Power Line on Newt Gingrich

Power Line is notoriously soft on Republicans, but this is ridiculous:

The Washington Post takes an inside look at the sickness that features so prominently in the leftist blogosphere. The Post doesn't pull its punches in examining the phenomenon ("I'm insane with rage and grief, but I feel more connected than I ever have," admits the protagonist blogger, who gets 14,000 page views per day). Amazingly, though, the Post blames conservatives for it:

What's notable about this isn't only the level of anger but the direction from which it is coming. Not that long ago, it was the right that was angry and the left that was, at least comparatively, polite. But after years of being the targets of inflammatory rhetoric, not only from fringe groups but also from such mainstream conservative politicians as Newt Gingrich, the left has gone on the attack.

But the author, David Finkel, presents no evidence that the left was ever the "target of inflammatory rhetoric" (at least from anyone with an audience) that resembles the raving he depicts here. And the reference to Gingrich is laughable. Like him or not, the former Speaker was (and remains) a man of ideas, not invective.

The left was never a "target of inflammatory rhetoric" from anyone with an audience? Well, there's only Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and about 500 other pundits.

And as for Gingrich, he was notorious for his use of invective. Does anyone at Power Line know anything about the history of American politics?

Here's a sample of his MO from the Columbia Journalism Review, which documents him comparing former House Speaker Jim Wright to Mussolini:

Enter Newt Gingrich, the man who, as Suzanne Garment put it in her book Scandal, "brought scandal politics unmistakenly home to the Congress." Even as a junior House member in the early '80s, he saw visions of the Speakership and had a strategy for getting there. Among other things, it required infusing those staid congressional reporters with a blood lust. The frontal lobe of a pit bull had to be sutured, figuratively speaking, onto the brain of a gentleman, and this new creature aimed at the Dems. How was this accomplished? With the idea of "corruption." Contrary to stereotype, the typical reporter is surprisingly passive. But, given a whiff of impropriety, a jolt of accusation, his eyes twitch, his limbs quiver ("It's alive, Igor! IT'S ALIVE!"), and he lurches from the slab.

In his book The Ambition and the Power, John M. Barry describes how Gingrich performed his surgical feat. His aim was to create "resonance" -- a pervasive perception among press and public that Democrats, particularly House Speaker Jim Wright, were crooked. Gingrich was short on evidence but long on persistence and rhetorical pyrotechnics. There was a circularity to his onslaught. Barry describes Gingrich walking into The Miami Herald in 1987 and persuading reporter Tom Fiedler to join the fray: "Fiedler's story quoted Gingrich's now-routine comment that Wright was the most corrupt Speaker in the twentieth century, and some variations: 'Wright is so consumed by his own power that he is like Mussolini....We have overwhelming evidence that he is a genuinely bad man....' The article added, 'Gingrich said his charges are based on numerous news accounts.' Many of those news accounts Gingrich had generated."

And, of course, Gingrich's GOPAC distributed an infamous memo called "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control," which provides a list of "contrast words" to apply to Republicans' opponents that includes "traitor," "sick," "anti- (issue): flag, family, child, jobs," "destructive" and "pathetic."

Comments

[Anon]

At least Michelle Malkin and the Corner people will strongly disagree with Bush on some issues. The lawyers at Power Line have figuratively taken on the Bush administration as their client, and they will say anything in their defense. It is by far the most nakedly partisan and intellectually dishonest blog on the Internet.