It’s been a long time since I’ve had fun with Jay Bookman the ultra-liberal editorial writer for the Atlanta Urinal and Constipation. Yesterday he wrote an op-ed blaming Newt Gingrich for today’s Republican Party. (The full column is only available if you are a subscriber to the AJC).

Let’s lay this baby at the feet of its father: While Donald Trump may prove to be the one who administers the coup de grace, finishing off the Republican Party as we have known it, the individual most responsible for the GOP’s ongoing self-destruction is Georgia’s own Newton Leroy Gingrich.

He has always pined for a great historic legacy, and we are now witnessing it.

Let’s see, he engineered the first Republican majority in the House of Representatives in over 40 years. That’s a pretty good legacy. Of course, six years later the GOPe stabbed him in the back, like they have done to most conservatives over the years.

If you think that’s an exaggeration, make a list of the changes in the GOP that have been led or inspired by Gingrich over the last quarter-century. Then make a separate list of the problems that have undermined the party and brought it to a place in which Trump may be its next and last presidential candidate. You’ll find that the overlap between the two is significant:

Don’t bother. Jay is gonna do it for us.

— Start with the style and tenor of modern Republican politics. Ceaseless confrontation, bullying, appeals to anger, resentment and persecution, a capacity for shamelessness that allows you to say or do anything to win — these have long been the hallmarks of Gingrichian politics. As we’ve seen in this presidential cycle, the Gingrich style has become the house style of the Republican Party as well.

I wonder if Jay has ever heard of projection. What he is describing is today’s Dimocrat Party and the Dimocrat Party of most of my life. Think of the shamelessness of the Dimocrats accusing Republicans of “pushing granny over the cliff”. The Dimocrats have been accusing Republicans of taking away Social Security and Medicare from senior citizens for as long as I can remember. And let’s not forget Obungler saying “Get in their faces. If they bring a knife, bring a gun.” You can’t get more bullying than that. Then we had the Clintons and their politics of personal destruction. Or howza ’bout Horrible Harry accusing Mittens of not paying any taxes. He had no proof. He just pulled that out of his ass. I guess Jay is just pissed off that Republicans are finally fighting back and using the same tactics against Dimocrats that Dimocrats have been using against Republicans since Clinton and before. Those of us old enough can remember LBJ and the Dimocrats saying Goldwater would get us in a nuclear war with his little girl with the daisy commercial.

— The GOP world view, in which their political opponents are not merely wrong or mistaken but agents of pure evil out to betray all that is good and decent in America, is also a distinct Gingrichian legacy.

GMAFB! That is pure Dimocrat rhetoric. Listen to ex-Speaker Blinky and Horrible Harry. If Newt started it, they refined it and took it to the next level. The same with Obumbler. I have never heard Newt anywhere close to the invective from these three disgusting Dimocrats. And, let’s go back to LBJ and the commercial I cited.

“These people are sick,” he said in a typical comment back in 1989, describing his Democratic colleagues in Congress. “They are so consumed by their own power, by a Mussolini-like ego, that their willingness to run over normal human beings and to destroy honest institutions is unending.” At the time, that kind of apocalyptic rhetoric was so rarely heard that it was shocking. Gingrich has made it standard behavior. It’s not just how they talk; it is how they have been taught to think, and how their base has been taught to think. As Gingrich once put it, “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz. I see evil all around me every day.” Again, you can hear that same messianic mindset every day on the GOP campaign trail.

Actually Jay, Newt was correct, especially if he was talking about the Clintons. Look at all of the people BJ and Thunder Rodent Thighs destroyed, and they were aided and abetted by Dimocrat members of Congress.

— Gingrich came to power in the early ’90s through an all-out, brutal assault on the credibility of the GOP establishment, inspiring a cycle of cannibalism in which each succeeding wave of Republican politician is instantly cast as insufficiently conservative and ardent by those ambitious to replace them. Such constant purges build strict party discipline, making any breach of orthodoxy unforgivable, but as Eric Cantor can testify, they also cement in place an ideology that over time can only get more extreme.

Actually Newt came to power by pointing out the corruption of Dimocrats in Congress (see Jim Wright) and promising to clean up Congress with his Contract for America. That gave Republicans control of the House of Representatives for the first time in over 40 years. The American people liked what they heard and threw Dimocrats out including the Dimocrat Speaker of the House. Six years later, the Republican establishment stabbed Newt in the back.

— “One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” Gingrich told a group of Republican college students way back in 1978, and he launched a decades-long crusade to correct that problem and teach them to “speak like Newt”. Based on the crude invective now being leveled by Republican presidential candidates — allegations of pant-wetting, Mafia connections, the public use of the “p word”, innuendo about genitalia size — his efforts can be deemed a success.

In other words, he’s doing the same thing that Dimocrats have been doing for years. Funny, I don’t recollect a column you have written condemning Dimocrats for these “nasty” tactics. Of course not, you fucking hypocrite!

— Two words: Government shutdown. During his tenure as speaker, Gingrich showed the party that it can accrue an easy form of power by always saying no, by never saying yes. Saying no made them feel good, as if they mattered, as if they were bravely standing up to the system. The fact that it is negative power, capable of shutting down the system but never capable of governance, does not register.

The funny thing about gummint shutdowns is it’s always the fault of Republicans. When Dimocrats do it, like they did during the Reagan administration, it’s principled opposition. That’s the nice thing about controlling the media. Republicans are blamed for everything.

Look at what is happening in Congress right now, where House Speaker Paul Ryan can’t even get his GOP caucus to agree among themselves on a 2017 budget. The stubborn far right won’t give in to the stubborn far far right, and vice versa, because the instinct to say no, to refuse to compromise, is that ingrained in Republicans. By now, it is the only way they know how to operate.

The real Republicans are trying to limit the size of gummint. And as for not compromising, howza ’bout Oblunder who refuses to compromise on anything. The reason the “far right” won’t compromise on the budget is because it is Obongo’s budget. He got everything he wanted in the budget. The Republicans ran on stopping Obambam and as soon as they got elected reneged on all of their promises. They did the same thing in 2010. That’s why the voters are pissed. That’s why we have Trump. Take off your partisan blinders Jay.

It’s also telling to watch Newt react to all of this. Mitt Romney, John McCain and other top Republicans are horrified by Trump, but Gingrich is not. Trump’s attack style, his crudity, his appeals to bigotry and his lack of policy comprehension — I mean, what’s not to like, as long as it works?¹ The mere idea of Trump appeals to Newt’s romantic Jacobin instincts.

Losers Mittens Romneycare and John McRINO are horrified by Trump because he is exposing them for what they are, spinelss RINOs who refused to fight during their campaigns. McRINO was afraid of being called a racist if he were to fight Obarky and Mittens allowed himself to be rolled by Candy Crowley. Had he fought back in that debate he might have won the election, but he showed just what a wimp he was. I watched that debate and I said right after Crowley took Obeauzeau’s side that Mittens had lost the election just like Bush 41 looking at his watch in the Virginia debate lost that election. Trump is fighting. We don’t really give a shit what the two losers, Mittens Romneycare and McRINO have to say.

In short, Trump is the culmination of Gingrichian politics, and Gingrich rather likes it.

I do too as does the base of the Republican Party. Suck on it Jay!