Anyone doing that had to be 'brought ' down one way or another. Sorta like all the recent attempts to recast Jefferson as a brutal slave owner and Lincoln as power hungry dictator.
While I agree with this, Newt, not unlike DeLay, tended to hammer the Democrats and tell them how happy he was to have done it. R. Reagan and G. W. Bush learned to hammer them while smiling and telling them we can all get along. This makes the task of the media far harder when they want to attack us.