A drunk-sounding Newt Gingrich upped the dangerously inflammatory Republican/Trump/Fox rhetoric of painting Democrats as dangerous thugs by now likening them to Nazis out to destroy America.
As I posted yesterday, Fox, Donald Trump and the GOP are depicting Democrats as crazed killers as at least part of their strategy to get out the vote for the midterms. It’s tantamount to an acknowledgment that Republicans are facing a blue wave and that the only way they see to stop it as by frightening their base into a big turnout.
It shouldn’t be a huge surprise that Gingrich didn’t take a lot of care with the truth, either. Or maybe he was just too inebriated to remember that the polls favor Democrats in the House and the state races and the statistics show plausible opportunities to win the Senate (though the odds are tougher). Furthermore, Democrats have consistently over-performed in the special elections this cycle. But here’s what Gingrich told Fox News viewers without a peep of challenge from host Sean Hannity.
GINGRICH: Well, I mean what you’re seeing is the emergence in a very weird way of a brown shirt party. To use the term for the people who, in Weimar Germany, literally dominated the streets by brute force. They can’t win. They didn’t win in the Senate, they didn’t win in the presidency. In my judgment, they’re not gonna win on Election Day and they’re becoming more hysterical, more anti-democratic, more willing to destroy the system. Abraham Lincoln warned that there are people who oppose us so much that it is either their way or they destroy it. And I think we’re faced with that kind of opposition.
So, I mean, let’s have an open, public debate. If you think people like Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton should be allowed to impose their will by brute violence, then you ought to vote Democrat. If you think that’s profoundly wrong, then you ought to vote Republican.
Don’t forget: Hannity is A-OK with mobs and violent rhetoric so long as it’s someone he doesn’t like on the receiving end. Nobody should believe for one second he’s against it now, as he claimed in this discussion.
Watch Gingrich below, from the October 10, 2018 Hannity and see once again that CEO Suzanne Scott’s edict to dial down inflammatory rhetoric was as legit as the old “fair and balanced” motto.
It takes one to know one Newt.