Gingrich, DeLay crew were "a group of weirdos"

The corollary to Digby's "Clinton Rules" must be the "Gingrich Rules." It's fine to report how utterly bat-shit crazy the bat-shit craziest Republicans are, but wait until they're safely out of office before you do it (lest they accuse you of liberal bias).

Here's a fine example from CBS's Dick Meyer:

This is a story I should have written 12 years ago when the "Contract with America" Republicans captured the House in 1994. I apologize.

Really, it's just a simple thesis: The men who ran the Republican Party in the House of Representatives for the past 12 years were a group of weirdos. Together, they comprised one of the oddest legislative power cliques in our history. And for 12 years, the media didn't call a duck a duck, because that's not something we're supposed to do.

Fair enough. But are they really supposed to report what friggin' fashion designer the incoming Speaker of the House is wearing? No, but that doesn't seem to stop them.

And while I can accept his apology, the point of remorse is not to mumble a mea culpa for the sake of the mumblee, but to learn and grow and change from the experience, and he and his colleagues are clearly incapable of doing that (just read Digby's post if you haven't yet).

I'm not talking about the policies of the Contract for America crowd, but the character. I'm confident that 99 percent of the population -- if they could see these politicians up close, if they watched their speeches and looked at their biographies -- would agree, no matter what their politics or predilections.

99 percent of the population can't see them up close, and if members of the media had a different concept of what their jobs were, they wouldn't need to. It may be too late to bare the naked truth about Gingrich and Armey and those weirdos, but James Inhofe is still in the Senate.

I'm confident that if historians ever spend the time on it, they'll confirm my thesis. Same with forensic psychiatrists. I have discussed this with scores of politicians, staffers, consultants and reporters since 1994 and have found few dissenters.

Politicians in this country get a bad rap. For the most part, they are like any high-achieving group in America, with roughly the same distribution of pathologies and virtues. But the leaders of the GOP House didn't fit the personality profile of American politicians, and they didn't deviate in a good way. It was the Chess Club on steroids.

The iconic figures of this era were Newt Gingrich, Richard Armey and Tom Delay. They were zealous advocates of free markets, low taxes and the pursuit of wealth; they were hawks and often bellicose; they were brutal critics of big government.

Yet none of these guys had success in capitalism. None made any real money before coming to Congress. None of them spent a day in uniform. And they all spent the bulk of their adult careers getting paychecks from the big government they claimed to despise. Two resigned in disgrace. [Read the whole thing]

A couple of months ago, I represented the “new media” at one of these horrid ethics in journalism panels that they run seemingly around the clock here in DC, and I got into the usual tussle with an editor from the Online News Hour. I said the media uncritically transcribed what 'he said' and what 'she said' and never bothered to call political figures on their bullshit, and he said that wasn’t their job; they were supposed to report “both sides” and let their audience figure out which side was full of it (you know, with the countless hours people have to research politicians’ claims when they aren’t busy putting food on their families).

What struck me about the exchange is that I had tied vapid and timid media coverage to Americans’ often shocking ignorance about their own political system and said it was perhaps the greatest threat to our democracy. But while he agreed that there was a major problem with the public's political knowledge and participation, he flat-out refused to acknowledge that it had any connection to the rules by which he insisted he had to live.