Creep of the Week - November 7, 1998
This week, Newt quit both his Speaker position and Congress after a group of his Republican peers, led by Representative Bob Livingston of Louisiana, announced that they were seeking to remove Newt from his post. They were upset that their party lost five House seats in the recent elections and they blamed Newt's lack of leadership, as well as his caving in to Bill Clinton during this year's budget negotiations. They are also out to topple Newt's second in command, the loathsome, skunk-like Dick Armey.
Newt has been in trouble almost since the day he became speaker. First, he accepted a $4 million advance for a book from Rupert Murdoch, who had a keen interest in pending legislation. Then there was the infamous shutdown of the federal government which Newt defended by whining that "Hey, mean old Bill Clinton wouldn't let me ride in the front of Air Force One." Later on, he got caught with his hands in the till, which led to ethics violations and a fine. And there were always his capricious and loutish rants every night on the evening news about liberals, welfare mothers and orphanages.
This year, Newt became obsessed with destroying Bill Clinton. He announced that he would never again make a speech without focusing on Bill's lawbreaking. During the last weeks prior to the election, Newt engineered a series of campaign ads that bombarded us with reminders of Monica Lewinsky's lips and cigar stains, despite his own polling which showed that Americans were sick to death of hearing about the scandal. And yet, there he was on election night, complaining that the Republicans couldn't get their message out because of (you guessed it) the liberal media's incessant reporting about Monica and Bill. The voters want to flush this whole stinking mess down the toilet and they showed they're willing to flush the wild-eyed scandal mongers (like Al D'Amato, Robert Dornan, and Lauch Faircloth) along with it.
The truly ironic aspect of Newt's meltdown was that for all his paranoid ravings about the liberal media and Democrats, the knockout blow didn't come from the left, but from the right. He spent so much time looking over his left shoulder that his own troops, who are more conservative than he is, were able to get him with a sucker punch that he didn't see coming. Newt registered his shock by accusing his tormentors of cannibalism: "The idea that I would be the excuse to cannibalize the majority is so sickening I couldn't risk it." The response from his colleagues was a resounding "Eat Me!"
Now Newt thinks he's going to run for President. But who's going to vote for him? There's not a Democrat in the world who doesn't puke in disgust the instant his face shows up on TV, and most Republicans see him as a pariah to be avoided at all costs.
Yup, he coulda been a contender. But once that last punch landed, he didn't even answer the bell for the next round. It turns out that his high-speed, never-resting jaw was made of glass the whole time.
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