Enter
cause he’s so terribly confident in
his own ability to speak extemporaneously for hours on end. Well,
I can only posit that at some time
between the 2012 presidential campaign and the premiere of Crossfire,
Gingrich fell out of love with the
sound of his own voice.
The sheer number of minutes
that Gingrich sat on the teevee,
not saying things, was simply
staggering. I could not fathom it.
The best explanation I can offer
is that he has come to the show
during a period of his life where
his goal is to underachieve, and he
sees “winning” at Crossfire as just
sitting there and saying as little as
the show’s producers will allow.
Neither host, however, seemed to
know how to push the conversation
along so that it went anywhere. Both
hosts, in fact, managed to ask their
guests the same question twice, allowing them ample opportunities to
keep repeating their positions, over
and over again. Cutter and Gingrich
followed suit, repeating their own
positions, over and over again. It
was like watching four people try to
filibuster CNN.
And the show’s hosts didn’t seem
at all ready, or even interested, in
contending with the assertions
their guests made. This led to an
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IN ANGST
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09.15.13
extraordinary moment in the second half of the show, when Gingrich
finally summoned the energy to ask
an interesting question of Menendez: “If, in fact, you go ahead with
votes in the House, and if in fact
the president loses decisively, is
he then constrained from acting?
Having come to the Congress, is he
bound by the Congress?”
Menendez responded, “I think
the president — that’s a decision
... in an act of comical
arrogance, it was decided
that events in Syria made
returning CNN’s famously
fusty panel show to the
airwaves critically important
for the good of the nation.”
the commander in chief has to
make,” adding, “He’ll have to determine that question.”
You know, it’s not every day
you see a high-ranking member
of Congress go on teevee, aggressively cast himself as a nonentity, and essentially say, “Oh,
I don’t expect the president to
consider what we say or abide by
it.” And yet, here you had Gingrich — a guy who used to be the