Too funny:
Several members of the Republican National Committee are miffed at Newt Gingrich for claiming that they’re a small bunch of egomaniacs who need to be coddled by the party chairman.
“Newt needs to take a breath,” New Jersey committeeman David Norcross told CNN.
***Defending Steele’s tumultuous start, Gingrich said the chairman might be under fire from some in the committee because he “probably has not yet learned the art of massaging the egos of RNC members.”
“They all think they’re precious, and they all think they should be taken care of, and they all think the job of the chairman, first of all, is to make the RNC members happy,” Gingrich said of the committee’s 168 members.
I remember the Democrats after 2000, and they were not this disorganized and disoriented.
Jack T.
What Steele hasn’t learned is that the members don’t like him. I bet they accidently call him Alan all the time.
Ash
Yeah, in 2000 the Dems were mostly just stoned and catatonic. This whole implosion thing is new. And fun!
The Grand Panjandrum
I guess we can scratch Newt from the 2012 candidate list. But it is great news for the GOP that half the RNC hates Steele and the other half likes him. Nothing like a diversity of opinion in the party that desires conservative purity in order to show the base they have a plan to become a national party again.
SpotWeld
And even if they were, they had the collective common sense to keep it all “in house”
Paddy
I’ve got the vid of Gingrich at my place, and he is truly derisive.
Ted the Slacker
I remember the Democrats after 2000, and they were not in this disorganized and disoriented.
AND… we could write complete sentences.
blogenfreude
I love watching them bayonet their own survivors.
MattF
Newt Gingrich calls the RNC ‘egomaniacs’. The ironymeter just exploded.
JDM
Did Steele stop paying for the prostate massages? I thought Faux Newz anchors backed that up.
Brick Oven Bill
The reason that Republican numbers have fallen faster than the Democratic numbers is that the parties have essentially merged, both are beholden to the banking interests, and the typical Republican has a greater sense of situational awareness than the typical Democrat, driving him away from the two-party system.
This is because Republicans typically work in the private sector. Democrats are typically government workers, victims, or a combination of the two. This makes them kind of dim.
Note the string of Goldman Sachs Treasury Secretaries. Geithner is not a former Goldman Sachs Chief, but he is a tool, his Chief of Staff is a Goldman Sachs lobbyist, and he has no other staff. Pretty sneaky move there Democratic Party. Former Republicans, myself included, are able to recognize this. It is not the Republican Party that is in trouble as much as it is the current two (one) party system.
Fencedude
….you render me speachless BOB
JC
@Brick Oven Bill: I’m pretty sure that’s not the reason.
Thanks for trying, though.
Keith
I guess the fabled 11th Commandment is now on the GOP scrap heap along with the ones about adultery, murder, and stealing.
scav
If only BoB had that effect on himself. Still, we’d have fewer giggles if so.
horatius
Wait. let me get this straight. Newt accuses other Republicans of having big egos in need of massaging?
There are something or the other involving a pot and a kettle that I vaguely remember applies to this situation.
horatius
are = was (conjugation fail!!!!)
Hunter Gathers
@Brick Oven Bill:
Gee, I didn’t realize Democrats hated blacks, hispanics, gays, women, Muslims, Jews or anybody else who isn’t a good ‘ol boy from the south. Or a dim bulb baby machine from Alaska. I stand corrected.
I don’t think you realize what the initiation procedure for the ‘Teabagger Party’ entails.
Zifnab
@Keith: If Reagen spins in his grave any faster, we might be able to use him as an alternative energy source.
jrg
They were not as fly, either. We better watch out. Steele’s like eminem in 8-mile – once he finds his game, he could start throwing out dope-ass rhymes that really make the Dems look like bitches… Then Gingrich will be all like “That’s my boy, hoes! Can’t nobody step to Steele!”
dmsilev
The Republicans seem intent on acting out classic novels. Under George Bush, it was certain parts of 1984. Now, they seem to have transitioned to Lord of the Flies.
One wonders what book is next. Lolita, perhaps?
-dms
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Nothing makes me smile more than a “50-state” strategy devised by Michael Steele to help propel a Palin/Bachmann ticket to the White House.
The resulting documentary film will be able to be chopped into 23-minute blocks and aired on Thursday nights on NBC.
Bernie
The reason Republicans are in such a death spiral in 2009 and the Democrats were still in relatively good shape in 2001 is how the parties are structured.
The Democratic Party is, and always have been, a party of loosely aligned interest groups who try and find common ground on a few issues and are usually at odds with each other on a lot of other issues. Even when they control everything it is very difficult to get the entire Democratic Party to vote one unified way.
The Republican Party, on the other hand, are a very top down party. The leaders in the party decide what the priorities and talking points will be and everybody falls in line. When the GOP is in power the can pass just about anything with the smallest of majorities. But as we saw from 2005-2008, when the leadership is massively unpopular the whole party suffers.
