“There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”
The speaker wasn’t President John F. Kennedy. Or President Bill Clinton. It was would-be President and “Mr. Family Values” Newt Gingrich.
The date for his riveting confession was March 8, 2011. And the reason for it: He intended to run for President–and wanted to launch a pre-emptive strike on critics who would charge him with being an adulterer and a hypocrite.
“And what I can tell you is that when I did things that were wrong, I wasn’t trapped in situation ethics, I was doing things that were wrong, and yet, I was doing them.
“I found that I felt compelled to seek God’s forgiveness. Not God’s understanding, but God’s forgiveness. I do believe in a forgiving God. And I think most people, deep down in their hearts hope there’s a forgiving God.”
And well he might. He has a lot to be forgiven for.
Perhaps his greatest moment as a hypocrite came while he was Speaker of the House of Representatives.
In 1998, the news broke that President Clinton had been trysting with a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. Gingrich lost no time in telling the nation what a moral disgrace Clinton was.
Of course, he didn’t bother informing the nation that he was well into an extramarital affair of his own.
It was by no means his first. Consider the following:
- While still a 16-year-old junior in high school, Newt Gingrich began an affair with his high school geometry teacher, 23-year-old Jackie Battley, in 1959.
- Gingrich had affairs with numerous campaign volunteers during his first two unsuccessful bids for a House seat from Georgia, in 1974 and 1976, according to multiple sources.
- Anne Manning, then married to another professor at West Georgia, became romantically involved with Gingrich during his 1976 campaign.
- In January, 1980, he met 28-year-old Marianne Ginther. The married congressman proposed to her within weeks, despite the fact that he hadn’t yet filed for a divorce from Jackie.
- In April, 1980, Gingrich told Jackie that he wanted a divorce.
- Gingrich was in such a hurry to divorce Jackie that he personally served her with divorce papers while she lay in a hospital bed, recovering from cancer surgery.
- In 1981, Gingrich married Marianne Ginther.
- By 1984, the marriage was in decline, and the couple regularly spent months at a time apart from each other.
- In 1993, a year before he became Speaker of the House of Representatives, Gingrich met then 28 year-old Callista Bisek.
- Doing his heroic best to lead both a married and a bachelor life, Gingrich was regularly seen with Bisek in Washington.
- In 1997, after a four-year investigation of his campaign financing schemes, the House Ethics Committee reprimanded and fined Gingrich $300,000.
- Following widespread GOP losses in the 1998 mid-term elections, Gingrich resigned from the House in November, 1998.
- In May, 1999, he told Marianne he wanted a divorce.
- During a joint counseling session, “Mr. Family Values” asked her if she would tolerate his ongoing affair with Callista Bisek to preserve their marriage. Marianne refused.
- While still married to Marianne, Gingrich proposed to Callista Bisek.
- Gingrich and Callista were married in August, 2000.
And how does Gingrich explain all this very non-“family values” series of adulterous couplings?
When his former wife, Marianne, asked Gingrich how he could give speeches preaching family values while flagrantly violating his marriage vows, he replied: “It doesn’t matter what I do. People need to hear what I have to say, and there’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.”
Assessing what voters seek in a President, Gingrich told an interviewer on March 8, 2011:
“You want to be able to look into them and understand, do they share my values? Do they know what I’m frightened of? Do they have answers that are real? Are they stable; are they capable of doing something?….
“You watch all of these folks for a while, and because it’s the presidency, they’re in your living room or your kitchen, or wherever you happen to watch TV. And, you get to know them over time.”
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LET CRIMINALS BE CRIMINALS
In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Politics, Social commentary on November 21, 2011 at 1:11 amA forgotten anniversary has come and gone: This December 2 marked the thirteenth anniversary of Enron’s bankruptcy.
Based in Houston, Texas, Enron had employed 22,000 staffers and was one of the world’s leading electricity, natural gas, communications and paper companies.
In 2000, it claimed revenues of nearly $101 billion. Fortune had named Enron “America’s Most Innovative Company” for six consecutive years.
But then the truth emerged in 2001: Enron’s reported profitability was based on systematic and creative accounting fraud.
