Gingrich was founder of the "Newt defense"....that oral sex doesn't count.

madfloridian

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Fri May-08-09 05:30 PM
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Gingrich was founder of the "Newt defense"....that oral sex doesn't count.

I ran across this Salon article today from 1998, and I started laughing out loud. I mean here we have the 3 stooges on the Sunday talk shows....and it's a contest between two of them who has done the most outrageous things.

Jed Lewison's diary at Daily Kos today kept me chuckling.

It's called "GOP brings out 'A-team' for Sunday spin". He had this picture.

The GOP's talking heads for Sunday: Newt Gingrich on Fox News Sunday, John McCain on ABC's This Week with George Stephanoulos Stephanopoulos, and Dick Cheney on CBS's Face the Nation.

:::Update -- 11:44AM: Detroit Mark comments:

"Shoot Me In The Face The Nation"
Funny how that title automatically reads that way to me even though the words aren't there.

Update 2 -- 11:47AM: DNC spokesman Hari Sevugan:

1996 called. They want their GOP Sunday show lineup back.

The Salon article from 1998 deserves some in depth reading. It shows the utter hypocrisy of the Republicans, and the nervy pushy way they went after our party. They have no shame.

Time to remember Newt's glass house

No, it's not compassion that tempers the speaker's censure of Clinton's self-destructive sexual compulsions. It's self-protection. Gingrich, lest we forget, has a closet full of sexual misconduct. For one thing, Gingrich pioneered a denial of adultery that some observers would later christen "the Newt Defense": Oral sex doesn't count. In a revealing psychological portrait of the "inner" Gingrich that appeared in Vanity Fair (September 1995), Gail Sheehy uncovered a woman, Anne Manning, who had an affair in Washington in 1977 with a married Gingrich.

"We had oral sex," Manning revealed. "He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, 'I never slept with her.'" She added that Gingrich threatened her: "If you ever tell anybody about this, I'll say you're lying."

Manning was then married to a professor at West Georgia, the backwater college where Gingrich taught. "I don't claim to be an angel," she told Sheehy, but "he's morally dishonest."

Gingrich refused to comment on Manning's charges, though he has admitted sexual indiscretions during his first marriage -- hey, it was the '70s, man! But Newt's oral sex denial proved embarrassing at a time when he was the secular leader of the "family values" crowd, appearing frequently at Christian Coalition gatherings.

There is more in the article:

As a high school student -- precocious, lonely, overweight -- Newt secretly romanced his geometry teacher, a buxom, matronly woman named Jackie Battley. The furtive romance with his 24-year-old teacher included nighttime sessions in the back of a car in remote areas of Fort Benning, Ga. Once, Newt and Jackie were so worked up, they got their car caught in a tank trap on the military base and had to call his best friend to rescue them before a daylight expos�, according to the friend's widow, Linda Tilton. Defying his stepfather, a stern Army colonel, Newt pursued Jackie, married her and promptly had two children. Jackie Gingrich raised the daughters, worked to put Newt through graduate school and was a loyal political wife during his two unsuccessful campaigns for Congress in 1974 and 1976.

When Jackie was recovering from cancer, a more shameful incident occurred. And more after that. Yet he is still given media credibility, able to appear on the Sunday TV talk shows.

Gingrich served divorce papers on first wife while she was being treated for cancer.

Gingrich: Do as I Say, Not as I Do
By Robert Scheer
Published August 17, 1999 in the Los Angeles Times

The news that Newt Gingrich is headed for his second messy divorce, allegedly involving a longtime affair with a House of Representatives employee, has been largely ignored by news media that have not always been as sensitive to the privacy needs of major politicians.

It's true that Gingrich is no longer in Congress, where he orchestrated the impeachment of the president of the United States over charges rising from Bill Clinton's sexual dalliances. But Gingrich, through his many public appearances, remains a self-appointed definer of the Republican Revolution, which counted family values at its core. These very values are called into question if the married speaker of the House was having an affair with a much-younger congressional employee who ultimately reported to him.

Critics of Gingrich have long made much of the insensitivity he demonstrated in serving his first wife with divorce papers while she was in the hospital being treated for cancer. Nor did news of his efforts to cut life insurance coverage for the mother of his children always endear Gingrich to his family values supporters, but it was generally assumed that his marital errors were in the past.

This time, his approach was less personal. Marianne Gingrich told the Washington Post that she was informed of the affair and the request for a divorce last May in a telephone call from Newt to her mother's home, where she was visiting.

Molly Ivins was not fond of Newt Gingrich.

Having watched election coverage nonstop all week, I sometimes wake screaming, "Bipartisanship!" and scare myself.

Of all the viral members of the media who have been suggesting that the Dems cooperate with their political opponents, the one who rendered me almost unconscious with surprise was Newt Gingrich. Newt Gingrich, the Boy Scout. Newt Gingrich, the man who sat there and watched Congress impeach and try Bill Clinton for lying about having an extramarital affair while he, Newt Gingrich, was lying about having an extramarital affair. (This all took place during his second marriage. The first one ended when he told his wife he was divorcing her while she was in the hospital undergoing cancer treatment.)

This is the level of Republican hypocrisy that reminds us all how far the Dems have to go. I tell you what. Let's all hold hands together and sing, "Oh the Farmers and the Cowboys Should Be Friends!" Just not, please, Newt Gingrich, the man whose contribution to civility was to recommend that all Democrats be referred to with such words as cowards, traitors, commies, godless, liars and other such bipartisan-promoting terms.

But there he is big as life all over TV....and on this Sunday while so many are not.

Marc Ambinder suggests that the Republicans are simply unable to find new faces to go on the air now.

What Rebranding? Part XVIII

Appearing on the Sunday shows on behalf of the Great Opposition Party: John McCain (This Week), Newt Gingrich (Fox News Sunday), Dick Cheney (Face The Nation.) All will be asked if the Republican Party needs to rebrand itself. All will give some version of the same answer: if we just lived up to our values, the American people would pay attention to us. Actually, that's not fair to Gingrich, who seems to understand that the third leg of the GOP stool can only be attached if Republicans figure out a way to offer a meaningful alternative route to universal health care and solutions for the alienated middle class. Still... kind of dovetails with the Democratic message du jour, which is that Republicans can't find new faces to put on TV.

I see so many good people in our own party really left on the outside or left behind. That's bad enough. But to see the corporate media give these guys so much Sunday prime time air time is just shameless.