Newt Gingrich spoke before a group of conservatives Monday, at a breakfast sponsored by American Spectator magazine. And the former Speaker of the House didn’t hold back, weighing in on nearly every topic imaginable.
On Michael Bloomberg: His “entire basis for survival is paying $91 a vote for reelection.”
On the war in Iraq and the political debate back home: We’re in the “middle of a phony war and not taking seriously the threat to our survival…This is Cambodia and Vietnam all over again.”
On Michael Moore: “He’s so despicable I can’t imagine looking at a movie by him. It’d be like looking at a movie by [Nazi propaganda head] Goebbels.”
On the presidential debate formats: “Thirty second answers…standing like a trained seal waiting for someone to throw me a fish… being asked dumb questions by a celebrity who doesn’t know anything.”
On Chris Matthews: “Utterly irrelevant shallow television celebrity.”
On the U.S. government: “The government simply doesn’t work…The American people fundamentally disbelieve that this government keeps its word and does anything…This country has watched the government lie for 21 years.”
On the Republican party: “We are in as bad of shape as we were in the late seventies. That’s an enormous negative achievement.”
On Bob Novak: “Sometimes he’s right and sometimes he’s just venomous. Robert Novak is a personality. He’s allowed to be who he is. He was once a good reporter. He’s now just a personality… I made mistakes. I also created a Republican majority, balanced the federal budget and reformed welfare. That doesn’t count in Novak’s world.”
On the current political system: “I came to the conclusion that intraparty politics is hopeless. I think the presidential nominating process sin its current format is insane.
On the current Republican field: Have any of these people enriched the race thus far? Have any of them made it interesting?”
On Howard Dean and the Democratic Left: “He exists in a fantasy world…The entire Democratic Left exists in a fantasy world in which there are no terrorists, there’s no foreign competition and there are no economic rules.”
On the current immigration system: “If you had tried to design a system by the U.S. government to infuriate everybody you could not have come much closer to what they’re doing right now.”
On the 2004 election: “The 2004 election was maniacally stupid and it’s just gotten worse.”
On “An Inconvenient Truth” movie posters: “As somebody who loves animals, I personally would never have put penguins on sand. I thought the advertisement for his movie was one of the most viciously anti-animal advertising I’ve seen in a long time. He had these penguins walking on sand, it was terrible.”
On left-wing environmentalists: “The actual goal of the left is to use the environment as an excuse to raise taxes, create a bigger bureaucracy, have more litigation and control your life.”
On Al Gore: “out of touch with reality on a grand scale.”
On whether Stalin and Mao Zedong were treated as a heroes during Al Gore’s education: “Probably.”
On McCain-Feingold: “John McCain’s insane censorship rules…”
On Congress: “This particular congress has learned nothing.”
On a potential Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama Democratic ticket: “It would be a wonderfully left-wing,deeply compassionate, Oprah Winfrey ticket, traipsing around the country, offering an extraordinary future of having a huge goose dinner in which we will kill the goose that lays the golden egg but we will have a terrific feast out of the goose and people will be salivating for this opportunity for the promised land. But then, gradually, in September or October, people will start to figure out that if you kill the goose there will be no more golden eggs and we’ll close them out like Gerry Ford closed it out against Carter in 1976.”