From that point on, the media behaved as if Enron’s collapse was some great tragedy.
To put this in perspective: Imagine a historian writing about the destruction of Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (Guard Detachment), or SS, as a similar tragedy.
Imagine its Reichsfuehrer, Heinrich Himmler, being blamed for failing to prevent its collapse–as CEO Kenneth Lay was blamed for Enron’s demise.
Imagine that same historian completely ignoring the horrific role the SS had played throughout Nazi-occupied countries–and its prime role in carrying out the Holocaust.
The California electricity crisis (2000-2001) was caused by market manipulations and illegal shutdowns of pipelines by Texas energy consortiums.
The state suffered from multiple large-scale blackouts. Pacific Gas & Electric, one of the state’s largest energy companies, collapsed, and the economic fall-out greatly harmed Governor Gray Davis’ standing.
The crisis was made possible by Governor Pete Wilson, who forced the passage of partial de-regulation legislation in 1996. Enron siezed its opportunity to inflate prices and manipulate energy output in California’s spot markets. The crisis cost the state $40 to $45 billion.
The true scandal of Enron was not that it was eventually destroyed by its own greed.
The true scandal was that its leaders were never prosecuted for almost driving California–and the entire Western United States–into bankruptcy.
Once the news broke of Enron’s filing for bankruptcy, commentators almost universally oozed compassion for its thousands of employees who would lose their salaries and pensions.
No one, however, condemned the “profits at any cost” dedication of those same employees for pushing California to the brink of ruin.
Nor did anyone declare that the solution to such extortionate activity lay within the hands of the United States Department of Justice: RICO—the Federal Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act.
Passed by Congress in 1970, this was originally aimed at the kingpins of the Mafia. Since the mid-1980s, however, RICO has been successfully applied against both terrorist groups and legitimate businesses engaged in criminal activity.
Under RICO, people financially injured by a pattern of criminal activity can bring a claim in State or Federal court, and obtain damages at three times the amount of their actual claim, plus reimbursement for their attorneys’ fees and costs.
Such prosecutions would have pitted energy-extortionists against the full investigative might of the FBI and the sweeping legal authority of the Justice Department.
Consider this selection from the opening of the Act:
(1) “racketeering activity” means (A) any act or threat involving…extortion; (B) any act which is indictable under any of the following provisions of title 18, United States Code: sections 891-894 (relating to extortionate credit transactions), section 1343 (relating to wire fraud)
Section 1344 (relating to financial institution fraud), section 1951 (relating to interference with commerce, robbery, or extortion), section 1952 (relating to racketeering)….
Needless to say, under the pro-oil company administration of George W. Bush, no such prosecutions ever occurred.
With the tenth anniversary of Enron’s demise coming up, the mantra of “de-regulation” should be ruthlessly turned against those who have most ardently championed it.
Republicans have ingeniously dubbed the estate tax–which affects only a tiny minority–“the death tax.” This makes it appear to affect everyone. Democrats should thus recast de-regulation in terms that will prove equally popular. For example:
“Greed Relief”
“Greed Protection”
“Legalized Extortion”
And here are some possible slogans:
“The Energy Industry: Giving You the Best Congress Money Can Buy.”
“De-regulation: Let Criminals Be Criminals.”
“De-regulating energy companies will reduce energy prices the same way that closing down prisons will reduce crime.”
The word “Enron” can be turned into an obscenity: “E x t o r t R O N.” Just as the corporation was in real-life.
Today the coal industry is pumping millions into TV ads touting the non-existant wonders of “clean coal.”
And Chevron spends millions more assuring us that “all those profits” go strictly toward making the world a better place for others. (Presumably not a penny is left for its altruistic executives.)
When faced with such outright lying by the most vested of financial interests, it’s well to recall the warning given by Niccolo Machiavelli more than 500 years ago:
All those who have written upon civil institutions demonstrate…that whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it.
If their evil disposition remains concealed for a time, it must be attributed to some unknown reason; and we must assume that it lacked occasion to show itself. But time, which has been said to be the father of all truth, does not fail to bring it to light.
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