Department of NSFW GOP Purple Prose

For all the delight we have taken in observing Newt Gingrich’s recent self-immolation, one of the more pleasurable developments of the one-time Speaker of the House’s train-wreck is the laughable reaction it triggered in Gingrich press secretary Rick Tyler. Here’s Tyler’s statement, a harried, defensive and ultimately counter-productive explosion of purple prose, delivered to a reporter for The Huffington Post not long after Gingrich’s now notorious Meet The Press interview:

The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding, Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. 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. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.

The pen is, as they say, mightier than the sword, but this statement reminds us of nothing so much as that scene in The Bourne Identity where Matt Damon’s character fights off an assassin with a ballpoint pen… except imagine that rather than disabling the assassin with a well placed jab to the neck, the scene had ended with Damon’s caracter stabbing himself in the eye. Shadenfreude is never so enjoyable as when the victim is a pompous ass.

Reading this delightful tract brought back fond memories of other great moments in right-wing literary hackery, and so we invite you to take a trip down memory lane and relive the best bad writing by right-wing luminaries of the last several decades…

Let us begin with Lewis “Scooter” Libby. While Libby’s literary edeavours are perhaps best summed up by noting that he once wrote a novel in which a geisha is raped by a bear, his best piece of bad writing is probably the last paragraph of the letter that Dick Cheney’s errand boy wrote to imprisoned New York Times journalist Judith Miller, releasing her from the vow of confidentiality that prevented her from spilling the beans on the whole Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson affair:

“You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover–Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work—and life. Until then, you will remain in my thoughts and prayers.”

The laughably florid prose, saccarine sentimentalism, and odd references to aspens led more than one blogger to speculate that Libby was attempting to send a coded message “in plain sight” suggesting to Miller which way her testimony should go. It’s possible, however, given Libby’s aforementioned literary pretensions that he was simply being an awful writer… again.

And while we’re on the subject of Dick Cheney and his minions, who can forget Lynne Cheney? Behind every successful Vampire is the creepy servant who transports his coffin during the day and procures virgins for him to feast on when the sun goes down. And what made Lynne Cheney such a peculiar one-eyed hunchback servant to the monster was a novel she wrote in 1981 called Sisters. Wait… let me rephrase that: what made Lynne Cheney so peculiar was the homo-erotic, lesbian, frontier romance she wrote in 1981 called Sisters. Feast your eyes on two of this literary masterpiece’s most celebrated passages:

The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage — no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were. She felt curiously moved, curiously envious of them. She had never to this moment thought Eden a particularly attractive paradise, based as it was on naiveté, but she saw that the women in the cart had a passionate, loving intimacy forever closed to her. How strong it made them. What comfort it gave.

…

Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. We shall find ourselves a secluded bower where they dare not venture. There will be only the two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons of sweet retirement. In the evenings, I shall read to you while you work your cross-stitch in the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl.

Yes, we are willing to give the Cheneys’ a little break here, given that they have expressed public support for gay marriage, but since everything else about the family is absolutely, irredeemably, horrible, we’re only willing to give them a teensy, tiny break.

And this brings us to our final, and most NSFW reminiscence of the day. During the years 2002 to 2008 george W. Bush, the worst president of America’s worst administration ever, had no greater defender than one Bill O’Reilly. Well versed in the practice of sexual harrasment and wierd sexual food fetishes, O’Reilly was also an accomplished bad writer, having penned a curious piece of whack literature cum political fiction titled Those Who Trespass. The novel is too filty to quote at length in a family publication like Stinque, however, the best and most celebrated passage is probably the following:

Ashley was now wearing only brief white panties. She had signaled her desire by removing her shirt and skirt, and by leaning back on the couch. She closed her eyes, concentrating on nothing but Shannon’s tongue and lips. He gently teased her by licking the areas around her most sensitive erogenous zone. Then he slipped her panties down her legs and, within seconds, his tongue was inside her, moving rapidly.

And, oh joy, you can read the rest of this lurid tale (with one hand on your mouse) thanks to the magic of Google Books. Word of caution: that style of “writing” (if you can call it that) marches on implacably for several dog-eared, spooge stained pages.