Friday, March 9, 2007

Gingrich, Sex, and Libby


Stop the presses: Newt Gingrich had an extramarital affair!

That's the political news of the day--but it's not really news. The fact that he had an affair with a congressional aide more than two decades his junior and dumped his second wife (after she had been diagnosed with a neurological disorder) was no secret. The news is that Gingrich confessed the affair during an appearance on the radio show of social-con guru James Dobson. The subject at hand was the "growing threat of radical Islam," but Gingrich, who is pondering a presidential bid, took the occasion to bare his soul to the religious right powerbroker.

During the interview, Gingrich argued he was no hypocrite for having led the impeachment crusade against Bill Clinton, who had lied to cover up his own sexual trysting. Here's what the former speaker of the House said:

The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge. I drew a line in my mind that said, 'Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed, and even though at a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept ... perjury in your highest officials.


What a brave and noble fellow he was, willing to be publicly embarrassed for the greater good (of impeaching Clinton). Of course, he didn't say anything about his own sexual peccadilloes at the time. But consider the last sentence of that quote: he could not ignore "perjury in your highest officials." Isn't that a fine standard to apply when considering the case (and the conviction) of Scooter Libby? No doubt, Gingrich will soon be out on the talk show circuit vigorously criticizing all his fellow conservatives who have decried the prosecution of Libby and who are demanding that George W. Bush pardon Libby immediately. Or will this be another one of those times, as Gingrich told Dobson, "that I have fallen short of my own standards"?

Posted by David Corn at March 9, 2007 10:08 AM

8 comments:

capt said...

RS,

EXCELLENT!!




capt

Robert S said...


The Unspeakable Truth
by Stirling Newberry | Mar 8 2007 - 5:21pm


******************************

Well, as opposed to the Laugh-In montage in the last thread, this is a little light reading for the day...

Gerald said...

Saladin in a couple earlier threads said that the Mayan priests will purify a site visited by Bush.

I sense a new scandal brewing in the cesspool city, aka Washington, D.C. The new scandal is FUMIGATE. Wherever Bush visits, those places must be fumigated.

In Latin America Bush says to the people that they must find alternative energies. Wonderful!!! Why has he failed to say that to the Americans? The reason may be that he intends to send troops to whatever Latin American country has oil and give it over to the American oil companies.

Robert S said...

Gerald, it is already a precedent. When Bush visited Ghandi's memorial in India they had Hindu priests purify the area afterwards...

Gerald said...

Robert S., thank you for that information! There's not much hype from the MSM regarding Bush's visits to other countries and how much purification is needed for a site to be clean again.

Gerald said...

I love this country. Gingrich is toying with the possibility that he will enter the presidential race. He's been married three times and he is a womanizer. Now, he's pandering to Dobson and the religious right for an endorsement. I will now have to wait and see if Gingrich, the Nazi pimp, will receive an endorsement from the religious reichwingers. You really have to love the land of pimps and prostitutes, aka Nazi America and the evil empire.

capt said...

WMR



Another Washington Post outrage. Longtime journalists, government officials, and politicians are increasingly bemoaning the fact that the Washington Post, the one-time paper of record in Washington, DC, has become a virtual propaganda arm of the Bush administration and the neo-conservative wings of both major political parties. It is a fact that one retired editor of the Post has stated personally to this editor that WMR is covering the sort of hard-hitting stories that the Post used to delve into. But no more.

It took a former Washington Post reporter named Denis Collins, who just also happened to be a member of the Scooter Libby jury, to ask the question his former employer should have been asking, "It was said a number of times, 'What are we doing with this guy [Libby] here? Where's Rove, where's you know, where are these other guys?' We're not saying that we didn't think Mr. Libby was guilty of the things we found him guilty of but that it seemed like he was to put it in Mr. Wells' [Libby's lawyer] point, he was the fall guy."

The answer to "Where's Rove?" was settled last May when the White House and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales turned the American justice system on its head by pressuring the special prosecutor to scotch a sealed indictment of Rove brought by the grand jury. Rove walked, Cheney remains unscathed, and Rove is now preparing for George W. Bush's legacy by staffing an assessment on that legacy if Bush pardons Libby.

Yesterday, the Washington Post on ce again showed its true colors when GOP and neocon hack Howard Kurtz wrote about the case of imprisoned online journalist Josh Wolf, jailed for refusing to turn over to a grand jury video footage he shot of an anti-Group of Eight demonstration in San Francisco. Kurtz first questions whether Wolf is a journalist (when, in fact, the question should be whether Kurtz, married to a GOP political strategist, is a journalist?).

Kurtz then quotes University of California Los Angeles law professor Eugene Volokh, of all people, about whether Wolf has a right to confidentiality. Volokh is an ardent neocon blogger (his blog is called "The Volokh Conspiracy") who is uniquely unqualified to comment on professional journalism issues. In any case, it is not in the pages of the Washington Post where one would want to read about the definition of a journalist. There are not enough there to make such a qualified determination.


More HERE

David B. Benson said...

I noticed an art poster, circa 1970, at the lunch stop today:

A daisy and
"War is bad for children and other living things."