There are many people to blame on the political Right for the appalling landscape of American politics. Roger Ailes, who has been a race-baiter and professional liar par excellence ever since his days working for Nixon, and who is the evil presence behind Fox "News", the television propaganda arm of the Radical Right, certainly has been key. Utterly vile Republican political consultants, such as the late Lee Atwater and his apt pupil, Karl Rove, have lowered our politics to depths of ugliness and dishonesty so astonishing and depraved I would have hardly thought them possible at one time. Smirking racist and anti-Semite Patrick Buchanan has consistently interjected white supremacist poison into our discourse. And of course, the whole network of Right Wing Hate Radio hacks, led by vicious, corrupt, borderline-criminals such as Rush Limbaugh, vomits out a constant river of lies and smears. But in this whole despicable bunch, one figure stands out: Newt Gingrich, now the favorite to be the Republican candidate for president in 2012. Jonathan Alter has given us a useful reminder of this lying con-artists's personal history here:
In 1988, as a young representative, he helped drive House Speaker Jim Wright from office for allegedly violating House rules to profit from a book; at the same time Gingrich himself was skirting House rules to promote his own book. A decade later, in a separate matter involving a college course he taught, the Republican-controlled House made Gingrich the first speaker ever to be fined for violating House rules.
In 1989, he viciously attacked Democratic corruption at the House bank and post office. It turned out he was among those members overdrafting from the same House bank.
In 1994, he implied that liberals were at fault in the Susan Smith case, in which a mother infamously drowned her children. He later said the shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech stemmed from the same “situation ethics” of liberals.
In 1998, he led the fight to impeach President Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky affair while he was already five years into an extramarital affair of his own — with a congressional staffer (soon to be his third wife) who was 23 years his junior.
In 2009, he called Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a “racist” not long before he said the secret to understanding President Barack Obama was his embrace of the radical “Kenyan anti-colonial” mentality of his late father.
In 2011, he blasted the president for seeking the help of the United Nations instead of just bombing Libya unilaterally. After military action began, he said without blinking, “I would not have intervened.”
Liar. Right-wing radical. Moral lowlife. Smear-artist. Con man. Lobbyist king. That's Gingrich in a nutshell. And lest people allow themselves to be impressed by "professor" Gingrich's academic credentials, one of the commenters on this story makes an excellent point:
I wish people would stop referring to him as a history professor with the same tone of voice that they use for real academicians. He got his doctorate from Tulane studying Belgian education policy in the Congo. He taught at West Georgia College for crying out loud and couldn't get tenure. How bad do you have to be???
I don't doubt that the reason he was hired in the first place is that the year (1969) before he was hired (1970) the university went on a hiring binge where they got more new professors than had been on the whole faculty ten years prior.
If Freddie Mac paid $1.6 million for a "historian" with these credentials, then that in itself shows that Freddie Mac management is totally and completely inept.
Heh heh. well-put. And by the way, remember this: Gingrich ACTUALLY said that President Obama is a graver threat to America than Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler were. If he actually believes this, he's somewhere between an idiot and a lunatic. If he doesn't, he's a cynical, lying scumbag who is feeding the worst hatreds of the Radical Right's most unhinged members. In any event, he deserves to be politically crushed as thoroughly as any human in America deserves to be. In a way, it'll be fun if Gingrich is nominated by the lunatic Republicans.
We'll strip the bark off of this son-of-a-bitch.
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