not hated quite enough.
Newt Gingrich!! with Rush Limbaugh!! Yes!
How about DeLay, they need him too. and Lil’ Richy Rich Santorum.
Oh please oh please, that is the leadership team they need.
Swaggart still around? He’d be good too.
I will pray for their return tonight.
Maybe they could get Crabby Appleton, Rotten to the Core, to make a comeback too.
I like it.
Wile E. Quixote
@WereBear
He’s like Victor Von Doom. Except instead of being from Latveria he’s from Georgia, and instead of being a evil genius who is constantly thwarted in his plans for world domination by the valiant efforts of the Fantastic Four he’s a complete fuck up who was constantly thwarted by Bill Clinton.
joeyess
@Comrad Stuck
Oh, so you mean, like a………… well, …….a Newt.
Comrade Stuck
@joeyess
Yup
different church-lady
I think I’ve found the problem with the modern GOP: they’ve stopped being a political party and are now nothing more than a marketing department.
joeyess
think about it for a minute…….
Newt in a primary process with the rest of the GOoPers. And the rest of the field then reminding the rest of the country of Newt’s ignominious fall from grace.
Let the laughter commence.
Oliver Willis
Newt shut down the government. Gibbs won 3 Super Bowls. LOW BLOW COLE!
Comrade Stuck
@Oliver Willis:
Twas Dougj Oliver.
joeyess
Perhaps there’s a Redskins fan in the room?
The Other Steve
Newt is good at gimmicks.
GSD
Gingrich/Ted Bundy’s Zombie 2012.
Trustworthy and likeable.
-GSD
AnneLaurie
Well, since Newt Gingrich is one of the original Lying Liars Who Lie, presumably this means that Newt really *is* interested in ‘being an opposition party’. In other words, he doesn’t care whether his team is winning or losing, much less what sewage his teammates are spouting, so long as Newt-Gingrich-Head-of-the-Opposition has a full schedule of speaking gigs at high-dollar conferences and the media face-time to support it. He looks at the Media Village and its Idiots, and thinks, "Why bother being Barack Obama — with all the late nights and hard work — when I can be Al Sharpton instead?"
Jay Severin Has A Small Pen1s
I’d totally teabag Newt.
Joshua Norton
You know what? My answer would be the exact same thing. But for a completely different reason.
spudvol
The Republicans are trying to go back to the future and Newt is their flux capacitor.
Mike P.
Gingrich/Palin ’12 = Pinky and the brain. I’ll leave y’all to figger out which is which (or who’s teabagging who). But don’t doubt, their plan for today, as it is every day, is nothing less than Taking Over The World!
One teabag at a time.
PeakVT
God help us
For the country’s sake I’d rather it be Newt than somebody who is in touch with people under 50 or outside the South.
Warren Terra
PeakVT, you’d have aa good point if anyone the R’s listened to these days had any demonstrated interest in appealing beyond the winger fringe. Even Mike Huckabee, last seen as a tax-raising populist bass-playing fun-loving ex-governor with a softer touch and Bobby Jindal, educated policy wonk, healthcare reform advocate, and post-partisan extraordinaire, have seen the light and have been working overtime to show us that they can be as narrominded, dishonest, willfully ignorant, and spiteful a dittohead worshipper of Zombie Reagan as the next guy (or gal, also).
Ninerdave
fixit
Ninerdave
alright…what’s the secret handshake to get a strike through to appear in a block quote? And yes I know that ( ) aren’t the proper method
BDeevDad
As in:
Ninerdave
@BDeevDad:
Yeah tried that as well as (s)(/s) no go. (again replacing angled brackets with parenthesis)
Meh…I guess I’m a moran.
TenguPhule
With rotten foundations, crumbling infrastructure and using an architect that thinks geometry is optional.
Brandon T
I don’t get it, is he a Republican strategist, or the second coming of L. Ron Hubbard?
Chuck Butcher
Today there’s a difference?
Chuck Butcher
Or – having fun with block quotes
Oh that’s cool, I learned something new.
Rommie
Me learn too.
Conservatives – acquainting the American public at large with
new ideasteabagging.Conservatively Liberal
Instead of strike and /strike, you can use del and /del (using the greater/less than brackets on each tag).
Richard Stanczak
Further proof of the self destruction of the Republican party. Frank Luntz is taking shots at Mr. Gingrich’s physical appearance.
opium4themasses
Josh Hueco
Yes, just what the Republicans need, another middle-aged Southern white crackpot. Brilliant!
Michael D.
Paul Harvey has died. "And now, the end of the story."
