Everyone who knows Gingrich dislikes him

[kage69]

I think it just comes from the 'politics as sport' wing as opposed to the 'politics as holy shit these people actually affect our lives' wing.

Some people view victory not as good policy but as the other side being defeated.

Quite so! A very accurate description of many of the posters here, you just nailed the spidey and FNE types to a T. In a way it kinda makes sense: they are mimicking the behavior of the majority of congressional repubs. Fuck the country and especially the middle class, there are Dems to malign and obstruct! Primary focus? Doing everything they can to smear Obama into a one term presidency, to hell with doing their actual jobs. Which is why it's hilarious to hear them complain of Obama still campaigning instead of doing his job. Which brings us to the "he hasn't done anything! vs. ZOMG he's turning us into Cuba!"


Funny stuff!

 

[GrGr]

One reason I like Gingrich was back in '94 he was the big leader of the "Contract with America" If you aren't old enough to remember those times or the fact that the Democrat party had a virtual lock on the House for generations you might not remember what a big thing it was. Republicans were so used to being the minority opposition party that they were always ready to capitulate or compromise about anything just so they wouldn't feel totally ignored. Although Democrats and members of the press wanted to call it the "contract on America" and dismiss it as destructive, all it did was to say that if the Republicans took control of the House they would promise to vote on the issues in the contract that the Democrats had been blocking from ever getting to a recorded vote.

I still find myself laughing when I remember the looks of shock,anguish and disbelief on the faces of the ABC,CBS,NBC and CNN news people as they reported the landslide. Just for those moments I have good memories of the Gingrich.

Seriously? That moment was pretty much the turning point for the US as it began it's slide into decrepitude, insolvency and militant fascism.

And you think it is a historical moment to celebrate? Ok, to each his own.

 

[manimal]

One reason I like Gingrich was back in '94 he was the big leader of the "Contract with America" If you aren't old enough to remember those times or the fact that the Democrat party had a virtual lock on the House for generations you might not remember what a big thing it was. Republicans were so used to being the minority opposition party that they were always ready to capitulate or compromise about anything just so they wouldn't feel totally ignored. Although Democrats and members of the press wanted to call it the "contract on America" and dismiss it as destructive, all it did was to say that if the Republicans took control of the House they would promise to vote on the issues in the contract that the Democrats had been blocking from ever getting to a recorded vote.

I still find myself laughing when I remember the looks of shock,anguish and disbelief on the faces of the ABC,CBS,NBC and CNN news people as they reported the landslide. Just for those moments I have good memories of the Gingrich.

How did you like him when he shut down the government?

 

[monovillage]

How did you like him when he shut down the government?

I thought he was pushing too far, too fast and with the establishment press so firmly in the Democrats pockets it was bound to end badly. It did.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Really bizarre. I'd love to know what kind of worldview or affliction it takes to warp the view of political opponents into something so detached from reality. I'm guessing it has something to do with hate and ego (just a guess).

Stupidity also helps. Narrow-mindedness would come easy to those whose brains lack the intelligence to assemble anything very broad.

 

[woodie1]

One reason I like Gingrich was back in '94 he was the big leader of the "Contract with America" If you aren't old enough to remember those times or the fact that the Democrat party had a virtual lock on the House for generations you might not remember what a big thing it was. Republicans were so used to being the minority opposition party that they were always ready to capitulate or compromise about anything just so they wouldn't feel totally ignored. Although Democrats and members of the press wanted to call it the "contract on America" and dismiss it as destructive, all it did was to say that if the Republicans took control of the House they would promise to vote on the issues in the contract that the Democrats had been blocking from ever getting to a recorded vote.

I still find myself laughing when I remember the looks of shock,anguish and disbelief on the faces of the ABC,CBS,NBC and CNN news people as they reported the landslide. Just for those moments I have good memories of the Gingrich.

Yes, those were the days.

 

[micrometers]

actually, Gingrich doesn't scare me in the way that Rick Perry or Sarah Palin scared me.

I'm just saying that the Republians in their neurotic reality show primary look like they've just bounced to a highly flawed person who is lacking in leadership skills, as shown by the testimonials of people who know him in person and not through a fox news screen.

 

[Lemon law]

One reason I like Gingrich was back in '94 he was the big leader of the "Contract with America" If you aren't old enough to remember those times or the fact that the Democrat party had a virtual lock on the House for generations you might not remember what a big thing it was. Republicans were so used to being the minority opposition party that they were always ready to capitulate or compromise about anything just so they wouldn't feel totally ignored. Although Democrats and members of the press wanted to call it the "contract on America" and dismiss it as destructive, all it did was to say that if the Republicans took control of the House they would promise to vote on the issues in the contract that the Democrats had been blocking from ever getting to a recorded vote.

