Marian Gingrich question at debates
Gingrich got huge applause for attaching John King for his question in the debates, attacking and deflecting the question:
'Let me be quite clear. The story is false. Every personal friend I have who knew us in that period said the story was false. We offered several of them to ABC to prove it was false. They weren’t interested because they would like to attack any Republican.'
"Now, last night, King reported on his show CNN’s John King, USA that Gingrich had spoken inaccurately when he said that friends had been offered to ABC to rebut the story. 'Well, tonight, after persistent questioning by our staff, the Gingrich campaign concedes now Speaker Gingrich was wrong both in his debate answer and in our interview yesterday,' King said. 'Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond says the only people the campaign offered to ABC were the Speaker’s two daughters from his first marriage.'" So he's out there, and he told John King during the debate, this is one of the answers that got a standing O. That he'd offered ABC a whole bunch of friends of his to rebut this point that he never said to his wife he wanted an open marriage. That turns out not to be true.
Speaking out against Reagan rather than his best buddy
Gingrich claims to be Reagan's heir...
See more below
Not a citizen of the world
In a June 17, 1982, speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Reagan similarly said, "I speak today as both a citizen of the United States and of the world."
CNN's Candy Crowley and CQ Politics' Jonathan Allen reported Newt Gingrich's claim that "I am not a citizen of the world. I think the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous," saying the line was a jab at President Obama.
More to come...lots of material...
Criticizing Clinton for ethical lapses:
The ultimate in hypocrisy...as he was having his own affair...
Full litany of Reagan criticisms
“Measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire’s challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing, and without a dramatic change in strategy will continue to fail. . . . President Reagan is clearly failing.” Why? This was due partly to “his administration’s weak policies, which are inadequate and will ultimately fail”; partly to CIA, State, and Defense, which “have no strategies to defeat the empire.” But of course “the burden of this failure frankly must be placed first on President Reagan.” Our efforts against the Communists in the Third World were “pathetically incompetent,” so those anti-Communist members of Congress who questioned the $100 million Reagan sought for the Nicaraguan “contra” rebels “are fundamentally right.” Such was Gingrich’s faith in President Reagan that in 1985, he called Reagan’s meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.”
Gingrich scorned Reagan’s speeches, which moved a party and then a nation, because “the president of the United States cannot discipline himself to use the correct language.” In Afghanistan, Reagan’s policy was marked by “impotence [and] incompetence.” Thus Gingrich concluded as he surveyed five years of Reagan in power that “we have been losing the struggle with the Soviet empire.” Reagan did not know what he was doing, and “it is precisely at the vision and strategy levels that the Soviet empire today is superior to the free world.”
Continuing on the surge:
And Abrams reminds us of what Newt was saying when George W. Bush was fighting critics for the surge in Iraq.
Here again Gingrich provided no support for his party’s embattled president, testifying as a private citizen in 2007 that the strategy was “inadequate,” contained “breathtaking” gaps, lacked “synergism” (whatever that means), and was “very disappointing.” What did Gingrich propose? Among other things, a 50 percent increase in the budget of the State Department.
Presidents should not get automatic support, not even from members of their own party, but they have a right to that support when they are under a vicious partisan assault. Today it is fair to look back and ask who had it right: Gingrich, who backed away from and criticized Republican presidents, or those chief executives, who were making difficult and consequential decisions on national security. Bush on the surge and Reagan on the Soviet empire were tough, courageous — and right. Newt Gingrich in retrospect seems less the visionary than the politician who refused the party’s leader loyal support on grounds that history has proved were simply wrong.
Some more comments
For Gingrich to disavow divisiveness is the equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg renouncing modern technology: Without it, we never would have heard of him. Newt has spent his career ceaselessly inventing ways to foment and exploit hatred of one group by another.
He's the guy who warned of "a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us." He likened those supporting a mosque near ground zero to Nazis.
He said Democrats are "the party of total hedonism, total exhibitionism, total bizarreness, total weirdness and the total right to cripple innocent people in the name of letting hooligans loose." Oh, and the poor? He said poor teens don't work "unless it's illegal." Nobody but us unifiers here!
