Seriously, GOP? Really?

[Guynemer]

Well played, grib.






I must say, it is absolutely fascinating to me, as an avowed independent, watching a party completely lose its collective ****. For the past couple decades, if one could say anything about the GOP, it was that they knew how to win a goddamn election. And now, all of a sudden, they seem determined to nominate the most unelectable, morally repugnant, repulsive piece of **** candidate I can remember in my years as a voter. It is like they don't want to win. And hell, maybe they don't; I sure as **** wouldn't want to be President. We're getting close to the rearranging-the-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic territory.

[Hauldren Collider]

I wish I knew why some people seem to like him, like this loon:

http://apolyton.net/showthread.php/1...=1#post5833250

Yeah, that guy is obviously crazy....

To be clear though, my main problem with Newt Gingrich is that he's totally unelectable. The fact that he's morally repugnant is important, but decidedly less so than the fact that he's like the biggest gift anyone could give Obama short of Bachmann.

[Egbert]

I wish I knew why some people seem to like him, like this loon:

http://apolyton.net/showthread.php/1...=1#post5833250

From what I hear of Newt, I have absolutely no idea why anyone would actually vote for him.

[Barnabas]

I think Obama is in a position similar to the one Tony Blair used to have, he could drown a kitten on tv and he would still win because of the opposition

[giblets]

1. How Newt Gingrich mis-handles money
One of the things Marianne has said repeatedly is that the couple was perpetually broke, leaving her desperate for money to pay their bills. While his first wife initially handled the bills, Marianne took over the management task when she married Gingrich. This included Newt's personal debt, his alimony and child-support payments, financing for his campaigns, a rental apartment and an expensive lifestyle in Washington. Over 20 years, they amassed no savings, and when the House Ethics Committee fined then-Speaker Gingrich a record-breaking $300,000 penalty in 1997 for violations, there was nothing to pay it with. "We didn't have anything," she has said. Today, Gingrich spends millions on jewelry at Tiffany & Co., takes Greek cruises, and flies in private jets. Still spending lavishly, only wealthier now that he's entered the private sector.
2. Gingrich's mystery mea culpa book and his 1997 breakdown
Gingrich is known to have had two periods of dark depression while he was in office, one in 1979 and another in 1997, both of which were so severe as to prompt action by friends and colleagues. In '97, following his ethics scandal Marianne says Gingrich began writing a book apologizing for his misdeeds, but she and his congressional staff destroyed it before it could be published. Gingrich grew more erratic over the course of the year to the point where he "wasn't functioning," and eventually Republican leaders staged a formal intervention. Marianne has never touched on what Gingrich was sorry for in his book, or what he was really like to be around in private during that year. Given the immense stress and the 24-7 nature of the presidency, these are fair questions to ask.
3. What drives Marianne to protect Newt even as she damages his campaign
It's obvious from print interviews and from what Marianne holds back from the press that she still has a solid affection for Gingrich, or at the very least, a strong sense of protectiveness. While this doesn't fit naturally with ABC's portrayal of her as a "bitter" ex-wife, it also makes Marianne's decision to talk about their marriage in the first place seem even stranger, especially given how much it could hurt Gingrich in conservative South Carolina. Moreover, once Marianne does start talking, she leaves out key details of the couple's breakup, like how Newt repeated over and over during couples' therapy, "I can't handle a Jaguar right now, all I want is a Chevrolet." By that point he had been seeing Callista Bisek -- now Mrs. Gingrich -- for six years, so it's easy to imagine who's who in Gingrich's mind.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/19/newt-gingrichs-marriage-marianne-gingrich-election-2012_n_1217087.html

What a wreck.