I still find myself laughing when I remember the looks of shock,anguish and disbelief on the faces of the ABC,CBS,NBC and CNN news people as they reported the landslide. Just for those moments I have good memories of the Gingrich.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Don't be a fool monoVillage, I too remember the so called Gingrich contract with America, as the GOP failed to fulfill a single term of their contract. Things like only one or at most two terms in office, a rejection of lobbyist as the dimocrats had become the party of lawyers and lobbyists, as Tom Delay soon set up the institution of K street. And all of those one or at most two term GOP pledge are the still the face of the GOP as they keep on for term after term As they vote for wasting more Federal money than the most free spending dimocrat ever did.

Gotta admit, the contract with America sure sounded appealing, but when the GOP failed to fulfill a single part of their contract, lets tell the truth that it was nothing but a Newt Gingrich Sham, a canard, a deception, a conjob, and now you ask the American people to buy the same snake oil again?????????????????????

The new Gingrich is even less credible than the new Nixon.

 

[monovillage]

The Republican party carried out every action in the contract they promised to do. Anything else is a lie. If they said they'd vote on it, it was given a vote. If it was a reform, it was carried out. They didn't get every Bill passed, since the Democratic Senate stopped some and Clinton vetoed some (one was passed overriding a Clinton Veto), but they fulfilled the Contract.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_with_America#Non-implementation_of_the_Contract

 

[bradley]

Gingrich Gave Push to Clients, Not Just Ideas
The New York Times
By MIKE McINTIRE and JIM RUTENBERG
Published: November 29, 2011

Newt Gingrich is adamant that he is not a lobbyist, but rather a visionary who traffics in ideas, not influence. But in the eight years since he started his health care consultancy, he has made millions of dollars while helping companies promote their services and gain access to state and federal officials.

In a variety of instances, documents and interviews show, Mr. Gingrich arranged meetings between executives and officials, and salted his presentations to lawmakers with pitches for his clients, who pay as much as $200,000 a year to belong to his Center for Health Transformation.

When the center sponsored a “health transformation summit” at the Florida State Capitol in March 2006, lawmakers who attended Mr. Gingrich’s keynote speech inside the House chamber received a booklet promoting not just ideas but also the specific services of two dozen of his clients. Executives from some of those companies sat on panels for discussions that lawmakers were encouraged to attend after Mr. Gingrich’s address.

Gerard White, president of Clearwave, which paid about $50,000 to become a center member, used the occasion to pitch his company’s system for managing patient medical data. “It was a way for companies who were part of Newt’s group to say to health officials in Florida, ‘Hey, here are some exciting things we’re doing,’ ” Mr. White said.

Mr. Gingrich and his aides have repeatedly emphasized that he is not a registered lobbyist, an important distinction in their effort to position him as an outsider who will transform the ways of Washington. They say that he has never taken a position for money and that corporations have signed on with him because of the strength of his ideas.

“You have somebody who knows what he believes in, he can effectively communicate it, and he’s successful in doing it,” said his spokesman, R. C. Hammond. “God bless America.”

Yet if Mr. Gingrich has managed to steer clear of legal tripwires, a review of his activities shows how he put his influence to work on behalf of clients with a considerable stake in government policy. Even if he does not appear to have been negotiating legislative language, he and his staff did many of the same things that registered lobbyists do.

The center’s own records — kept in a restricted section of its Web site, but found by The New York Times in an unsecured archived version of the site — contain several previously unreported examples.

Two years before the Florida “summit,” Mr. Gingrich made a presentation to Republican lawmakers in Georgia, promoting the work of his member companies by citing specific benefits if they were hired. For example: “VitalSpring could save the State Employee Program over $20 million a year.”

Minutes of a members-only conference call from March 2004 said the center had “arranged joint meetings” for members to present their work on electronic health records to top federal officials, noting that Mr. Gingrich “reported very positive feedback overall from these meetings.”

He also pressed for passage of a federal bill to increase the use of electronic health records, collaborating with one of its co-sponsors, Representative Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, both Democrats. After appearing at a press briefing on the issue with Mrs. Clinton in 2005, he stated flatly on Fox News: “We’re launching a bill.”

