Tuesday, September 30, 2008

The Return of Darth Gingrich

I was in the middle of drafting an entry talking about the slow news day when I ran upon this item at The HuffPo.

In short, the article relates efforts taken by Newt "I may be human, but I still come off reptilian" Gingrich to make sure the bailout vote failed before then stepping in front of the cameras to offer feeble support for the bill. The HuffPo calls it backstabbing; Joe Scarboro says Gingrich "undercut one of his own."

But, why, Newt? Why be so brazen in your naked political manipulation? MSNBC's Mike Barnicle has a theory:

Mike Barnicle: "...I was told last night by two or they members of Congress that this was the opening salvo of Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign four years hence."


Holy fuck. Now that's balls.

4 comments:

Erin O'Brien said...

Huff, balls, holy, Gingrich, and fuck all in one post.

You guys give good first date.

Anonymous said...

I am a staunch liberal, but I'm starting to get leery of Arianna's junk. It's sounding and looking very tabloid-ish. And also, Mike Barnicle is a disgraced plagiarist...but so is Biden really (any of you remember 1987 and how he lifted Neil Kinnock, then leader of the British Labor Party, speech?) and he's on my ticket. Guess all of these bastards are more or less swine...but you know how the modified Orwellian thing flows: all swine are equal, but some swine are (ed: mo' better) than others.

Newt is a has-been for the Reps. I hope they start thinking about putting forth younger, more viable candidates in the future. Huckabee comes to mind right about now. They have no chance with Bloomberg, however.

Erin O'Brien said...

Swine, you are right about Huff. But I cannot help myself, it's sort of becoming my guilty pleasure.

the beige one said...

Ms. O'Brien, we aim to please.

I get what y'all are saying about HuffPo being something of a tabloid, and their headlines are often quite breathless, but, in terms of resources, you could do far worse.

Oh, and, much like the Dean Scream, there's a bit of information regarding that incident with Biden that doesn't get communicated as often as it should:

Biden had been using the bit of Kinnock rhetoric throughout that campaign, and would always mention Kinnock by name in his speeches prior to the one time he neglected to source the material.

Makes the accusation of outright plagiarism more than a little trumped up (imagine that, exaggeration from the media), and his mistake a bit more forgivable.