Spoiler:

Gingrich had affairs with numerous campaign volunteers during his first two unsuccessful bids for a House seat from Georgia, in 1974 and '76, according to multiple sources.
A former campaign staffer, Dot Crews, told Vanity Fair that Gingrich's dalliance during his 1974 campaign was common knowledge among the staff. L.H. "Kip" Carter, Gingrich's campaign treasurer at the time, put it less delicately. "We'd have won in 1974 if we could have kept [Gingrich] out of the office, screwing her on the desk."
Carter also recounted the following incident excerpted from Vanity Fair, to more than one media outlet:

"We had been out working a football game -- I think it was the Bowdon game-- and we would split up. It was a Friday night. I had Newt's daughters, Jackie Sue and Kathy, with me. We were all supposed to meet back at this professor's house. It was a milk-and-cookies kind of shakedown thing, buck up the troops. I was cutting across the yard to go up the driveway. There was a car there. As I got to the car, I saw Newt in the passenger seat and one of the guys' wives with her head in his lap going up and down. Newt kind of turned and gave me his little-boy smile. Fortunately, Jackie Sue and Kathy were a lot younger and shorter then."

Offered the chance to dispute Carter's account in a separate interview in Mother Jones, Gingrich declined, telling The Washington Post, "I am not going to argue every point of that story, but I will say that it painted a picture of me that is essentially untrue."

Spoiler:

Anne Manning, became romantically involved with Gingrich during his '76 campaign. The curly-haired young Englishwoman, then married to another professor at West Georgia, Tim Chowns, was an avid volunteer in Newt's Carrollton office. "I did have a relationship with him," she discloses for the first time, "but when it suited him, he would totally blow you off."

In the spring of 1977, she was in Washington to attend a census-bureaus workshop when Gingrich took her to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. He met her back at her modest hotel room. "We had oral sex," she says. "He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, "I never slept with her."
Indeed, before Gingrich left that evening, she says, he threatened her: "If you ever tell anybody about this, I'll say you're lying."

Spoiler:

As his marriage collapsed, Gingrich entered a period of dark depression in 1979-'80, during which he drank heavily and has admitted he contemplated suicide. Recalling the period more than a decade later, he said "I ultimately wound up at a point where suicide, or going insane, or divorce were the last three options."
Luckily for Gingrich, in January of 1980 he met 28 year-old Marianne Ginther. The married congressman proposed to her within weeks, despite the fact that he had yet to file for a divorce from Jackie.
"He asked me to marry him way too early," Marianne said later. "I should have known there was a problem ... It's not so much a compliment to me. It tells you a little bit about him."
One of her close friends at the time, Betty Sekula, sensed trouble early on. "Newt was indifferent to Marianne right from the beginning," she told Vanity Fair. "It was [about] him, not us."

Spoiler:

Gingrich's 1981 marriage to Marianne Ginther showed signs of trouble from the start.
For one, the couple was constantly short on funds, the result of maintaining two households, paying down debts, and campaigning constantly on Newt's $70,000 salary. Moreover, longtime Gingrich staffer Dolores Adamson told Vanity Fairthat Marianne struggled to adjust to life in politics. "Well, I don't want to be unkind to her, but Marianne didn't know how to dress. She was smart enough, I think, but she was somehow a little naive ... In staff meetings, she'd go away in tears, because she didn't really understand. She would just be totally frustrated and confused."
For her part, Marianne says that she "made it very clear [that] I wasn't happy with certain behaviors" in her new husband. She even gave him a book, "Men Who Hate Women & The Women Who Love Them."
By 1984, the couple was regularly spending months at a time apart from each other. "Newt always wanted to be somebody," Marianne said in Esquire last year. "That was his vulnerability, do you understand? Being treated important. Which means he was gonna associate with people who would stroke him, and were important themselves. And in that vulnerability, once you go down that path and it goes unchecked, you add to it."

[DaShi]

Well played, grib.






I must say, it is absolutely fascinating to me, as an avowed independent, watching a party completely lose its collective ****. For the past couple decades, if one could say anything about the GOP, it was that they knew how to win a goddamn election. And now, all of a sudden, they seem determined to nominate the most unelectable, morally repugnant, repulsive piece of **** candidate I can remember in my years as a voter. It is like they don't want to win. And hell, maybe they don't; I sure as **** wouldn't want to be President. We're getting close to the rearranging-the-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic territory.