Mr. Gingrich’s ability to reach leaders like Mrs. Clinton was a selling point for the center. A PowerPoint presentation for prospective members advertised its “contacts at the highest levels” of federal and state government. Paying $200,000 a year for the top-tier membership, it said, “increases your channels of input to decision makers” and grants “access to top transformational leadership across industry and government.”

In asserting that Mr. Gingrich has never engaged in lobbying, his aides say lawyers have thoroughly vetted all of his activities. Randy Evans, a Georgia lawyer who has represented Mr. Gingrich since his days as House speaker, said none of Mr. Gingrich’s clients paid him to adopt a position that he did not already have.

Read the rest of the article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/u...e-push-to-clients-not-just-ideas.html?_r=2&hp

 

[bradley]

One of NAFTA’s biggest promoters, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, appeared on the Howie Carr radio show yesterday evening and was asked about the watershed trade pact between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada he helped create. Responding to a caller who asserted that NAFTA killed American jobs, Gingrich didn’t disagree, but retorted by touting the fact that NAFTA had created jobs “close to the United States” in Mexico:

CALLER: Back in the ’90s I remember Ross Perot saying that there was going to be the giant sucking sound of jobs if NAFTA passed. I think it ended up being true, right? And I know you were a big free trader.

GINGRICH: Yeah, well, I don’t think it was true in Mexico. I think the fact is that NAFTA allowed us to build jobs in Canada, the United States, and Mexico, in competition with China. I mean, our big competitor is not Mexico. Our big competitor is China and India. And I’d rather have jobs close to the United States than have jobs overseas in places like China and India. That’s why I was in favor of it. … So in a sense, I’d like our neighborhood to be fairly well off and fairly prosperous.

Listen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3GcnHe9wDY


Of course, critics of NAFTA worried about precisely what Gingrich points to as a success — jobs being created in Mexico and Canada instead of the U.S. While there were many benefits to the American economy from enacting the pact, there is no question that NAFTA pushed low-skilled American jobs out of the U.S. to Mexico. “All 50 states and the District of Columbia have experienced a net loss of jobs under NAFTA,” especially in the manufacturing and agriculture sectors, according to a study from the Economic Policy institute. “[O]ver a million jobs that would otherwise have been created were lost, and wages were pressured downward for a large number of workers with less than a college education.”

And Gingrich himself promised NAFTA would help create American jobs, telling Congress after being re-elected Speaker that the treaty would help the U.S. “focus on increasing American jobs through world sales.” It’s not like Gingrich wasn’t warned about what NAFTA would do to American manufacturing. Robert Reischauer, then the director of the Congressional Budget Office, warned in 1993 that while the deal would create jobs for educated Americans, the gains “will all largely be invisible.” “But when the glass factory in Toledo closes or the textile plant in South Carolina or the furniture manufacturer in North Carolina because those low-wage jobs move to Mexico, it will be highly visible, and it will be attributable to Nafta,” he said.

 

[FerrelGeek]

We should totally elect people based on the idea that it would make our political opponents angry.

You're right, that's totally stupid. We should elect them based on the if we'd like to have a beer with them or hang out at a ball game.

 

[cybrsage]

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/12/sen-tom-coburn-finds-newt-gingrichs-leadership-lacking/

Tom Coburn says that he would be very uncomfortable supporting Gingrich for President.

So any gingrich supporters out here? explain why you like him>

So a couple of people is "everyone". Exaggerate much?

 

[cybrsage]

How did you like him when he shut down the government?

I was pesonally affected by it, as I was leaving the Navy and my stuff was in a transport that would not bring it to me until the government started back up again. I used a lot of paper plates and plasticware...

I still say it was the right thing to do. It forced Clinton to reassess his style of working with/against Congress. For all his personal faults, he was not a bad leader. He decided he could get a lot more done if he worked with the Republicans after that.

This was also the time of compromised...when both parties were willing to give the other side a win so they could get a win at the same time. Everyone benefitted and the Clinton economic boom was in no small part helped along by this.

If the current Congress would work together and compromise, things would be better. Unfortunately, if you compromised today, the other side will attack you on it later, saying you are wishy washy, etc. Politically, compromise has become a bad thing.

 

[Jaskalas]

I dislike Gingrich almost as much as I dislike Romney, and much for the same reasons. They are Neocon in the image of Bush and the Republicans who gave us big government expansion, Patriot Act, Iraq war, TSA, Open Borders etc.

He talks the talk but I'll never trust him to be conservative. If he truly were then there'd be little wrong.

