Just another whack at why Gingrich irritates me.

I think the big part of why Newt Gingrich has hung around as a pundit on Fox and a speaker at right-wing blatherfests is his talent for divisiveness. The OWS movement isn't about a "left/right" divide, however much he wants to demonize the left. (This seems to be his favorite hobby--he blames the left for everything from Susan Smith killing her babies, to plotting a secularist sharia, to his coffee getting cold.)


The "go get a job, after taking a bath" thing is probably a winning statement in culture war terms, where the protesters can just be looked down on as "dirty hippies". But the movement is broader than "hippies" vs. working people. Mayor Bloomberg, just the other day, was whinging about how the 99% was co-opted by unions. Well, duh. Working people who are concerned about jobs, compensation, and benefits also are the 99%. That's not co-optation--that's synergy. The right-wing blogs have been on about how they speculate that the long-definct ACORN is behind OWS because people involved with ACORN have turned up among the protesters. That's stupid, too. As I've written elsewhere:

The right is going to look for any connection they can from Acorn to the current Occupy movement—as if it had to be a conspiracy. Whereas I would see any overlap of persons involved in one organization and another movement as a natural event—being surprised at seeing a person who supported Acorn or NYCC also being an Occupy supporter is like wondering what, say, Jesse Jackson was doing at a civil rights march. Huh! Like, why would Gloria Steinem be at a feminist event? Why, it’s almost as if there were real issues that real people cared about, and regularly turned up to discuss!

The inequity of our current system is multilayered, intersectional, and intergenerational and goes well beyond "left/right". It is not something that can simply be placed in the "culture war" box of "hippies" vs. "straights."  Some of the people who have involved themselves are by no means hippies, and they are not slackers looking for a handout. I don't even think Gingrich is misconstruing what is going on, so much as deliberately misinterpreting it because his narrative lends him and his preferred listeners more comfort. If the concerns of OWS were just ginned-up fodder for the leftist grist mill, that would be one thing.  but you don't have to be a million-dollar historian to note that if the problem really was a majority of people recognizing that there was pervasive systematic inequality in terms of access of regular people to their government, people like him would be on the losing end of popular sentiment.

He could have expressed some understanding, but he went with a cheap "tough guy" laugh line to dismiss the concerns of real people willing to sleep on the streets in the cold, to march, and even face violence to express a point of view. That makes him a very small person in my eyes.