… hit back cleanly. Here, Newt’s press secretary defends his man against recent attacks from the lamestream media.
The press secretary strikes the right belligerent tone, but his mixed metaphors confuse us rather than rouse us to indignation.
The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods.
Instead of gaining a clear picture of the press bullies, we struggle with three incompatible images:
1. A firefight.
2. Sheep.
3. Cocktail parties.
Our minds, striving to make sense of disparate phenomena, put it all together into a picture of party-going, pistol-packing, sheep. This takes us very far away from the image of embattled heroic Gingrich that’s intended.
Also – You want to end on a strong word. Here, we have a lot of exciting build-up, and we’re panting to see what actual evil thing the media has done to Newt Gingrich. But instead of a word like “lies,” we get the careful (cowardly?) “distortions and falsehoods.”
After all that firepower, this is a letdown. Big guns don’t shoot distortions and falsehoods! Not in the US of A! They shoot lies, baby!
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Update: Now, this is good writing.
The sheer spectacle of watching Newt try to live out his man-of-destiny fantasies and failing utterly — always in ways that were cringe inducing, yet impossible to turn away from — evoked something powerful that I couldn’t quite place. But then last night, I figured it out. It must have been Newt’s $500,000 Tiffany’s account, or maybe his apology to Paul Ryan. Anyway, I realized that everything about Newt Gingrich–the operatic temperament, the multiple divorces, the six-figure credit line at Tiffany’s, the ego, the solipsism, the sheer haplessness and capacity for self-delusion–it all summons up the “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”
You see how his build-up ends with a bang?
Newt press secretary: Take note.
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Update: Graphic.
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May 19th, 2011 at 6:50AM
Hilarious.
Herzberg has his way with the Newt in the current New Yorker, tagging him an implausible candidate.
e.g., according to Newt:
Obama is “the most radical president in American history.” His foreign policy is rooted in “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.” His Administration “represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did” and aims, oxymoronically, to turn the United States into “a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists.”
Then there’s the matter of “personal baggage,” which in Gingrich’s case is a steamer trunk of Titanic proportions.
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And to polish off the hilarity, there is the latest Newtonian verbigeration:
“Any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood, and because—I have said publically that those words were inaccurate and unfortunate.”
And remember, folks, Newton is a fallen away college perfesser.
May 19th, 2011 at 6:54AM
Yes – it’s interesting to me that people hit Obama for having been a professor, for being ‘professorial.’ It’ll be interesting to see what they say about Gingrich, who seems to me much closer to professorial stereotypes.