I've been wondering when people would start to remember Newt Gingrich's twitchy and unreliable political character, his dazzling debate fireworks notwithstanding. At long last, conservatives are taking his candidacy seriously enough to speak up:
Tom DeLay, a top deputy to Gingrich during the Republican revolution of the mid-1990s, joined the chorus of other conservative members breaking their silence about Gingrich’s erratic leadership style. In a radio interview with KTRH, DeLay said: ‘He’s not really a conservative. I mean, he’ll tell you what you want to hear. He has an uncanny ability, sort of like Clinton, to feel your pain and know his audience and speak to his audience and fire them up. But when he was speaker, he was erratic, undisciplined.’
Well, shazam! I've been saying that for years — that Gingrich is a politician and a fighter, but you never know on which side he'll be fighting — but people never seem to get it. That fact that he was the aggressive and loud-mouthed Republican leader behind the ‘Contract with America’ confuses them. In 1994, Gingrich saw a political opening and ran into it. Principle had nothing to do with it.
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More on Gingrich's pathological combativeness, always sans principle, from Elliott Abrams in National Review:
Far from becoming a reliable voice for Reagan policy and the struggle against the Soviets, Gingrich took on Reagan and his administration. It appears to be a habit: He did the same to George W. Bush when Bush was making the toughest and most controversial decision of his presidency — the surge in Iraq. Bush was opposed by many of the top generals, by some Republican leaders who feared the surge would hurt in the 2008 elections, and of course by a slew of Democrats and media commentators. Here again Gingrich provided no support for his party’s embattled president, testifying as a private citizen in 2007 that the strategy was ‘inadequate’, contained ‘breathtaking’ gaps, lacked ‘synergism’ (whatever that means), and was ‘very disappointing’. What did Gingrich propose? Among other things, a 50 percent increase in the budget of the State Department.
The State Department. Under George W. Bush. Seriously.
But this was 2007, and we're supposed to forget all about it. Also, please forget about that cuddly global-warming ad he did with Nancy Pelosi in 2008 (on a freaking love-seat!), and also his 2007 book on the same subject. Because he's a ‘fighter’.
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