This week a man, Newton Leroy Gingrich — Newt to his friends, if he has any — got acerbic with NBC News senior congressional correspondent, Scott Wong, when asked about the House Committee investigating the Jan 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.
As reported by Mediaite, the conversation went thus,
“What do you think about the January 6 Committee?” Wong asked Gingrich on Thursday.
“I don’t,” said Gingrich, who was asked multiple times during a gaggle on Capitol Hill about the committee.
“You have no thoughts about the committee itself?” asked Wong.
“I think you have a learning disability,” said Gingrich, pointing a book at Wong.
“Excuse me,” said Wong.
“The fact is, I’ve said three or four times, I don’t talk about it,” said Gingrich, pointing at his own head.
“Try the phrase: I don’t talk about it,” he added.
However, he is lying. Earlier this year, he had no problem talking about it. In January, this towering egotist, who is desperately trying to remain relevant after a series of political failures, threatened the House’s J6 Committee members with jail. The disgraced former GOP Speaker of the House told Fox News that,
"I think when you have a Republican Congress, this is all going to come crashing down, and the wolves are going to find out that they're now sheep and they're the ones who … I think, face a real risk of jail for the kinds of laws they're breaking."
Lacking imagination, he expended on the “lock her up” red-meat mantra offered by Republicans to keep the bestial base salivating over imaginary crimes. Leroy kept to the script by offering no evidence that the J6 Committee had committed any crime. He added to the vacuity by failing to even enumerate what crimes he was talking about.
The J6 Committee, on the other hand, has revealed the previously unimaginable narrative of an American President encouraging his thuggish followers to storm America’s legislature to keep him illegally in a job the American voter had overwhelmingly told him to vacate. Yet this pompous prat thinks the crime is committed in revealing misdeeds, not in perpetuating them.
Did I say that Gingrich is a Republican?
Of course he is. He is one of a long line of conservative politicians who have shunned greatness. The towering figures in American politics have been a boon to the country and its citizens. They have held the Union together. They won wars; established Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; enacted civil rights legislation; expanded healthcare; and protected the rights of all Americans regardless of their sex, race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity, and disability.
From 1995 -1999, Leroy had the opportunity to leave his mark. He did — but not as he might have imagined he would. He rode his Contract with America (aka Contract On America) to the House Speakership as the GOP gained a majority for the first time in 40 years.
The contract was the usual litany of benefits to the wealthy couched in disingenuous language. The plan was to “reform” social security, welfare, and other entitlements. The honest verb would have been “slash”.
Gingrich’s style laid the groundwork for the Tea Party and MAGA. He embraced aggressiveness and eschewed any pretense of bipartisanship. Under his leadership, hateful language and hyper-partisanship were commonplace. Leroy would routinely question the patriotism of Democrats. He called them corrupt, compared them to fascists, and accused them of wanting to destroy the United States.
He conducted his business with breathtaking hypocrisy. In 1987, he accused Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright of using book sales to circumvent campaign finance rules. At the same time, he raised $105,000 by selling his book “Window of Opportunity”. He was not done. In 1994 he received a $4.5 million dollar advance for two books from Haprer Collins. A publisher owned by Ruppert Murdock
He decried corruption in the House. Then it turned out he had bounced 22 checks at the House bank. Including one to the IRS for $9,463 in 1990.
He was also extraordinarily petty. When Bush the Elder, along with leaders from both parties, reached a deal on a deficit reduction package in 1990, he led a revolt that delayed the measure and shut down the government. He petulantly stormed out of a televised ceremony in the Rose Garden — causing Republican House Minority leader, Robert Michel, to characterize Leroy’s revolt as “A thousand points of spite.”
He reached peak pettiness in 1995 when, after a trip on Air Force One, he said that, because Bill Clinton had refused to talk to him about the budget and because he was forced to sit in the back and use the rear door of the plane, he had ended up “sending down a tougher continuing resolution". Bad as that peevishness was. He lied. Video clearly showed him exiting the plane right behind Clinton.
But his most outrageous hypocrisy was yet to come.
Gingrich was a snapping turtle when it came to impeaching Clinton for his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. Yet it turns out that Leroy was a serial adulterer with the moral compass of a bonobo and the compassion of a parasitoid wasp. When he divorced his first wife, Jackie, he first brought up the subject as she lay in a hospital bed the day after she had surgery for uterine cancer.
He treated his second wife, Marianne Ginther, with equal callousness. He ignored his marital vows. And stuck it where ever he could — until, in 1993, he stumbled on Callista Bistek, a devout Catholic and willing fornicator, 20 years his junior. Gingrich appreciated this Catholic approach to morality so much — “foist it on others, ignore it yourself” — that he too switched to Papism.
In 2011, he revealed that the root of his sinning ways was an excess of patriotism. He told David Brody of the Christian Broadcast Network,
“There’s no question at times in my life partially driven by how passionately I feel about this country, that I worked too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate”
While his sins point to a horrible little man, his lasting blow to America is his close embrace of conservative Christianity in cahoots with conservative politics. This unholy alliance of secular fascism, cloaked in the language of scripture, has blighted America with a mindless mob of sham-religious bigots who believe that a celestial sadist has backed them in their crusade against non-white, non-heteronormative, fluid-gender citizens.
Leroy’s attack on Wong is a product of his sensitivity to being called to chat with the J6 Committee. They had sent him a letter requesting he voluntarily share what he knew about the plot to overturn a legitimate election. The letter states,
“Information that we have obtained includes email messages that you exchanged with senior advisors to President Trump and others, including Jared Kushner and Jason Miller, in which you provided detailed input into television advertisements that repeated and relied upon false claims about fraud in the 2020 election.”
“These advertising efforts were not designed to encourage voting for a particular candidate. Instead, these efforts attempted to cast doubt on the outcome of the election after voting had already taken place.”
In a response on Fox News, Gingrich called for Republicans to form a “Select Committee on Congressional Dishonesty and Abuse of Power” to investigate members of the Jan. 6 committee as well as Justice Department officials.
Blind to irony, he wrote in a Newsweek editorial,
“This is not about revenge.This is about reinforcing the principle that in America, political wolves who viciously destroy their fellow Americans—and violate the rule of law to do so—will not be tolerated. This is about restoring the core principles of American self-government.”
What a toad.
