May 19, 2011 09:12 PM UTC

Newt Gingrich Getting The Dan Maes Treatment

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Fox News Channel’s Judson Berger reports, it’s at least partly self-inflicted:

Gingrich has already conceded he made a “mistake” in choosing to describe the House Budget Committee chairman’s proposal as “right-wing social engineering” in an interview over the weekend. But Tyler, pressed for reaction by The Huffington Post to the media coverage Gingrich endured, offered what looked to be an excerpt from an epic poem starring the ex-House speaker, trudging through a world of Cyclopean Sunday show hosts and editorial writers.

Excerpting it does little justice, so here is the response in full, as published in The Huffington Post.

From Tyler: “The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.”

And so it was written…

And if that wasn’t bad enough:

Our Dan Maes parallel kind of works, doesn’t it? Now, these off-reservation hits on the GOP 2012 budget proposal from Rep. Paul Ryan didn’t start Newt Gingrich’s fall from viability as a GOP presidential candidate, but as the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler reports, he’s left a hole where the GOP’s fiscal message used to be–a bit of a problem for the rest of the team.

And it can’t be undone.

Here are the guts of Gingrich’s answer:  

I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering.  I don’t think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate.  I think we need a national conversation to get to a better Medicare system with more choices for seniors. …[The Ryan plan] is too big a jump.  I think what you want to have is a system where people voluntarily migrate to better outcomes, better solutions, better options, not one where you suddenly impose upon the – I don’t want to – I’m against Obamacare, which is imposing radical change, and I would be against a conservative imposing radical change.

The real question is not whether Gingrich thinks he made a mistake. Clearly he thinks he made a political mistake, or else he would not be dialing Ryan to grovel.

The question that he has not answered is: Do you still believe the Ryan plan is “radical” or “right-wing social engineering”?

The problem here, as we said previously, isn’t really for Newt Gingrich. Newt Gingrich, like Ron Paul or Rick Santorum or Lyndon LaRouche, is never going to be President. But what happens to Colorado freshmen Rep. Cory Gardner, and especially early “Ryan Plan” adopter Rep. Scott Tipton, if this “right-wing social engineering” business becomes a relevant question for their constituents? Isn’t this more a problem for Republicans who actually voted for it?

One other note: it seemed to us like the more overtly Republicans tried to get Dan Maes to shut the hell up, the more coverage he received in the media. Funny how that works, isn’t it?