Newt and the enemies of normal Americans

Probably you’ve seen the Mother Jones article “Newt in His Own Words,” widely linked on the interwoobs this week. Here’s some more they left out:

1978: Running for Congress for the first time against Virginia Shapard. She intended to commute to D.C. from Georgia and hire a nanny. He accused her of breaking up her marriage (this was just before his wife got cancer and he dumped her).

1994: “You cannot get to universal coverage without a police state.”

1994: called for Republicans to take back the Senate from the “enemies of normal Americans.”

1995: called for mandatory death penalty for drug mules, with mass executions, 30 or 35 at a time.

It wasn’t just Susan Smith’s murder of her two children that Gingrich blamed on “how sick the society is getting”. The following year, 1995, when a 9-month pregnant woman was murdered (along with her two children) and the fetus (which survived) cut out, I guess to be sold on the black market, Gingrich blamed the welfare state for creating moral decay.

In 1996 he explained what freedom is all about: “A mere 40 years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. Now it is not only a sport in the Olympics. There are over 30 countries that have a competition internationally. There are some 13 states with 25 cities in America. And there’s a whole new world of opportunity opening up that didn’t even exist 30 years ago or 40 years ago, and no bureaucrat would have invented it. And that’s what freedom is all about. Freedom is about having a dream, and maybe I feel that particularly because the greatest Georgian of this century, Martin Luther King, went to the Lincoln Memorial and said in his extraordinary speech, ‘I have a dream...’”

1997: Clinton was thinking about apologizing for slavery. Gingrich said this would be “emotional symbolism” – one day after the House passed a Flag Burning Amendment.

By the way, in 1990, his opponent, David Worley, came within 1,000 votes of unseating him and might have won but the Democratic Party decided to give his campaign no funds because he broke omerta on talking about the pay raise Congress had voted itself.

(Update: Here’s one which I couldn’t find earlier because I googled pigs instead of piglets; Gingrich 1995 on why women should be kept out of combat: “If combat means living in a ditch, females have biological problems staying in a ditch for thirty days because they get infections and they don’t have upper body strength. I mean, some do, but they’re relatively rare. On the other hand, men are basically little piglets, you drop them in the ditch, they roll around in it, doesn’t matter, you know. These things are very real. On the other hand, if combat means being on an Aegis-class cruiser managing the computer controls for twelve ships and their rockets, a female may be again dramatically better than a male who gets very, very frustrated sitting in a chair all the time because males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.”)