Quote:
Originally Posted by PaulS
Newt helped take us from a time when pols. would drink together after sessions (think Reagan and Tip) to a time where if someone on the other side disagrees with you, they are evil and un-American.
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from Chris Matthews lips you your ears...icky
"There's something there I miss today," mused the former Democratic staffer and longtime talk-show host Chris Matthews in January about the relationship between Reagan and House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, the most powerful Democrat in Washington during Reagan's first term. Matthews dreamily evoked a time when Reagan and O'Neill had drinks together, swapped Irish stories, slapped backs, and, they say, cut deals with a minimum of personal rancor—as opposed to the ugly relations between the two parties today.
The Democratic Party maintained control of the House from 1954 until 1995.
Newt helped take us from a time when the Dems ran the House perpetually to a time when it has, now, changed hands a couple of times in 15 years .....a lot of people didn't like that....Washington and the goings on there have always been quite ugly, if you know anything about the history of American politics and elections you would know that nothing has changed since our founding in terms of the brutal rhetoric, the attacks and in many cases the complete lack of civility....politics has always brought this out in people and always will, Newt did not help make Washington a less friendly place....it has always been that, particularly at times when power is changing hands...
it does make a nice talking point though
"Newt ruined civility in Washington"
Didn't the Clintonistas refer to their paticular brand of politics as "
BLOOD SPORTS"? The term refers to and traces back to 18th Century England when entertainment was provided in the village square for the masses by tethering a bear.... "bear baiting".... or a bull... "bull baiting" and sometimes even a bager
"Newt Baiting?", to a stake and then unleashing mastiffs and bulldogs on the animal where they would then rip eachother apart....and then they'd go have drinks afterward
"In truth, this depiction of Reagan is entirely false, as is the contention that Reagan-era Washington was a kinder and gentler place than it is today. The hostilities between parties and ideologies in Washington during Reagan's presidency make the present day look tame by comparison. No president in modern times has ever been as reviled. And the hatred of Reagan was justified, to some degree, because his presidency, in the rueful words of the journalist Richard Reeves a decade ago, "damned near destroyed American liberalism."
Liberals hated Reagan in the 1980s. Pure and simple. They used language that would make the most fervid anti-Obama rhetoric of the Tea Party seem like, well, a tea party. Democratic Rep. William Clay of Missouri charged that Reagan was "trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf." The Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad drew a panel depicting Reagan plotting a fascist putsch in a darkened Munich beer hall. Harry Stein (later a conservative convert) wrote in Esquire that the voters who supported Reagan were like the "good Germans" in "Hitler's Germany."
There was ample academic support for this theme. John Roth, a Holocaust scholar at Claremont College, wrote:
I could not help remembering how 40 years ago economic turmoil had conspired with Nazi nationalism and militarism—all intensified by Germany's defeat in World War I—to send the world reeling into catastrophe. . . . It is not entirely mistaken to contemplate our postelection state with fear and trembling.
Eddie Williams, head of what the Washington Post described as "the respected black think tank, the Joint Center for Political Studies," reacted to Reagan's election thus: "When you consider that in the climate we're in—rising violence, the Ku Klux Klan—it is exceedingly frightening." (This was not far removed from Fidel Castro's opinion about Reagan, offered right before the election: "We sometimes have the feeling that we are living in the time preceding the election of Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany.") In the Nation, Alan Wolfe wrote that "the United States has embarked on a course so deeply reactionary, so negative and mean-spirited, so chauvinistic and self-deceptive that our times may soon rival the McCarthy era."
"As for the supposed sweetness and light between Reagan and Tip O'Neill, it was mostly blarney. The two had numerous tense phone calls and meetings. In private they called each other's views "crap" on more than one occasion; as the budget talks in 1982 headed to a climax, Reagan told O'Neill, "you can get me to crap a pineapple, but you can't get me to crap a cactus." O'Neill publicly called Reagan "callous . . . a real Ebenezer Scrooge," whose program was "for the selfish, the greedy, and the affluent." In his diary, Reagan wrote: "Tip O'Neil [sic] is getting rough; saw him on TV telling the United Steelworkers U. that I am going to destroy the nation." He also told his diary that "Tip is a true pol. He can really like you personally & be a friend while politically trying to beat your head in." That was Reagan at his most charitable. He noted once that in a White House meeting where O'Neill "sounded off in a very partisan manner," "I almost let go the controls but I didn't," and on another occasion he described one of O'Neill's public claims as "the most vicious pack of lies I've ever seen."
'Reagan had in mind such O'Neill gems as his remarks in 1981 on ABC that Reagan "has no concern, no regard, no care for the little man in America. And I understand that. Because of his lifestyle, he never meets those people." This was a mere warm-up for O'Neill's blast at Reagan during the 1984 campaign:
The evil is in the White House at the present time. And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America, and who likes to ride a horse. He's cold. He's mean. He's got ice water for blood.
bet they had a few beers after that one huh?...did he say "evil"....twice?????