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Jeez, are you all that young? Palin was a blip. The original was Newt Gingrich, "The Man Who Broke Politics" (theatlantic.com/magazin… - by McKay Coppins, the same author who has written the new Mitt Romney book. The article doesn't do his damage justice; in Dana Milbank's book "The Destructionists", Gingrich gets the first 3 chapters, a…
Jeez, are you all that young? Palin was a blip. The original was Newt Gingrich, "The Man Who Broke Politics" (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/ - by McKay Coppins, the same author who has written the new Mitt Romney book. The article doesn't do his damage justice; in Dana Milbank's book "The Destructionists", Gingrich gets the first 3 chapters, a sickening litany of everything from circulating a list of 65 pejoratives for Republicans to use to demonize Democrats (How to Talk Like Newt, 1990) to routinely making up damaging stories about people he wanted to take down, including throwing his weight behind the ridiculous narrative that the Clinton's had had Vince Foster killed - which ended up with sufficient legs that Republicans, including Trump, were still using it in 2016. He introduced government shutdowns and impeachment as political weapons, among other "innovations".
Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh were contemporaries and complementary, and there's a steady growth of the right-wing alternate-reality echo chamber from their day to now.
Reading Milbank's account of Gingrich's escapades, the parallels with Trump are sobering. Oh, and BTW - while Newt was rabidly publically moralizing about Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, he was having his own affair with a 22-year-old house staffer (in 1999 he divorced his second wife, and married the staffer in 2000).
Intended as a reply to another item. Ignore here.