"It's hard to hate the parents of a kid who's on your kid's baseball team. To a great degree the 1994 election changed that. Newt Gingrich told Republicans to run against Washington. They did that and they won. He told them to keep their families in their home districts ... members would fly into D.C. on Monday afternoon and fly out on Thursday afternoon, a practice that has continued until this day."
Easier to demonize people you don't know or socialize with, Newt's plan. I remember hearing that Newt told his staff to make sure he never ran into Bill Clinton, because Bill was so charming that it was hard to hate him. I also remember a Vanity Fair article after G.W. Bush was elected about how now that there was a president who went to bed early, D.C. social life was dead. Making fun of liberals in the 80s seems benign compared to the hate that was promoted from the 90s until now.
"Two years later, Newt Gingrich and the Republicans took over Congress for the first time in forty years, which was upsetting in and of itself. What made it worse was that the same Limbaugh character was their mouthpiece and mascot -- they even made him an honorary member of their freshman class. ... I kept noticing conservatives in the media saying things that were recklessly, provably false. ... Even worse, not only were they lying, there were even more liars than ever before, and on more platforms. They had Fox News. They had right-wing think tanks feeding pundits to other cable networks and publishing op-eds in the newspapers. They had the conservative Internet. They had this thing called Ann Coulter. They lied and lied and lied."
I know I've read about Newt's philosophy of politics as total war and personal destruction, bipartisanship as evil. It's not enough to win, the destruction and suffering of the enemy is the most important. But can't remember where.
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