WOULD JESUS VOTE FOR REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE NEWT GINGRICH?
by Robert Scheer for HUSTLER Magazine
If not for the well-established fact that most Republican primary voters are breathtakingly stupid, a columnist could safely assume that the Presidential campaign of Newt Gingrich would have collapsed by the time this is read. But never underestimate the ability of this particular blowhard to stick around. He has turned political hypocrisy into an art form and the debate over moral values into a carnival of competing sexual indulgences.
After all, Newt’s campaign only took off last fall because of the revelations of Herman Cain’s serial infidelities, exposing the then front- running family values candidate as a hypocrite who had allegedly sexually harassed several work colleagues. That sort of scandal is a difficult one for the Republican base to accept since its political theology proceeds from the notion that the second coming of Ronald Reagan was betrayed when the diabolical Bill Clinton was orally serviced by a lowly White House intern. There went the God-given City on the Hill to be replaced by gay marriages, the 9/11 attacks and the housing meltdown, all plagues cast upon us by that instrument of the devil, Representative Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts), a former chairman of the mighty House Financial Services Committee.
Not Bill Clinton, who—while devilish enough—had the saving grace of being a good ol’ white hetero Southern boy like George W. Bush and Newt on the Republican side. That expectation of white male depravity, as Confederate as pecan pie, is what allowed Gingrich to take Cain’s place as the front-runner in Republican primary polls last December because, in the deepest of Southern scripture, there is the assumption that when a “colored fellow” even looks at a woman, he’s already committed rape. But for a white dude, there is really no such thing as a sexual crime. Unless, of course, he marries a man.
Gingrich has kept his Christian values scorecard sufficiently high enough with most right-wing moral wing-nuts to be taken seriously as a Presidential contender. As to why some women have been willing to share their most intimate gifts with this despicable lout is for one of their gender to explain. But despicable Gingrich has been, with a trail of philandering so indelibly defined that it, on its own, obliterates any GOP claim to the moral high ground.
Don’t ever forget that in 1995 the Republican majority elected Newt Speaker of the House, third in line to succeed the President, when his sordid personal life was already known. That includes—in order to marry the woman with whom he was having an affair—discussing divorce terms with his cancer patient wife Jackie (Newt’s high school math teacher) while visiting her in the hospital a day after she had surgery. And Gingrich didn’t stop with betraying just one wife. No indeed, he was just getting started, hypocritically cheating on his second wife with an employee while he was leading the charge against Bill Clinton for doing the same thing. Although Newt was truer to Southern tradition, grabbing his satisfaction in the backseat of an American-made car.
Marianne Ginther, whom Gingrich had met at a 1980 Republican fund-raiser, said he asked her to marry him before his divorce from Jackie. He shed Marianne after learning his second wife had a disease that could lead to multiple sclerosis, she said, calling her on Mother’s Day 1999 to drop the Dbomb. In 2000, Gingrich wed Callista Bisek, a Congressional aide more than two decades younger than Newt, with whom he had a six year affair—while he was Speaker!
And Gingrich had the chutzpah to ask the Catholic Church to annul his 18-year marriage to Marianne because she reportedly had been previously married. Imagine the nonstop Fox News hysteria if the Democrats had elevated John Edwards to that level of national responsibility after the ugly truth was known of the Democrat’s comparable family betrayal.
While there are plenty of further salacious details that Gingrich will have to keep to himself during confessionals, I wonder if he converted to Catholicism in part because a church with so many sexual scandals of its own might be more forgiving of Newt’s sins. However, the Republican’s moral decadence in the economic arena should prove more problematic to a religion fond of invoking the example of Jesus.
Gingrich is all too typical of the corrupt moneychangers that Jesus threw out of the temple. As Newt was forced to acknowledge during the campaign, he received $1.6 million from Freddie Mac (the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation), one of the leading financial entities that enabled the greatest swindle of the poor whom Jesus sought to protect. Nor could Newt get away with saying that Freddie Mac was just one of them damn “guvnment banks” and that he was merely a humble historian warning the banksters of their errant ways.
On the contrary, Gingrich served as a false prophet for Freddie Mac, claiming at the height of the housing bubble that this “government-sponsored” financial institution should be the model for the nation’s major enterprises, including NASA. In reality, Freddie Mac is a privately owned company that is traded on the stock market and pays its highest-ranking executives in the $10 million-a-year range.
The government-sponsored angle meant only that the taxpayers would end up paying for all of Freddie Mac’s bad debts while the housing swindlers, from their own lucratively rewarded top execs to their banking partners among the biggest Wall Street banks, made out like bandits. Just like Newt Gingrich.
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Before serving almost 30 years as a Los Angeles Times columnist and editor, Robert Scheer spent the late 1960s as Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. Now editor of TruthDig.com, Scheer has written such hard hitting books as The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America and his latest, The Great American Stick-Up: Greedy Bankers and the Politicians Who Love Them.
