A garbage barge passes over Newt's domain.
One of Gingrich’s main themes in his columns and speeches over the past few years has been the need to stop the “secular socialist” takeover of America, which he blames for the demise of the family. Yet he had several of these affairs while attacking President Bill Clinton for his own. He justified his hypocrisy to his second wife once, telling her, “It doesn’t matter what I do.”
— Zaid Jilani, ThinkProgress, March 3
Picture a chasm in the North Atlantic, far beneath the spot where sludge pipes and garbage barges converge to relieve themselves. Descend to the floor of this foul locale and you’re in the spiritual home of Newt Gingrich, champion of unregulated markets, states’ rights and family values. That’s where the news is this week.
Newt is the the man who best illustrates the difference between Democratic and Republican styles of bad behavior. A politician in either party might belly up to the trough to take bribes. He (or she, rarely) might blow money on the horses, or go on a bender with a transsexual crack whore, using campaign contributions he hid in the freezer, next to the Stoli.
But nine times out of ten, it’s the Republican who does such things while presenting himself as a moral exemplar. Only a Newt-like creature will cheat on his wife and simultaneously call for the censure, or even the impeachment, of another politician on moral grounds.
There’s no time to get into the why of it, except to note that Republicanism made a deal with the devil when it joined forces with religious fundamentalism. Politicians who are beholden to religious absolutists must fake zero tolerance all the time, and are as scary and scabrous a breed in the United States as in Iran or Afghanistan.
A full squad of Republican uglies will run for president if it looks like Obama can be beaten. Almost all of them will reveal themselves to be hypocrites as soon as they start making speeches. One of them — the doughy-faced, philandering moralizer from Georgia — doesn’t even have to open his mouth. It’s a matter of public record.
Footnote: Just ran across this, from the inimitable James Wolcott:
Like a stripper too conceited to hang up the tassles, even though those tassles don’t have the twirl they once did, indeed they droop like limp silver spaghetti swaying to and fro, Newt Gingrich insists on parading his tired act down the runway, exciting no one except the political pundits for whom the sheer drop of a bra strap makes their hot dogs lose control.
Odd Man Out 
Media guy blames media for Wisconsin turmoil
This is to help Michael Smerconish locate the center.
— Michael Smerconish, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 25
I doubt very much the protesters standing in the Wisconsin cold don’t know what collective bargaining means. Perhaps Smerconish, a right-winger with a law degree, was arguing that working people think they know their rights but really don’t, possibly because they’re too dumb to understand the nuances of the laws that were passed over the years to protect those rights.
Displaying chutzpah of the highest order, Smerconish, who hosts a radio talk show and holds a cozy second job opining for the Inquirer, wrote that “media coverage of the frenzied atmosphere in Wisconsin” is to blame for the failure to provide “insight into who should be held accountable for unsustainable financial promises.”
Guess what, Mike — you are the media, and you’re doing a piss-poor job of providing insights about what’s at stake for the protesters or their foes. Many of us think the latter have been duped by the Republican propaganda machine into believing unions are to blame for Wisconsin’s budget shortfall, which wouldn’t even exist if tax rates on the wealthiest citizens hadn’t been drastically cut since the Eisenhower era…
But Smerconish wouldn’t want to hear such talk, it might distract him from his stock argument — i.e., extremists who “dominate” our discussions are avoiding “middle of the road realities” we must face in order to end the Wisconsin standoff and, it seems, passively accept the disappearance of decent jobs in America.
In his column were statistics showing that union workers in Wisconsin earn more than non-union workers and have better benefits (that’s what unions are for!), as if this is reason enough for union workers to make wage and benefits concessions (something they’ve already done). Not surprisingly, he offered no statistics on the sums billionaire right-wingers have spent on fomenting the Wisconsin crisis, and no speculation on whether David Koch calls the shots for Gov. Scott Walker.
But God forbid we should conclude Smerconish was blaming the collective bargaining process for Wisconsin’s woes. “The lawyer in me,” he wrote magnanimously, “sees an analogy between collective bargaining and two sides involved in a legal dispute.”
It’s a favorite trick of right-wing commentators these days to pretend they’re arguing from the center, wherever that is. In this regard, Smerconish reminds me of the NYT’s David Brooks, the Earnest Weasel, who tries to sugarcoat his right-wing views with homilies about the importance of everyone converging — through astral projection, I guess — on that mythical center.
I take it back, there is a center in Philadelphia. It’s just east of Eden, around the bend from the Elysian Fields, in the big white building on Broad Street where Smerconish opines.
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