I liked Paul.
dslak
I grew up listening to Harvey, but then I learned that he tended to make things up, and so I could never take anything I heard on "The Rest of the Story" seriously again.
Michael D.
@dslak: Yeah, I know. But I still liked him. I would always laugh out loud when he could turn an ad for Metamucil into a Page 2 news story. :-)
Ari
Nonsense. As everyone who’s seen ‘Men in Black" knows, Gingrich a known alien.
electrophoresis
Pure comedy gold. Newt Gingrich was thrown out of his own majority party in congress for pathological dishonesty. All he needs is clown shoes and bright red hair.
Yes, Newt is back and bigger than ever. He’s the majority leader of…wait… Okay, Newt was elected to…no, okay, he doesn’t hold any elected office… Newt is bigger than ever because he’s the CEO of…hm…okay, Newt hasn’t actually accomplished anything since 1994.
Bigger than ever? Bigger fool. Bigger loon. Bigger nut job. That kind of "bigger than ever" they’re thinking of…?
aimai
Anne Laurie way upthread at #19 makes a very important point. Watch their hands, not their mouths or "they lie about everything." For years I’ve found this a very good metric to understand what is going on with Republicans. For example "when they say its not about the money, its about the money." She’s right that when Newt says he cares about "building a new governing majority" not about being "in the opposition" we have to ask really where Newts money is coming from. There’s just as much money in *saying* you are building a working majority as in standing on the sidelines coaching the drowning team, if you play it right. The only thing we can be sure of is that whatever Newt says in an interview or on TV is *for effect* with his donor base. If he cared at all about the country, or governing the country, he’d be doing and saying completely different things.
aimai
TR
Newt’s comment reminds me of this.
Sam Simple
I hope some blogger picks up on this – Rush Limbaugh spoke at CPAC, the conservatives little self-congratulatory soiree` and said this, "We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independent. We believe that the preamble of the Constitution contains an inarguable truth, that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, freedom. And the pursuit of happiness…"
Here is the link:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/28/limbaugh.speech.cpac/index.html
Of course, the "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" phrase is from the Declaration of Independence, not the preamble to the Constitution. None of the right-wing doorknobs probably knew that though.
By the way, these shit-for-brains conservatives think the Boston Tea Party was about people protesting paying high taxes. It wasn’t. It was a protest against the East India Tea Company getting preferential tax treatment by the Crown. Most conservatives support tax breaks for big corporations. Morons.
Svensker
@Jay Severin Has A Small Pen1s:
Nah, you wouldn’t. Would you?
El Cid
A Newtant?
By the way, what would be the analog for Democrats if (or the actual fact if they did) they had fantasized about turning to some great historical failure to rebuild the party?
Only Jim Wright can save us? What? Who?
Comrade Darkness
@Chuck Butcher, just never hit the edit. If you do, you’ll lose the strikes. That’s why it "sometimes" works.
bago
Teabagging basically means nuts on face. It’s fun to do to passed out people, and is often done in games like Halo.
Mudge
Let’s see.
Gingrich, The Movie
We’ll have Mickey Rourke play Newt, he has the comeback bona fides.
Music by Gary Glitter, whose music is still played despite complete disgrace.
Will Ferrell can choose any role he likes, my guess Bill C.
Newt’s wives..Madonna, Paris Hilton and Courtney Love
Jim Bunning will play himself.
jcricket
Can Newt take a white-hot iron mask and put it on his face, pretty please? I’d be ok with that, even if it made him look scarier and was impervious to bullets or whatever.
And isn’t Georgia right next to Latveria (in between Krygistan and Springfield where the Simpsons live).
Seriously, thinking that Newt, Limbaugh, Joe the Plumber are brilliant strategists for the GOP (or even people like Steele, Jindal and Palin) is simply a result of the GOP having a conversation only with themselves.
They accuse liberals of existing in an echo chamber, but again, as with everything (accusations of treason, inability to be appeased, hating America), it’s about them. Psychological projection strikes again.
Marshall
If they have video of Newt doing blow with AEI groupies, I am down for it.
Marshall
Newt is a carpetbagger from Pennsylvania who lives in Georgia. He is not from Georgia in the same way that G.H.W. Bush is not from Texas.
Now, if I heard that he was Latveria, Pennsylvania, I would not be surprised.
Cain
@Sam Simple:
I think elementary education (certainly mine) teached that it was because of taxes. Since likely that’s what most people have on the matter it’s believable.
cain
ricky
George Bush (pick one) is from Texas the same way Phil Gramm is from Texas. They got elected there. Phil is from Georgia.