Tag: Newt Gingrich

Political legend Pete McCloskey compares ‘psychopath’ Trump to Hitler — and traces the GOP’s demise to Newt Gingrich

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If anyone ought to have perspective about the troubled state of American democracy, it’s Pete McCloskey.

Now 93, McCloskey had more than a front-row seat during the turbulent Vietnam era and the fall of President Richard Nixon. As a renegade Republican congressman, McCloskey called for Nixon’s impeachment over the Vietnam War in 1971, opposed him in the Republican primary in 1972 and was the first to demand his resignation during Watergate.

So McCloskey knows an outlaw president when he sees one. With the benefit of that experience and the wisdom of his years, does he see the need to view the reign of Donald Trump dispassionately as just a case of history repeating itself? Are people overreacting to the turmoil of recent times? Continue reading.

Former GOP Speakers Join To Defend Gerrymandering

The Republican State Leadership Committee says that three of the four living former Republican speakers of the House of Representatives will advise its efforts to push for GOP-friendly gerrymandered legislative maps after the 2020 elections.

Former speakers Paul Ryan, John Boehner, and Newt Gingrich will lead the committee’s Speakers Advisory Council. “In these key advisory roles,” the group said in a press release, “each of the Speakers will provide critical support to the RSLC’s recently-launched ‘Right Lines 2020’ initiative to protect Republican legislative majorities ahead of the decennial redrawing of federal and state district maps.

A Democratic group, backed by Barack Obama and Eric Holder, has been pushing to ensure fair maps in the next redistricting. But rather than follow their lead to independent redistricting commissions and maps that accurately match the partisan composition of the states, the RSLC is focused on ensuring Republicans get to draw Republican-friendly maps.

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Bill Barr’s alternate universe ‘investigation’ has a goal: Right-wing authoritarian rule

AlterNet logoStudents of the modern conservative movement often date the recent supercharged radicalization of the Republican Party to the rise of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution in the early 1990s. It’s true that the GOP went seriously off the rails during that period and the craziness has been picking up speed ever since. But in reality, the conservative movement has been radical from its beginnings, starting with the anti-communist crusade after World War II all the way through Goldwater to Reagan, Gingrich and now Trump. Now it has finally shed all trappings of a sophisticated political ideology, culminating in this surreal parody of a presidency in 2019. The conservative “three legged stool” of small government, traditional values and global military leadership has completely disintegrated.

But one aspect of that earlier conservative movement has continued to chug along with its long-term project to transform the U.S. into an undemocratic, quasi-authoritarian plutocracy. That would be the group of far-right lawyers who started the Federalist Society, with the goal of packing the judiciary with true believers, along with a certain group of Reagan-era legal wunderkinds who came to believe that the GOP could dominate the presidency for decades to come. They developed the theory of the “unitary executive,” originally advanced by Reagan’s odious attorney general Ed Meese ( recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom) which holds that massive, unaccountable power is vested in the president of the United States.

Attorney General William Barr was one of those lawyers, along with White House counsel Pat Cipollone, former appeals court judge Michael Luttig and others who encouraged Barr to take the job, particularly after his famous memo declaring that what any normal person would see as obstruction of justice doesn’t apply to the president. (In a nutshell, Barr agrees with former President Richard Nixon, who said, “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.”)

View the complete October 25 article by Heather Digby Parton on the AlterNet website here.

From Nixon To Trump: Democracy and Indecency

The following article by Rick Perlstein was posted on the National Memo website December 2, 2016:

shutterstock_364331684-668x501This January marks my 20th anniversary writing about the American right wing as a historian and a journalist. Wearing my historian’s hat, I’ve documented lunatic John Birch Society members convinced that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”; underground militias stockpiling guns against imminent Communist invasion, threatening death to congressmen who dared abet the evil socialist agenda; drunken louts in a Queens, New York, bar describing Richard Nixon’s impeachment as a liberal coup, opining, “If I was Nixon, that’s what I’d do—I’d shoot every one of them.” I stroked my chin, and explained how such maniacal, anti-democratic, and violently anarchic rage had always been part of the story, though really only at the margins of the American conservative movement.

At the same time, as a citizen and as a journalist, I documented that margin encroaching on the center, until, with Donald Trump’s apotheosis, it seems now to have consumed the entire damned thing.

Let’s look at the score. Continue reading “From Nixon To Trump: Democracy and Indecency”