Shutdown follies: Could we have a genu-wine crisis without Newt Gingrich contributing obfuscation and lies?

Apparently when there's obfuscating and lying to be done, our Newt just doesn't trust the upstart crop of right-wing obfuscators and liars to get the job done.

"We decided to stick to our principles through a very contentious and difficult period. Our attempt to balance the federal budget was distorted in the news media as an effort to ruin family vacations, frustrate visitors to the nation's capital and prevent government employees from going to work."

-- Newt Gingrich, in a 2011 Washington Post op-ed

by Ken

This is priceless. I guess former House Speaker Newt Gingrich thinks we just can't have a governmental crisis without him opening his corpulent piehole and letting the bilge spew forth. Or the e-equivalent.

Unfortunately for the giant tub of toxic sludge, he has left behind, among more unsavory things, a pretty wide paper trail. Including this preposterous 2011 lie that the dastardly media "distorted" his government shutdown into "an effort to ruin family vacations, frustrate visitors to the nation's capital and prevent government employees from going to work."

Even all those years later the loathsome lout seemed unable to grasp that his misdeed wasn't "an effort to ruin family vacations, frustrate visitors to the nation's capital and prevent government employees from going to work [emphasis added]." That's simply what he and his congressional lackeys did. And surely he must understand that that's what he did then, because now he's only too quick to vilify, well, it's not quite clear who.

Before this gets any more confusing, let's turn the floor over to our Washington Post "In the Loop" pal Al Kamen.

Shutdown? What shutdown?

By Al Kamen, Tuesday, October 8, 12:10 AM

On Sunday night, former House speaker Newt Gingrich fired off a tweet cheering on the veterans who crashed the WWII memorial despite the shutdown that has shuttered Washington's memorials and monuments.

"Every veteran and their family who can should visit Washington memorials and shame Capitol police into standing down. This is petty tyranny," wrote @newtgingrich.

First, we're pretty sure he meant U.S. park police, not Capitol police. (And park officers eventually did let the vets visit, to "exercise their First Amendment rights," but let's let that one go.)

Sounds like Gingrich's memory might be failing him: The shuttering of National Park lands is happening pretty much the way it did during the 1995 shutdown — the one in which the Georgia Republican played a rather central role. The one that, even in retrospect, he thought was a pretty dandy idea.

We referred to an op-ed Gingrich wrote in The Washington Post in 2011, when the government was on the brink of another shutdown (it was ultimately averted). In that piece, he fondly remembered the good old 1995 shutdown, trying to counter the generally accepted idea that the incident was bad for Republicans.

"We decided to stick to our principles through a very contentious and difficult period," he wrote in 2011. "Our attempt to balance the federal budget was distorted in the news media as an effort to ruin family vacations, frustrate visitors to the nation's capital and prevent government employees from going to work."

So, let's get this straight. In 1995, "ruin[ing] family vacations and frustrat[ing] visitors" was an A-okay byproduct of principle-sticking, but now it's "petty tyranny"?

Perhaps tyranny, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

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