A wonderful article from Mother Jones, providing numerous sourced quotes of the odious Newt. Please go read it.
Fair use allows me three paragraphs, I think, so let me choose some good ones (MJ has 3 pages worth).
GODWIN
1983 He compares Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill to Chamberlain: "He may not know any better. He may not understand freedom versus slavery...in the tradition of [former British Prime Ministers] Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, whose only weakness was they left their nation with war with Nazi Germany."
JERK
1989 He explains to the Washington Post why he fights with his second wife, Marianne: "It's not even that it matters to me. It's just the habit of dominance, the habit of being the center of my staff and the center of the news media." Newt gives the marriage a "53–47" shot of surviving.
He's not a good bettor, either.
SHAMELESS
1994 A South Carolina woman, Susan Smith, murders her two sons. Gingrich draws the only logical conclusion: "I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things. The only way you get change is to vote Republican.
APOCALYPTIC
2005 Gingrich's latest greatest threat to America is the American Civil Liberties Union. "[I]t's almost as though they were into destruction for its own sake and weakening and undermining America for its own sake." He also labels the group "a consistently destructive organization that is opposed to and undermines the values of most Americans, and takes positions that are consistently weakening the security of the United States.
I know, that's four. But there's just so much Newty goodness!
Please go read the rest yourself. The key one (which I did not quote because you really should go read it all) was when he sent out a message to 4,000 GOP politicians advising them what words they should use to describe Democrats. The word "traitors" is among them. This demonstrates two key facts about Newt - his unselfconscious arrogance and his vicious mean-spirited nature.
Update
Hardball also went over Newt's past statements. Here's some quotes from their
transcript:
MEREDITH VIEIRA, CO-HOST, “THE TODAY SHOW”: You say that Obama and the Democrats are pushing what you call this secular socialist agenda, and you write—quote—“The secular socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.”
Can you honestly compare what‘s going on with the Democrats to Nazi Germany?
NEWT GINGRICH, FORMER SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: No, I—look, it is not a question of how evil they were. Nazi Germany was terrible. Stalin‘s Russia was terrible. Mao‘s China was terrible.
It is a question of finality. Had we lost either of those contests, we would have become a radically different country. The secular socialist agenda clearly is for an America fundamentally different than America has been for the last 400 years.
Here is Newt a year ago talking about the president. Let‘s listen.
We got a lot of footage of this guy.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, 2010)
GINGRICH: The president of the United States, the most radical president in American history, has now thrown down the gauntlet to the American people. He has said: I run a machine. I own Washington. And there‘s nothing you can do about it.
GINGRICH: Look, I think that there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us is prepared to use violence to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion.
And I'll end my update with a quote from David Corn of MSNBC:
CORN: Newt Gingrich is Glenn Beck with better syntax.