 

[matt0611]

George Will nails Gingrich perfectly in his recent column:

His temperament — intellectual hubris distilled — makes him blown about by gusts of enthusiasm for intellectual fads, from 1990s futurism to “Lean Six Sigma” today. On Election Eve 1994, he said a disturbed South Carolina mother drowning her children “vividly reminds” Americans “how sick the society is getting, and how much we need to change things. . . . The only way you get change is to vote Republican.” Compare this grotesque opportunism — tarted up as sociology — with his devious recasting of it in a letter to the Nov. 18, 1994, Wall Street Journal (http://bit.ly/vFbjAk). And remember his recent swoon over the theory that “Kenyan, anti-colonial” thinking explains Barack Obama.

Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how. Conservatism, in contrast, is both cause and effect of modesty about understanding society’s complexities, controlling its trajectory and improving upon its spontaneous order. Conservatism inoculates against the hubristic volatility that Gingrich exemplifies and Genesis deplores: “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.”

Gingrich is no small government conservative. He's damn scary IMO, wants to run everything, has an idea how to fix everything.
I'll take Obama over him to be 100% honest.

 

[Ausm]

George Will nails Gingrich perfectly in his recent column:



Gingrich is no small government conservative. He's damn scary IMO, wants to run everything, has an idea how to fix everything.
I'll take Obama over him to be 100% honest.

Anyone would half a brain would come to he same conclusion.

 

[Lemon law]

For what its worth, I heard an interesting fact on NPR today.

Out of all the many GOP house members swept into office in 1994, not even one has given NEWT an endorsement for POTUS in 2012.

Not ONE.

 

[micrometers]

For what its worth, I heard an interesting fact on NPR today.

Out of all the many GOP house members swept into office in 1994, not even one has given NEWT an endorsement for POTUS in 2012.

Not ONE.

yup.

Newt is the sole one of them that has character and integrity issues (well, aside from Herman Cain...but I never took him seriously). Even Rick Perry, while I actually would be afraid of him in the presidency, I will give him credit for his marriage.

The NRO otoh put it best...Callista Gingrich would be the first First Lady who could justifiably called a "home-wrecker"

And yes, personal integrity in one's personal life does matter when selecting a president.

 

[Ausm]

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
the left tends to slobber their hatreds at fascists like hitler too, but by londo_jowo reasoning the right should love fascists like hitler. And by extension, a lot of gop 2012 potus candidates, the gop puts under their own microscope and rejects.

After all, after a brief gop love affair with backmamn, perry, romney, and then cain, with all of the above found wanting by the gop, newt is just the next lucky man to be put under the gop microscope. And newt looks temporary only good by virtue of unexamined comparison.

The real question is, are the dimocrats frothing at the mouth at only newt, or are the dimocrats laughing their heads off because the gop does not have one single electable candidate in their entire 2012 potus stable.

ding ding ding we have a winnar!!

 

[Siddhartha]

What is going on with the GOP POTUS nominee race has nothing to do with Democrats or liberals or at least it shouldn't. Mr Gingrich's likeability is a Republican issue.

 

[cybrsage]

So are we all in agreement that the OP made a ludicrious claim when he posted that everyone who knows Gingrich disklikes him?

If not, can you support the everyone part?

 

[Atreus21]

We should totally elect people based on the idea that it would make our political opponents angry.

Quite a few people on this forum, I'd wager, would subscribe to that exact sentiment.

I doubt they'd admit it though.

 

[Atreus21]

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Don't be a fool monoVillage, I too remember the so called Gingrich contract with America, as the GOP failed to fulfill a single term of their contract. Things like only one or at most two terms in office, a rejection of lobbyist as the dimocrats had become the party of lawyers and lobbyists, as Tom Delay soon set up the institution of K street. And all of those one or at most two term GOP pledge are the still the face of the GOP as they keep on for term after term As they vote for wasting more Federal money than the most free spending dimocrat ever did.

Gotta admit, the contract with America sure sounded appealing, but when the GOP failed to fulfill a single part of their contract, lets tell the truth that it was nothing but a Newt Gingrich Sham, a canard, a deception, a conjob, and now you ask the American people to buy the same snake oil again?????????????????????

The new Gingrich is even less credible than the new Nixon.

The fact that there was a contract at all is what impressed me.

Part of the appeal of the contract, or of any contract really, is that you're willfully putting your ass on the line where everyone can see if you fail. That's a good attitude for a politician to have.

 

[Thump553]

Not a single one of the 74 GOP freshmen members of Newt's landslide Congress of 1994 has endorsed him yet. Not much love there.