GOP Future Looks To The Past: McCarthy & Gingrich

..."The elite media tried to ignore us. The government labeled us 'extremists.' But on April 15, more than one million Americans came together, spontaneously, to defend fairness and freedom. I know because Callista and I were there. Here is our story."

Thus began Newt Gingrich's heart-warming albeit rose-colored glasses-garbed assessment of the Tax Day Tea Parties held across the nation on April 15. However, it is probably less interesting to deconstruct Gingrich's optimistic views of Tea Party-ness, as expressed in "Will the Tea Parties Matter?" -- a disquisition on "the nature of the Tea Party movement" -- then it is to recognize that the former House Speaker, has more and more come to represent both what's left of the intellectual firepower of the post-Bush Republican Party and the critic/commentator/analyst/partisan politician that will take on just about any question that comes his way.

With the Republican Party seeming to settle into a state of beserkiness, what with their call for Democrats to rename itself the Democrat Socialist Party; with McCarthyite claims that there are a host of "socialists" in Congress; with a very strange Michael Steele heading up the RNC, while Rush Limbaugh assumes the Party's head-without-portfolio position, it is left to Gingrich to be in as many places as possible, to criticize the Obama Administration (with an occasional compliment tossed its way), to slash away at current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and to proclaim that the Party still has some guiding principles.

Gingrich's goal? To stitch together a coalition of disparate GOP forces that will back him for the Party's Presidential nomination in four years. Does it matter that the public has never liked the man? Apparently, not to the Newtster!..."

Bill Berkowitz
Gingrich's Gasps of Wrath