Does anyone else remember this?
Yes, you are right and Santorum is full of it. The Republicans got scared of how fast and hard Newt was playing, and they replaced him with the failed Dennis Hastert. This history vindicates Newt, not Rick Santorum and the rest of the lace panty House members.
The Hastert era started the House down the wrong road that ended up in massive defeat in 06. Shame shame shame on Rick S. for using that line of attack.
At the time it looked like the Democrats had the ethics charge handle to remove him and others at will.
It just looked that way. They didn't. It was total BS. Lie after lie.
I'm surprised Newt didn't pull a pistol and shoot John right between the eyes last night.
Now that'd had them not only standing in their seats cheering, they'd been leaping from the balcony!
Santorum said that the Republicans did not like Gingrich as speaker because he was erratic.
I do not remember that. I do not remember anything written about Gingrich being erratic- I sort of remember some power play going on at the time.
Republicans hadn't been in power for 40 years. They had NO idea what to do with it. I think it scared them to be "leaders". They'd rather be liked.
Forgive my oversight.
I meant to say all those Republican Speakers *PRIOR* to Gingrich.
You make my point from other threads, precisely.
Gingrich’s loss of his Speakership is an indictment of how shameful and cowardly the Republican cognoscenti is as Lott’s loss of his leadership FOR PRAISING AN OLD MAN AT HIS BIRTHDAY PARTY!
That does sound familiar.
It was a multi front attack and a major part of it was dragging Newt's marriages before social conservatives. They neglected to mention, however, that Newt's first wife (Jackie Battley) was a sexual predator who had been boffing him in high school whilst she was his geometry teacher, or that she had separated from him and gone back to Georgia, or that it was she, not Newt that wanted the divorce.
Newt has messed up in his relationships, but nearly all kids who fall sexual victim to adults in authority over them later do.
That said, I am still for Santorum.
That’s the way I remember it too. Dems wanted pay back, Pubbies were scared, some conservatives mad because Newt compromised some to get legislation passed and signed.
Does anyone else remember this?
Rush was partially right about this one. Democrats do defend their own, after a fashion. But the Ruling Class did not like Jim Wright. Newt took point on the ethics fight that ended Speaker Wright's too-long congressional career but it was Democrat in-fighting that brought him down. Newt is given too much credit for the intra-caucus battle that did not end with Wright's election to the Speaker's chair after Tip O'Neill.
Wright had been Majority Leader for more than a decade after winning that election by a single vote on the second ballot defeating two stalwart elitist Prog favorites as a long shot after the 1976 election.
Wright was never well-liked after the stripped down Socialist N.E. & Calif. Democrat/Labor/NAACP coalition emerged as an Insider nomenklatura after Watergate. They were relieved to survive both Wright and his chief rival, the Chicago thief and gangster Danny "Rosty" Rostenkowski, destroyed each another in late 1986.
Wright was "shaky" to the True Believing Left, and not a college graduate. He was a White southern Democrat at a time of very precipitous decline. He voted against the first Civil Rights Acts and the "Voting Rights" Act.
But make no mistake. Wright was (and still is) a partisan Democrat who started out as Sam Rayburn's protege' and arrived with the first term of the 40 year-long Democrat reign in 1955.
Nevertheless, at best he was a wannabe Progressive, left over from the days when there was essentially one Party in Texas, one Party with two wings. Until John Tower the "Conservatives" and the "Progressive, not-Liberals" wings of the Democrat Party settled elections in the Party primary.
By 1986, Wright's time had come and gone already, and he was way over his head. The Party passed him by on their way into Deep Left Field, the very place where they have managed to strand the whole nation today, and uncomfortably out in the open.
That's a place the Socialist Democrat hard-liners have never function very well.
But in the Eighties, Newt blasted Wright, without question, and he got the attention for it but the GOP did not retake the House for another five years after Wright's resignation.
Wright's marketable skill was fundraising, and when he lost that he was of no more use to the Left elites, and the School that emerged with the 1974 election (e.g., George Miller and Henry Waxman of California, the former owing his seat to Wright's PAC).
Point is this, of course Rush was right-on, on all point but one point. The Legacy Media Elite pukes of the time did not hate Newt because he had "taken down" Jim Wright. That was an illusion, and they detested Jim Wright, a man who's failure at gaining their respect mirrored Lyndon Johnson's.
They hate Newt because he was (and hopefully still is) a threat to their meal-tickets, a Republican who minds very much being in a near-permanent minority and who worked to take away their pork and perks, rising in the House leadership in a fashion ironically similar to the methods used by Jim Wright.
That's all the Leftist bastards need to make anyone their target.