Hunter Gathers
Not quite. Eminem doesn’t use outdated slang like “That’s how I roll”. Steele is quite the fool. I fully expect him to say that the GOP should “Keep on truckin'”.
cleek
as long as it’s not the Anarchists’ Cookbook or the Turner Diaries…
wilfred
I think BOB made a good point. After all, it isn’t often a ranking US Senator says that the government is run by the banks, only to have zero mention, follow-up or interest shown by the press, blogs or Homelanders in general.
Huey Long was famous for that sort of thing. I can’t rememeber anyone saying something so remarkable. yet zero interest by either party. Interesting.
horatius
I can’t figure out if BOB is a Colbertian genius making some very sarcastic role-playing arguments, or just a dumber version of Joe The Dumber.
Hunter Gathers
@dmsilev:
Nope. Mein Kampf. Definitely Mein Kampf.
horatius
They do seem to take the Ein Volk part of the battlecry a little too seriously.
PaulW
The Republican implosion is mostly because there’s not a set of potential political leaders or organizations (that haven’t been utterly discredited) around whom the party can rally. For the Democrats, they were able to rally somewhat around Gore, or at least the idea of Gore, from 2000 to 2004. They were at their weakest trying to back Kerry in 2004 when he turned out to be the candidate Rove wanted all along (when Rove was caught cheering Dean on, you should have known Rove was bluffing like it was five-card draw): partly because Kerry proved a poor campaigner, mostly because the Democratic leadership was waiting for Hillary. When Dean was able to implement his 50-state strategy, that was when the Democrats rebounded and gave Obama the upstart opportunity.
For the Republicans, though, seriously who’s in charge? Is it Rush? Beck? Steele? Newt? Palin? Cheney still? They’ve got all these egos pulling in ten different directions whereas the worst the Dems got was being pulled in three directions. And none of the potential GOP leaders have a sizable enough backing from enough players in the Republican leadership to ensure some form of stability: the Dems still had a core group for Clinton, and the left activism of Kos/Dean in the other corner. And while the Democrats can be vicious to their own (the constant use of Holy Joe Lieberman as a pinata by the Kos crowd, fer example), the Democrats still have a “let’s work it out” sensibility going for them. When the Republicans turn on each other, it’s with knives drawn and thermal detonators primed to explode.
Keith
@Hunter Gathers:
I’ll go with “300” since that’s about all they have left in their ranks, plus they seem to scream a lot these days.
Napoleon
@Bernie:
Your comment reminds me of something I read regarding the advance of human civilization in various parts of the world. It may have been in the book Guns, Germs and Steel. Where as Europe was a bunch of little states, some of which decided to undertake maritime expedition/colonies or some other things that advanced their civilizations (and some of which did not) China was ruled by one family that made top down decisions on which way China was going to go (no emphasis on trade or maritime) that more or less reverberates to this day.
SGEW
@horatius: It’s a very interesting Poe question. Either: a) B.O.B. is an astonishingly good spoof writer and is working on a character study for a novel (a sort of mash-up of A Confederacy of Dunces and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, written semi-ironically with a kind of Hemmingwayesque leaden style: Pulitzer level stuff) or b) B.O.B. really is a mentally disturbed racist, sexist, homophobic crypto-aristocrat who trolls the internet, has been banned by several notable bloggers for being a bigot (see, e.g., hilzoy), and now comments here.
I kinda hope it’s A (I’d like to read the novel: it sounds great!), but Occam’s razor and all . . .
Zifnab
@Bernie:
Not so much anymore. It used to be you’d have the anti-war activists and the Greens and the pro-choice groups and the various union and education and civil liberties groups all divided up by region. So a Detriot Democrat and a California Democrat and a Florida Democrat were completely different animals.
But the GOP’s “wedge” issues have force the Dems to solidify their message quite a bit. Now you hear Obama talking about Green (Union) Jobs and Universal Health Care that virtually every facet of the party can get behind. The Ledbetter decision made every woman in the nation suddenly care a bit more about civil liberties. The Iraq War pulled traditionally conservative budget hawks on board. The economic fallout forced banksters to at least come to the table with hard line regulators.
Now the Dems are in the middle of the maelstrom, but they’re doing a better and better job of synergizing their varied interests. Republicans are just being whipped around by whatever the current news cycle demands of them.
That’s why you’ve got guys like Specter, Collins, and Snowe breaking off while Nelson and Bayh are more consistently toeing the party line. Obama has done a very good job of appealing to everyone.
canuckistani
Last month’s issue of Hustler.
Elie
The Republicans have no message – no content related to reality. They are leaderless because they have nothing to say. If they had a message, leaders would emerge. Whatever they had to say (and it was precious little and generally damaging to our country), has already been said and tried to great negative effect.
