Pete McCloskey compares 'psychopath' Trump to Hitler -- and traces the GOP's demise to Gingrich

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Political legend Pete McCloskey compares 'psychopath' Trump to Hitler -- and traces the GOP's demise to Newt Gingrich

Ray Hartmann
February 01, 2021



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.

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Q. What has happened to American politics?

A: Who knows? It's a mystery to all of us. How can some Republicans get up and say, oh yes, we think the election was rigged when they know that it wasn't?

I mean, the closest you can come to it is Kristallnacht in 1938 when Hitler's stormtroopers dragged the Jews out of their houses and broke all the windows and he had convinced the German people that the Jews were responsible for having lost World War One. And the stormtroopers, coupled with his concept of the Aryan race: that Germans were a special race and that Jews were tainting the blood of the chosen people. He gradually convinced the Germans of the untruth, and they accepted that the Jews were responsible, and the Holocaust was justified.

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Q. How did things get so bad?

A. It's been happening for a long time. But I think you can trace a lot of the bitterness that now exists between the two parties back to Gingrich getting elected speaker in 1994. He had been in the House when I was there. He was a pop off, and nobody thought of him as anything but a pop off. But he conceived that for the Republicans to gain power, they needed to treat Democrats as weak and unprincipled and as people who were going to sell the country down the road. That the entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security were bankrupting the country and the Democrats were an evil thing to the country. When Gingrich became speaker, he removed chairmen from any of the 21 House committees if they collaborated with the Democrats in any way. He replaced them with hard heads. From that time on, the contempt Gingrich's has felt for Democrats, that concept of regarding them as enemies of the country, has lasted beyond Gingrich's time. We're so far from where we were when I was in Congress, when people were more decent to one another even when they disagreed.

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https://www.rawstory.com/pete-mccloskey/

[roscoeroscoe]

1. Excellent points

I have felt the same way for a long time!

[Mike Nelson]

2. Agree...

... with the Gingrich roots... also, Palin, the "Tea Party" and George Wallace ("Dixiecrats&quot . I hear people say Reagan, but I don't think so... Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Ford.. all would have detested The Donald and his ilk. We saw a bit of that in Bush, McCain and Romney...

[SharonClark]

3. Lee Atwater's "southern strategy" helped, too.

[Mr. Sparkle]

4. I have always thought Gingrich destroyed the house, Mcconnell destroyed the Senate.

His world record amount of filibusters during the Obama presidency was what had done it.

[Irish_Dem]

5. Gingrich made political discourse ugly and dirty.

Demonized Dems so people would hate them.
All of it led to Jan 6 attempts to kill Pelosi.