The GOP is serving up a ****-sandwich and all of us are going to have to take a bite.

[MrFun]

I have two words: **** Gingrich.

Ew - I didn't know he is your type.

[Zevico]

My view:

- Gingrich has a mixed record of legislative achievements and policy views but his two decade long career as a Congressman is marred by the acrimonial circumstances in which his career as a Speaker ended, partly and quite possibly due to Gingrich's own misendeavours.

- Gingrich is undoubtedly knowledgeable and is an excellent expositor of many of the principles of the Republican party, be they economic, social or foreign policy. But that does not necessarily mean that he hews to all of those views. Rather it means that he understands those principles and is willing to speak in favour of them for political benefit. He may agree with some or even most of them though.

- He has, in my view, descended into populist (and implicitly classist) ignominy and prejudice by condemning Romney's supposed "vulture capitalism." That condemnation is undoubtedly inconsistent with the free market principles that are essential to the United States' prosperity. Nor should it be regarded as mere rhetoric, for such ideas and statements reflect what candidate Gingrich believes may be necessary to get elected, if not what he actually thinks. But whether he thinks it or not is irrelevant. As the man campaigns, so too he governs.

Gribbler:
Please note that the Administration's policy on gay marriage is basically supportive. The Administration is on the record as declining to support DOMA (the Defence of Marriage Act) on the basis that it violates the Equal Protection provisions of the United States Constitution. That amounts to saying that opposing gay marriage is a form of discrimination which the Administration does not support politically rather than a statement of the correct legal position which the Administration should support. That is so because there is no provision for the protection of gay marriage, implicit or otherwise, in the United States Constitution. To pretend otherwise is to engage in a form of sophistry. That sophistry involves pretending that the enactors of that Constitution, who had universally enacted laws banning the mere practice of sodomy, intended for it to protect gay marriage. The only justification for this act is political, not legal; and it involves not merely a defence of gay marriage but an implicit embrace of lawlessness. By this act the Administration does not merely support gay marriage. It tears up the Constitution its office-bearers are duty bound to uphold.

[Zevico]

-double post.

[Dr Strangelove]

- Gingrich is undoubtedly knowledgeable .

Is he? This is the guy who has written books about the Christian faith of the founding fathers, completely ignoring the fact that 2/3rds of them were avowed Deists. He was a history professor for crying out loud, he was supposed to know this stuff!

[Elok]

Possibly he does know that, on some level (the exact ratio of Deists to Christians probably depends on whom you call a Founding Father). But he also knows how to lie like a crack-whore and rabble-rouse like an old-timey tent revivalist.

[giblets]

What does a crack-whore need to lie about, other than not telling the police they're a crack-whore? I think crack-whores have much better morals than Newt Gingrich and it isn't fair to make such a comparison.

edit: oh, did you mean lie in the other sense?

[Elok]

What does a crack-whore need to lie about, other than not telling the police they're a crack-whore?

Well, for starters, she has to tell the gentleman in the purple suit where the hell his money is, and make it sound at least a little convincing. Er, assuming this crack whore does have a manager. Possibly there are freelance crack whores who are more honest.

I think crack-whores have much better morals than Newt Gingrich and it isn't fair to make such a comparison.

Possibly, but given that several CEOs have gone on the record stating that Gingrich gives a better BJ than any crack whore they've ever had, I suspect the crack whores are just jealous of the way he has radically transformed the way our nation orally pleasures powerful men for money. Under his leadership of himself, he has negotiated high enough payment to buy a metric ton of rock for a single act. He, of course, did not spend the money on crack, because he is not one of the Urban Poor addled by foodstamps. Plus he prefers to inject kittens with heroin before chewing off their heads and sucking them dry through the neck-stump. But the point is, he knows how to make America's crack-whores prosperous again, only powerful insider interests are standing in his way.

[Krill]

[giblets]