They have nowhere to go until they rethink what they stand for. The remaining crazies are in charge until they do. Even the winning context they had using fear is not working like it usually does. They are left with idle threats, panick mongering and hate…
Corner Stone
@SGEW: It’s obvious he’s a spoof, albeit a damn good one.
He never breaks character, never responds in anger, or passionately about anything. Even someone with limited faculties would throw the curve ball in the umpteen-thousands of posts he’s put up.
I also think his character is running out of energy. Just in the last two months or so the snap level has really diminished. He’s recently started to make personal digs at regular posters here but I think that’s just an effort to keep his will to spoof up, something to giggle about while he cranks out his BS. The level of quirky detail has also changed. The one a while back about wrestling, big boobs and missing teeth was pure genius. Now it’s more generic Americana that any half-ass spoof could toss out.
Anybody could come up with “lounge act at a Chinese restaurant in a small town”.
passerby
@Brick Oven Bill:
because the conservatives allowed the theocrats, with their brittle belief system, to take over.
Yes.
No.
I think a new party will emerge from within the political conglomeration of the D party. We already have evidence of that in a handful of Dems that formed a coalition to demonstrate their refusal to be Obama Purists.
A clever move which they hope hedges re-election chances in their republican-leaning electorates. Mary Landrieu, who comes from a Dem family (her dad was a D Mayor of N.O.), is now voting like an R (see Bankruptcy Reform Bill) clearly demonstrating the point that the parties have essentially merged, both are beholden to the banking interests.
passerby
@Corner Stone:
Yes, his “the typical republican has a greater situational awareness than the typical dem” is almost invisible. Zingless.
C’mon Bill, is that the best you can do? Imagine that you’re coloring with a box of 64 crayons–you’re only using two.
Farley
Prostates, egos. Same thing.
SGEW
@Corner Stone: I think the lounge act in the chinese restaurant bits are great, actually. A long-running scenic location (I believe there was a knife fight during his lounge act once) and very much in his style: preposterousness just verging on self-awareness followed by leaden declaratives. Over the top while remaining flatly nondescript; yet containing surprisingly subtle revelatory undertones.
[Sigh. I never know whether to lit crit B.O.B. or petition to have him banned for his overt bigotry – such a conundrum!]
The Moar You Know
@passerby: C’mon: spooferatin’ is hard work.
Da Bomb
The Republicans have dwindled down to a pary of whiners, purists, teabaggers, and mule f#ckers.
They will keep dwidling in number if they continue their crazed protests and unrealistic demands.
It’s like watching an episode of The Office, where all the crazies are kept in a confined space, except Dwight and Michael Scott would be the ones duking it out, to become leader of their new deranged party.
Xecklothxayyquou Gilchrist
I remember the Democrats after 2000, and they were not this disorganized and disoriented.
True, but the Redoublechins haven’t cultivated that deep sense of shame for belonging to the party they belong to that so defined DLC Democrats.
eyelessgame
The Republican party is top-down in the sense of its priorities being chosen for them, but the party itself is a tight coalition between big business, militarists, libertarians, religious conservatives, and racists.
They’d keep the coalition together by loudly favoring deregulation, military adventurism, low taxes, and anti-sexuality, and quietly coding racist apologia (e.g. “states’ rights”.) But balancing this and keeping the coalition together is very tricky. Reagan managed it, but it was a task quite beyond Dubya.
Each of the groups ran their own candidate last year – Romney, Giuliani, Paul, Huckabee, Tancredo. They settled, ironically enough, on an old-school conservative who wasn’t really wedded to any of them — someone more like Bush Sr. than like either Reagan or Dubya.
That was the real sign of the collapse. Two things are killing them: they don’t have someone with Reagan’s rhetorical gifts anymore, and events have conspired to render each movement’s positions politically untenable.
Reaganism is dead. The effects of deregulation are such that — while the banksters are still running a lot of the show — you can’t get elected by pushing deregulation anymore. Adventurous dick-swinging militarism, risen from its own ashes in Vietnam, has immolated itself again in Iraq. Low taxes have led to such high deficits and concentrated wealth that the majority actually doesn’t favor cutting taxes anymore. The generation starting to hold the wheels of power now reacts, even in public, to the notion that sexuality is sinful with more incomprehension and scorn than anything else. And racism is, for all its still-potent slime under the radar, on a (far too slow) permanent decline.
The very real and very rational panic among Republicans is that they really don’t know how they’ll ever win a national election again.
eyelessgame
There’re intrinsic problems with that coalition anyway, which needed only the present crisis to fall apart more or less permanently.
Big business and racists are simply unpopular to start with, so they’re irrelevant in terms of political capital.
Militarists need shared social sacrifice – taxes and a draft – to maintain their adventures forever: libertarians are simply not going to stand for that.
Libertarians and christianists are fundamentally incompatible in nearly every social context (and Huckabee is proving that they are incompatible in some economic contexts too).
