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With the coronation of George Bush as president in 2000, despite the fact hundreds of thousands more citizens had voted for his opponent, a new level of meanness has been introduced into America's domestic and international politics. America's claim to being a civilized nation is now very much in question.
George Bush has shown that America can be a bully, not only to the world but to its own citizens. He talks but doesn't make sense -- he says things that are patently ridiculous and nonsensical, yet the media hardly ever notices. He's discovered the power of being a bully, because there's nothing else persuasive about him. But he gets away with it because the media ?is, for whatever reasons, letting him get away with it.
Before Bush, leaders usually tried to rule by eloquence, by wit, by powerful arguments. But Bush wins by bullying and intimidation. And why not? It's a style that has served the four men we will be talking about here well over the years.
PART 2 - It's educational to learn that when Newt Gingrich and cohorts in Congress were spending $40 million of taxpayer dollars to investigate charges against [former President] Clinton ranging from murder to corruption, all they could come up with was a blowjob with an intern. The $40 million blowjob!
Clinton must have been the most honest politician ever to come to Washington if that's all they cold dig up on him.
Gingrich was a leader in the lynching by the "Hamas wing of the Republican Party" against Clinton for his supposedly unpresidential indiscretion. Yet, at the time, he [Gingrich] was having his own wild affair with an intern - even as he called those who dared to disagree with him "The enemy of normal Americans."
Some say that the problems began when Gingrich got peeved at Clinton because the President failed to give him a nice seat aboard Air Force One. Worse, Gingrich felt Clinton was patently ignoring Gingrich on that flight. Gingrich reacted by peevishly closing down the Congress in an attempt to control it, which failed spectacularly at the time -- 1998. His "Contract on America" - in fairness that was a Democratic description of the contract - was really a contract on Clinton and the Democrats and some would argue, by extension, the nation.
In essence, the Republicans, and in particular, Gingrich, threw a temper tantrum. They tried to close the government down, a move rejected by the majority of voters in the 1998 congressional elections when Gingrich was dethroned.
Gingrich, of course, was engaged in nothing that Republicans haven't been trying to do ever since Franklin Delano Roosevelt - they were trying to close down the social compact implied in the New Deal.
As we said, the effort backfired in the 1998 elections -- and Gingrich was forced to back down.
Newt was not of the manor born. There was a kind of hard scrabbleness to his childhood. When she was 16, his mother Kit married a hard drinking, brawling fellow. She left him when he hit her once too many times. Next, Newt's mother wed Robert Gingrich, who adopted the boy in 1962.
I
n the late '60s, Gingrich was smoking dope and married his high school math teacher to get a deferment from Vietnam.
As a young campaigner in the '70s, he had one main drawback, according to Dot Crews, his campaign scheduler at the time. "We would have won in 1974 if we could have kept him out of the office, screwing her [a young volunteer] on the desk."
Not only did he serve his first wife divorce papers while she was in a hospital bed, he became a deadbeat dad. The local Bap
tist Church had to take up collections for their children because Newt refused to pay support for them. She had to go to court to get him to keep the lights on. Gingrich was like another fellow Southern Baptist in another important way. He liked blowjobs, in part because he could, like his fellow Southern Baptist, good ol' boy Clinton, deny having sex - at least technically. Blowjobs meant you could say you never slept with the woman.
He taught at a backwater college in West Georgia where he had an affair with Anne Manning, wife of another professor there. It was Manning who explained that Gingrich preferred oral sex. "He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, 'I never slept with her.'" Despite the fact that Gingrich appeared at Christian Coalition events, he also was caught in someone's car with someone's wife giving him a blowjob. Hence his reelection promise in 1978. ?"When elected, Newt will keep his family together." But alas, it was not to be. Newt ran for Congress a couple of times in the å70s. He married his first wife when he was 19. A few years later he got divorced and married Mary Ginther. As he was having an affair with his next wife to be, he demanded a couple of congressmen be expelled for having affairs with their pages. He was elected Speaker of the house in January, 1985.
A decade after that, he was proclaiming to the Conference of Mayors that Victorian England should be lauded as a model, because it reestablished, "values, by moral leadership and by being willing to look at people in the face and say, 'You should be ashamed.'" This is the same man who also explained about his first wife, that she wasn't "young enough or pretty enough to be the President's wife" (she in turned said "I don't want him to be president and I don't think he should be"). He was actually considering a run for the presidency in 1996.
In talking about Clinton's problems with Monica Lewinsky, Gingrich said, "Around the world today, the institution of the presidency has been degraded to the point that it is viewed as the rough equivalent of the Jerry Springer show - a level of disrespect and decadence that should appall every American."
He then predicted - on Rush Limbaugh's show - in July, 1998, that the Republicans would win as many as five seats in the Senate, 400 in the Congress, three governors and 500 state legislators. He later said the odds were even better than that.
When the numbers went the other way from what he had predicted, he blamed it on the media fascination with Lewinsky. "I mean, I totally underestimated the degree to which people would just get sick of 24-hour-a-day talk television and talk radio and then the degree to which this whole scandal became just sort of disgusting by sheer repetition."
