What They Are

(Photo: © Newscom / Wenn)

A long time ago, I was involved in speech and debate competitions. 'Extemporaneous Speaking' was one category, where you were handed a slip of paper with three topics chosen from current news events. To compete, you had to know what was going on in the world; to inform yourself (so our debate coach told us), you had to read the weekly news magazines of the 1950's and 60's: Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report.

It was clear from their editorials, and the general focus of their articles, that the major news magazines were ideologically split: U.S. News was solidly conservative; Time, a creation of Ol' Henry Luce, was Center-Right; and Newsweek (owned by the Washington Post's redoubtable liberal publisher, Katherine Graham) leaned to the Left. This editorial split remained true for nearly forty years.

In the early 1990's, when the Republicans had taken control of the House, and Newt Gingrich had become the new Speaker and the intellectual power of the GOP, I remember Newsweek publishing a balanced portrait of the man -- even so, you walked away thinking This guy's a vicious little ass. What led me to that conclusion were two incidents Newsweek had reported.

Gingrich had grown up with a stepfather, an officer at the U.S. Army's infantry school at Ft. Benning, Georgia; he had been diagnosed with cancer when Gingrich had just begun his political career in the Congress.

At one point, the stepfather had broken down, exhausted by disease and treatment, crying, telling his family he was frightened of dying. Newt refused to comfort him, telling him to "Shut up and act like a man".

Nice.

The second vignette is by now well-known, but when Newsweek reported the story, it was a fresh revelation: That Gingrich had served his first wife, Jackie Battley, with divorce papers as she was lying in a hospital bed recovering from Uterine cancer surgery.

Very nice.

A year later, he married again -- and he would divorce his second wife, Marianne, under similar circumstances as she was suffering from a serious illness -- to marry a young staffer with whom he'd been having sex in his office, or in his car in the Congressional parking garage ("If you see my car rockin'", he reportedly told an aide at the time, "don't come knockin'").

Over the years, the magazines have been sold (Newsweek will shortly be sold to Sidney Karmann, billionaire and partner/founder of Harmann-Kardon). Since 1992 and Newt's "Contract For America", our political Right has become more and more strident and aggressive; even Gingrich has been outdistanced by the ramblings of a Rand Paul, or the continuing drama of a Glenn Beck.

And, publishers have decided that it's better to go with what they believe is the future of America: Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Rupert Murdoch, Evangelicals and Teabaggers. Newsweek made a right turn some time ago. They would never publish the kind of portrait of Gingrich as they had in 1994 when it appeared he might be poised to run for President against Clinton.

And Ol' Newt is resurgent -- now appearing on the Sunday talk shows as the intellectual, the rapid-speaking leader-in-waiting of America's conservative movement. He's opened PACs and already received sizable contributions for a possible Presidential run in 2012.

This week, Esquire magazine published an article about Gingrich -- actually, an extended interview with Gingrich's second wife, Marianne (Newt is currently on wife number four, I think).

It's not pretty. Apparently, Herr Gingrich just couldn't keep his zipper up and his wick dry, and had been congenitally unfaithful to Marianne. And everyone knew it; Gingrich turned out to be the cause of his own political demise.

One night, Marianne says, Bill Clinton called from the White House. She answered the phone and the President asked if he could please speak to her husband. Could the Speaker come over immediately? After he hung up, Newt summoned his driver and went in the back door to the Oval Office. During that meeting, he would tell her later, Clinton laid it out for him: "You're a lot like me," he told him.

A classic scene, something right out of All The King's Men: In the Oval Office, Clinton gets up from behind the same desk used by JFK, takes Gingrich over to the sofas in the middle of the room and tells him they're two Southern boys. They're a lot alike. Then he tells Newt what they had on him about his sexual escapades, and that if he stepped out of line he'd be washed up in politics and in Washington.

Ironic, given what happened to The Clenis a year later.

Newt Gingrich was muzzled in the critical run-up to the [19]98 midterms. Three weeks before the election, Gingrich got a visit from Kenneth Duberstein, a senior Republican who had served as chief of staff to Ronald Reagan.

[Marianne recounted to Esquire] "He says, 'What's going on? We're gonna lose seats if something doesn't change.' "

Marianne jumped in, too. "I asked Newt, 'What are you doing? Why aren't we out there blasting them?' "

This was his true turning point, she believes. As his personal failures and his political contradictions closed in on him, she began to entertain fears about his fundamental decency.

So, Newt Gingrich is a vicious little ass, a serial adulterer, a liar, and Esquire lays it out rather neatly.

Please pay attention to this part, though, because it will be on the final: If, despite plentiful evidence about his character, Newt still becomes one of the GOP front-runners (if not their candidate) for President in 2012 -- then I would become very, very afraid.

Look: The actual unemployment rate in America is between 16 and 18 per cent. The "recovery" has stalled. The Republicans in Congress will do nothing, and the Democrats can't seem to do the right thing because they've sold their soul to the Fed and the Banksters. Communities are laying off teachers, firefighters, police; roads are being plowed back to gravel; they're talking about doing away with Social Security and Medicare -- and no one is out in the streets raising their voices about any of it.

The possibility of a Gingrich Presidency would be as bad as Lil' Boots Bush (the only difference is, Gingrich has a better command of spoken English) -- but if such a thing ever becomes possible, it will be because -- even with clear evidence of what kind of man he is -- it would not matter to voters.

It would be more proof (if you needed it, that is) that the game is rigged; the fix is in; that it's Chinatown -- and that Americans will prefer government by sociopaths; and proof that the lowest common denominator in this country will have suddenly fallen to depths unimaginable even twenty years ago.

If you want to stop and consider that for a moment, it's what many thinking Germans must have felt when their country mutated into something clearly and unmistakably malignant, right in front of their eyes.

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