By now, you’re likely aware that, on last Sunday’s Meet the Press, host David Gregory asked GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich about his thoughts on Medicare. Gingrich’s response – in which he labeled Paul Ryan‘s voucher plan “right-wing social engineering” – quickly alienated him from his fellow Republicans.

Gingrich has since tried to claim that he was essentially “set up” during the interview, and that he now wishes he’d refused to answer Gregory’s question about whether Republicans should turn Medicare into a voucher program:

It’s a hypothetical baloney question that had no hope of happening. The Republicans don’t control the Senate. They don’t have the White House. They can’t do what Obama did. And I should just dismiss it. So, that was a mistake.

Gregory, meanwhile, is standing firmly by his question. And, what’s more, he definitely plans to ask Representative Ryan about Gingrich’s comments on this week’s Meet the Press.

Gingrich’s press secretary, Rick Tyler, is less than pleased with the media coverage surrounding Gingrich’s comments and told the Huffington Post as much in an email that should be required reading for the nation’s middle schoolers:

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.

Hark! Out of the billowing clouds of multi-colored glitter he flew, perched casually on a luminous Pegasus, circling ever higher above the writhing masses of ticked-off Tweeters and bulbous bloggers bobbing belligerently below.

h/t HuffPost

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