Tag: Newt Gingrich

GOP Racism Rears Its Ugly Head – Newt Says Obama Is an Anti-Colonial Kenyan Conman

Jon Ponder
Gingrich and third wife, Calista
Gingrich and third wife, Calista

Is a person’s behavior determined by his or her race?

Take the case of a theoretical mixed-race American boy — let’s call him Barack Obama — whose mother is a Caucasian American and whose father is an African native of Kenya. Let’s say the father leaves the boy and his mother when the boy is two years old and moves back to Kenya, 10,000 miles away, never to be heard from again, except for one visit when the boy was 10 years old. How will the father influence the boy when he grows up?

A) Is the boy predestined by his genetic connection to his father to grow up and emulate his African-ness (whatever that is) — even going so far as to hold the same political beliefs rooted in Kenyan culture as his father?

Or B) is the boy more likely to identify with the culture and politics of the United States, the country where he spent most of his formative years and that he considers to be his home?

If you answered A, you are a racist, just like Newt Gingrich, the smartest guy in the Idiocracy — who is floating a possible run for president in 2012 — who made one of the most outrageously racist statements by a national politician since the Jim Crow era:

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Gingrich Proposes Govt Seize Ground Zero to Stop ‘Mosque’ – But Govt Already Owns Site, Which Does Not Include Park 51

Jon Ponder

Ground Zero after towers are built - Gingrich wants to seize land and make it a battlefield memorial
Ground Zero after towers are built - Gingrich wants to seize land and make it a battlefield memorial
The attention span of American voters is famously short, and today it appears that a majority of independent voters are ready to vote Republicans back into control in Washington, apparently having already forgotten how Republicans’ vaunted conservative principles evaporate the minute they gain power.

Meanwhile, buoyed by Democrats’ bad polling, Republicans are not only measuring the drapes at the Capitol, they’re already returning to their old ways — tossing aside their purported principles in favor of political expediency.

Case in point is a proposal last week from former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich — the smartest conservative in America, per the movie “Idiocracy” — that, in order to satisfy his political goal of degrading Islam, the government should seize the site of World Trade Center as a tactic for stopping construction of the Park 51 Islamic center near New York City Hall:

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Read the Bill: Complete Text of Section of House Bill with Purported ‘Death Panel’ Provision

Jon Ponder

It’s a dead cinch that none of the folks screaming “Read the bill!” at members of Congress at health-care reform town hall meetings this month have actually read the bills themselves.

Top Republicans, including Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, House Minority Leader John Boehner, former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey and others, are lying when they claim a provision in Section 1233, “Advance Care Planning Consultation,” sets up “death panels.”

By not reading the House bills — in particular, the one called “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009” — town hall disrupters who have also been railing about a purported provision in the bill that establishes “death panels” have revealed themselves to be hypocrites as well as willing dupes in a campaign by the medical lobbies and Republican leaders to kill reform in order to protect health-care profits.

Top Republicans, including Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, House Minority Leader John Boehner, former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey and others — and just today Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa — are lying about the contents of Section 1233, “Advance Care Planning Consultation,” which they say requires elderly and infirm people to be evaluated by “death panels” every five years.

What the bill actually does is extend payments to Medicare recipients who seek professional counseling on end-of-life issues like setting up a living will and issuing “do not resuscitate” instructions to their families.

Facts do not matter to right-wingers, of course, but normal Americans who might take the Tea-baggers’ and Birthers’ venting about euthanasia at face value instead of seeing it for what it really is — rage over having a black president — need to know the truth.

The full text of Section 1233 follows:

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The Real Threat to Marriage: Top 10 GOP Adulterers

Jon Ponder

Ten Commandments

The traditional media may be interested almost exclusively in the sex lives of Democratic politicians, but on the hypocrisy index, it is hard to score higher than Republicans pontificating about saving the institution of marriage while so many of their leaders are serial and long-time adulterers:

1. President George H.W. Bush allegedly had an LTR with British-born Jennifer Fitzgerald that lasted at least two decades, all while married to Bar, who said, “He didn’t even notice when I stopped coloring my hair.”

2. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, famously married to Maria Shriver since 1986, is allegedly a purveyor of prostitutes, the father of at least one child out of wedlock and a serial groper of women in workplace situations.

3. Sen. John McCain, 2008 Republican presidential frontrunner, and admitted adulterer and alleged philanderer. [Update July 2008: McCain’s Extramarital Affair with Cindy Ended His Friendship with Reagans in the 1970s]

4. Rudolph Giuliani, former mayor of New York City and another GOP 2008 presidential contender, betrayed his second wife, TV presenter Donna Hanover, with his “very good friend” Judith Nathan, whom he has since married. Hanover also publicly accused Rudy of having an affair with a staffer, Cristyne Lategano-Nicholas.

5. Rush Limbaugh, comedian, (a.k.a. “Rusty Sharpe”) dated Marta Fitzgerald while she was married to someone else. Marta later became his third wife. (He and CNN’s Daryn Kagin recently stopped dating.)

6. Bill O’Reilly, propagandist, who is married to Maureen McPhilmy, tried to have phone sex with Andrea Mackris, who sued him for sexual harrassment.

7. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, is probably the most audacious serial adulterer in any political party.

8. Former Rep. Bob Barr’s notoriety as an adulterer was one of many ironies around the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DoMA) which he wrote, and which was passed with the leadership of fellow adulterers Sen. Majority Leader Bob Dole and House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

9. Rep. Henry Hyde, who served as chairman of House Mangers in the adultery-related impeachment of President Clinton, was a home-wrecker himself. Hyde had an affair when he was a young and foolish man of 41 while he and his girlfriend were both very much married. Her husband later said Hyde broke up his family.

10. Gary Bauer, professional moralizing Christian nationalist, experienced a mutiny when he was running for president when actual Christians on the staff of his 2000 presidential campaign quit in protest over Bauer’s “inappropriate” behavior with a 26-year-old deputy campaign manager. Euww.

11. (Updated) Had to add this one sent in by reader S.O. that probably should have bumped poor old Henry Hyde on the list: Neal Horsley, and rightwing religious nut, freely admitted to a kinky sex life, including this outrageous exchange on Fox’s Hannity & Colmes:

AC: “You had sex with animals?”

NH: “Absolutely. I was a fool. When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule.”

AC: “I’m not so sure that that is so.”

NH: “You didn’t grow up on a farm in Georgia, did you?”

AC: “Are you suggesting that everybody who grows up on a farm in Georgia has a mule as a girlfriend?”

NH: It has historically been the case. You people are so far removed from the reality… Welcome to domestic life on the farm…”

UPDATE: Thanks for all the emails. Our list attempts to identify the top 10 adulterers so there were several top contenders that didn’t make it:

  • Rep. Bob Livingston, the man who would have been House Speaker after Newt if Larry Flynt hadn’t uncovered some very kinky dirt on Livingtston. He was a top contender but since he never really served as Speaker, was bumped for Bauer.
  • It is true that Nancy Reagan was pregnant when she married Ronnie, but neither of them was married to anyone else at the time. By Republican standards of “abstinence only,” Nancy clearly did not say “no.”
  • We covered the rumors of troubles in the marriage of the president and Laura Bush but the evidence of this is spotty.
  • A definite top 10 contender is the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, a sanctimonius Clinton-hater, who, as reader TL reminds us, “[Apparently] had a fling with the DAUGHTER of someone he was having an affair with and then arranged for (or at least condoned) the abortion of their child.”
  • Back-bencher Rep. Don Sherwood of Pennsylvania, whose adultery with a younger woman was revealed after he tried to strangle her, didn’t make the cut, but someone please tell us he won’t be re-elected. (And thanks, M.H. and others, for the reminder!)
  • Reader Tim pointed out the track record of Rep. Jim Nussle of Iowa, who used his wife and autistic child as family values props then left them for a high-powered lobbyist after he was elected.

Keep ’em coming!