Krauthammer says Gingrich is done:
Gingrich has since apologized to Ryan. Josh Marshall is amazed by how terribly Newt has run out of the gate:
There's a lot of fear among House Republicans — especially the many freshmen from competitive districts — about this Medicare vote hanging over them. They all have to realize that they have to hang together on this. Division is lethal. So it's no surprise that Newt's flippant criticism — in characteristically brash and florid style — are bringing them down on him like a ton of bricks. It's aggression rooted in fear.
JPod goes deeper:
There is nothing wrong in itself with Gingrich saying he opposes aspects of Ryan’s budget plan. That plan is not the flag; it does not need to be saluted. It’s a set of proposals and, as Gingrich noted, the proposal involving Medicare isn’t popular taken in isolation. Debating the issues is perfectly fine. It’s the way Gingrich talks about things that is so awful. He is incapable of disagreeing on any matter about anything without creating a whirlpool of negativity that ends up sucking in his own confreres while leaving his partisan and ideological antagonists amazingly untouched.
I hate to sound all pious and stuff, but this dynamic doesn't help us on the debt question at all. What Ryan has done, I fear, is stigmatize the case for entitlement reform by essentially ending one entitlement altogether and replacing it with an insufficient subsidy. Mathematically, if you just want to free the federal government from this burden, it works. Politically, it is so ham-handed on Medicare that it has actually failed to move the goalposts to the right and may be moving them toward the left.
We may have two consecutive elections based on Medicare scares. First: fear of Obamacare. Second: fear of Ryan's Randian radicalism. And now Coburn is bailing.
The Dish 