Newt Gingrich tells OWS protesters to get a bath and a job, MSNBC livid

Newsbusters reports that hosts at MSNBC were livid Monday morning after GOP Presidential candidate and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Occupy Wall Street protesters should occupy a job after they occupy a bathtub.

"All of the occupy movements start with the premise that we all owe them everything," Gingrich said Saturday at a "Thanksgiving Table" forum in Iowa.

"They take over a public park they didn't pay for; To go nearby to go to bathrooms they didn't pay for; to beg for food from places they didn't pay for; to instruct those who go to work to pay the taxes to sustain the bathrooms and to sustain the park, so they can self-righteously proclaim that they are the paradigms of virtue for which we owe everything," he added. 

"Now that is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country and why you need to assert something as simple as saying to them, 'Go get a job right after you take a bath,'" he concluded, to a cheering crowd.

On Monday, Newsbusters' Mark Finkelstein reported that MSNBC sidekick Mika Brzezinski nearly had an apoplectic fit while discussing the issue.

"It wasn't merely Mika's words: "arrogant, disgusting, sickened."  So strongly ran Brzezinski's rage that more than once her voice quavered and she seemed on some sort of emotional brink," Finkelstein wrote.

According to Brzezinsky, Gingrich's words were "arrogant" and "disgusting."  Apparently, she is unaware of the disease and filth that have become standard for many of the camps.  Nor is she apparently aware of the 200 pounds of human excrement found near the Occupy Santa Cruz camp - the same camp that has been occupied by ringworm and scabies. 

Naturally, her guest agreed.

Finkelstein posted a transcript of the exchange:

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Wow. It's really not surprising, coming from me, but that's about the most arrogant and un-self-aware, and those are probably the only words I can use [inaudible] for any politician in this Republican field to say.

JEFFREY SACHS [income redistribution fan and Columbia prof]: Disgusting.

 

BRZEZINSKI: Disgusting.

 

SACHS: Absolutely disgusting.  No sense of any meaning at all of this.  Absolutely revolting, actually.  And especially when what they're protesting against is the incredible abuse of power, the criminality on Wall Street and so forth that he--he has taken his millions of dollars.  It's shocking!

 

BRZEZINSKI: Someone needs a bath, and I don't think it's the people from Occupy Wall Street. That's all I'm going to say.  I've got nothing else. I'm so disgusted by that that something horrible is going to come . . . I, I, am I alone here? Am I over-reacting [note quavering voice]? I'm sickened by that . . . It's fair to say he's in the 1%, correct? He's telling the 99% to take a bath and get a job?  Really? Really, I wonder how they do that right now. How, given the state of this country, how anyone's going to just get a job and take a bath. Who is this man?  Who does he think he is? And why is he surging in the polls? I don't get it.  I mean,to hear Newt Gingrich standing on literally his high horse, after taking advantage of the system, cashing in, being the biggest, literally the biggest hypocrite in the Repubican field, probably in politics today.  The biggest hypocrite.  And then to cast aspersions and to speak down to these people as if--plghhh--they should be flipped away? It's disgusting.  It's absolutely disgusting.  It's a very angry way to start the show. I'm extremely sorry.  But it's the first time I'd seen that.  And it literally made my skin crawl.  I can't believe he resonates. 

"I know he's trying, that is Newt Gingrich, trying to appeal to conservatives, but could this kind of toxic language end up ultimately backfiring?" Roberts asked guest David Goodfriend, a Democratic strategist.

 

"I think it could" Goodfriend agreed, noting how his party had dismissed the appeal of the Tea Party protests, adding, "The Tea Party represented a bona fide feeling among American voters, and I would say the same thing of the Occupy movement."
 

"To take this sort of cartoonish picture that Newt Gingrich is painting as gospel looks past the fact that you've got retired police captains and moms and teachers along with young people in those parks," the former Clinton White House staffer argued.

"Right, out of work veterans, too, who have returned home from fighting the wars" might be offended by Gingrich's comments, Roberts helpfully added to Goodfriend's argument that they were "politically risky, even on the right."