The more sober members of the military are recognizing that the aggressive Christinizing of the armed forces is a very bad thing. And once in a while, a Christian will remember that “loving your neighbor” ought to include, y’know, a little less killing.
binzinerator
@Brick Oven Bill:
Sooo…you’re saying you’re actually a victimized government worker Democrat?
Dennis-SGMM
@binzinerator:
He’s saying that he wishes that he too would be victimized like that.
Jennifer
Yeah, well, they also hadn’t been soundly rejected by the electorate. Remember, Gore WON the 2000 election.
I don’t think the comparison makes sense. The Dems “lost” in 2000 because the other party stole the election – not because the voters were sick of their BS and incompetence, which is why the Republicans have lost everything in the past 2 years.
eyelessgame
Agree pretty much with @48. The Democratic Party was significantly more disoriented after 1972 (and we still suffer aftereffects from the bad lessons learned). 1984 didn’t scar us nearly so bad, mostly because it was a Globetrotters-v-Nationals problem as opposed to a problem of any political policy.
Republicans avoided it in 1992 and 1996 for much the same reason: they could blame their problems on GHWB and Dole, respectively, and on Perot. It wasn’t a repudiation of their philosophy, it was the wrong messenger and a third-party distraction.
I’m kind of surprised they aren’t just thinking they had the wrong messenger in 2008. Perhaps because it’s clear even to them that despite McCain’s iffy relationship with the base, the election was a repudiation of their policies.
RememberNovember
The RNC is run by Underpants Gnomes, has been since Rove stepped in.
They have no concept of a back-up plan or follow-through
Having a “we can’t possibly lose”attitude means you will.
TenguPhule
The Congressional Budget says otherwise.
asiangrrlMN
Wait, I actually have to agree with Newt Gringich to a certain extent? I feel dirty now.
P.S. I actually heard the whole GOP hat comment that Steele made, and it’s not as bad as it reads.
TenguPhule
World War Z.
Marcos El Malo
I think they weren’t disoriented because a certain amount of disorganization is normal for them. You remember the old Will Rodgers quote.
The GOP, on the other hand, is highly disoriented because it is used to being highly disciplined and organized. It has enabled them to “stay on message” for so many years. However, they currently don’t have any very good messages on which to stay, at least not anything sustainable that will appeal to anyone beyond the 21%*. And the messages that appeal and motivate the 21% are alienating everyone else.
Unless or until they can find a message that resonates with folks on the center, they are going to remain disoriented. However, they might find it easier to organize as their numbers shrink, merely because its easier to organize fewer people. They might even be able to quickly agree on which movie to see or what restaurant to visit.
*I like using the term “the 21%” to describe the ultracon rump of the GOP, especially now that I’ve decided to change my party affiliation.
kay
@TenguPhule:
Republicans work in the private sector only to the extent that they work on government-funded projects that they privatized, with the help of no-bid contracts and crony connections.
And somehow managed to spend more taxpayer money doing it, while providing less services. In the “private sector”.
See: Medicare Advantage Program, the student loan subsidy to private lenders and the entire No Child Left Behind/Abstinence education industry.
Corner Stone
@Marcos El Malo:
You’re switching to the R party now? Because only a damn fool would’ve waited until *2009* to leave the R party to become a D or I.
Jamey
Splitting hairs here, but…
Dems “won” the presidential election in 2000, but had the victory wrested away by SCOTUS judges who were apparently unable to read the very document their job it is to protect. Also, Dems had fought to a draw in the Senate, gaining four seats from 1998. The Democrats’ message was not rejected; they were NOT out of touch with the issues that mattered most to Americans’–and they hadn’t ratfucked the economy and plunged the country into a series of unwinnable wars.
So, no, the Dems weren’t disorganized and disoriented. They might have recaptured both chambers of the Legislature in 2002, had Cap’n Codpiece not seized 9/11 for the greatest possible political advantage.
kay
I don’t think it’s worth having Specter switch sides. Now I have to listen to him wax eloquent again on his career as a prosecutor, a thousand years ago, and explain why he can’t vote to confirm Obama’s SCOTUS nominee.
I can’t stand another sanctimonious rule of law lecture from Mr. Former Prosecutor, now, embarrassingly enough, as a Democrat.
It’s not worth it. I want him to switch back.
AnneLaurie
Well, it’s an Expert Opinion. *Nobody* is more qualified to diagnose egomania than Newt Gingrich.
wall-e
My neighbor has a Newt 2012 bumper sticker already. Scary.
passerby
This may well be the job description of the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, too. As someone pointed out a few months ago, here on BJ, the majority leader’s job is to keep the club members happy. Which would explain why Reid doesn’t come across as an actual leader, rather, he’s more of a messenger. And he’ not impressive at that job title either.
Senators. So, so precious.