When is the last time you talked politics with your dog?
But perhaps more important than the joys of the flesh, the sin of lust, was his unerring attraction to money. Such as the deal he made with Rupert Murdoch, the $4.5 million book deal, the House Banking Scandal in which he bounced 22 checks, the secret pay raises, the Lincoln Town Car limousine and chauffeur, the sliding scale between donations made for his politics and those for his personal comfort.
The famed book deal of 1995 was particularly interesting. Harper Collins was owned by Rupert Murdoch, of Fox News infamy. Rupert needed help - a lot of Americans were rather pissed off by his robber baron type ways. Making an overly handsome book advance to someone with whom Murdoch was having some sort of help with regulatory problems was pretty much a pattern for him, whether it was Margaret Thatcher or Jeffrey Archer or Deng Xiaoping's daughter.
Gingrich was not terribly forthcoming about the book advance. He finally admitted he had sat with Murdoch on a park bench the week before the deal and just talked - perhaps about the weather, because he insisted the book deal was not discussed.
There were various other little scams - he regularly used third-rate cracker colleges from the South to indoctrinate people in Christian politics, very much in the same way Saudi-financed Moslem schools teach Moslem fundamentalist values. He taught a "college course" in right-wing ideology and rich folks contributed to it. He almost got busted by the proper federal authorities for that one.
Newt was an academic - he taught history at West Georgia College. He ran for Congress three times, starting in 1974, before he was elected in 1978.
What is odd, for a man who was patently so avaricious and kind of a sexual predator, was that he delighted in accusing Democrats of the same types of things. He made a career of this, in fact, until he was hoisted by his own petard.
He was the evil genius behind the right-wing conservative sweep that included "The Contract With America." Democrats quickly renamed it the "Contract on America," because, in fact, that is what it was. Luckily his monumental arrogance and venality ultimately sank him and his career.
Gingrich was and no doubt still is a real piece of work. And, for that matter, so are the others in the Gang of Four.
He sometimes said nice things about Clinton, because they were both kind of good ol' boys, with all that implies, but mostly hated him in the worst kind of way.
At one point, for instance, he proclaimed that Clinton wasn't warlike enough, as if that was some sort of character defect. (In fact Clinton racked up quite a bit of mileage on the old military coin box himself in Haiti, in Yugoslavia, in Africa, and various other places -- including Iraq).
What isn't easy to answer is how much of a committed right-wing demagogue was Gingrich. A former political adviser who apologized for having unleashed Gingrich on the nation, L. H. Carter, offered this interpretation of him. "The important thing you have to understand about Newt Gingrich is that he is amoral ... There isn't any right or wrong, there isn't any conservative or liberal. There's only what will work best for Newt Gingrich. He's probably one of the most dangerous people for the future of this country that you can possibly imagine. He's Richard Nixon ?glib." Then Carter said that it didn't "matter how much good I do the rest of my life," the fact he helped create Gingrich will besmirch him for eternity.
Who is the real ideologue - Gingric
h or Limbaugh? The Nazis had plenty of Limbaugh-type characters around, true believers, sort of small time bullies and thugs who got their chance to be big time bullies - some of the thugs were physical thugs and others were intellectual bullies. Gingrich probably had a bit of disdain for some of the scruffy types around him - but his motivations were crass enough to overlook them.
But America shouldn't overlook the radical right, and in particular that unpleasant marriage of Christian fundamentalism combined with right wing politics - politics that border on the fascist.
[TO BE CONTINUED IN THE NEXT EDITION - Ed.]
LOS ANGELES, CA, USA - [Reprinted from last edition's introduction to this series. - Ed.] They're the most unappetizing gang of hypocrites and liars ever, these spawn of the "Reagan Revolution." We're talking about Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Jerry Fallwell and Henry Hyde.
By November of 1998 he announced he was resigning - and then actually did resign in January of 1999. He married yet another wife -- Calista Bisek -- in August of 2000, a woman described as a "willowy blond Congressional aide 23 years his junior." All through the Clinton-Lewinsky adultery scandal, Gingrich was busy denouncing Clinton for adultery while he himself was dating his third wife to be while he was still married to his his second wife. She sang in the National Shrine Choir. Many a night he would read his Bible while waiting for her at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. They would end up having breakfast together and, hopefully, a nice time inbetween. Newt left behind Marianne, his wife of 18 years.
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LIONEL ROLFE is the author of Literary L.A., Fat Man on the Left and the forthcoming, "The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather." Portions of this article will appear in Anna Nevenic's Hidden Agenda: Conservatives, Fundamentalists and the Republican Party.
WEB SITE PICK OF THE WEEK: If you listen to radio broadcast on the Web, we've got two fun places for you to go. Hear the likes of Al Franken and Jeneane Garafalo on AirAmerica Radio. Then could check out the younger generation of hell-raisers on Radio Subversion. Enjoy!
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