News Intelligence Analysis
More floor sweepings and musings from the ol' sausage factory...
On Newt Gingrich, Integrity and Impeachment
by Dennis Crews
March 9, 2007 – My friends, it's been a good while since I've ventured to comment on the body politic. Been busy, if you need to know. But once in a while something gets stuck in my craw and makes me want to testify. This time it was an old story made brand new again – from today's Associated Press:
"Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was having an extramarital affair even as he led the charge against President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, he acknowledged in an interview with a conservative Christian group.
" 'The honest answer is yes,' Gingrich, a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson to be aired Friday, according to a transcript provided to The Associated Press. 'There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There's certainly times when I've fallen short of God's standards.'
"Gingrich argued in the interview, however, that he should not be viewed as a hypocrite for pursuing Clinton's infidelity. 'The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge,' the former Georgia congressman said of Clinton's 1998 House impeachment on perjury and obstruction of justice charges. 'I drew a line in my mind that said, 'Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed, and even though at a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept . . . perjury in your highest officials.' "
Okay, right; Clinton's impeachment wasn't about the sex, it was about perjury – just like Scooter Libby's trial was. Glad we got that straight.
Whereas Newt's affair was only about the sex. And a good thing, too. Because let's see, Henry Hyde, the leader of Clinton's impeachment panel, broke up another family by his adultery; Rep. Dan Burton had at least six affairs and fathered an illegitimate son by one of them; Rep. Bob Barr, another Clinton foe, cheated on all three of his wives and persuaded one to have an abortion; GOP Speaker-elect Rep. Bob Livingstone cheated on his wife with at least four different women and the list goes on. So it's not the sex that's unforgivable, it's just lying about it.
But after the Libby trial we now know Republicans lie under oath too! And they lie rather often when not under oath, as the Bush administration continues to demonstrate. And not just about sex either, but about the nation's mundane business – things like the cost of the Medicare plan. George Bush not only lied to the whole nation about its cost, but Medicare chief Thomas Scully threatened actuary Richard Foster with firing if he revealed the true cost of the bill to members of Congress before the vote was taken. And let's never forget exactly how that vote was accomplished by the narrowest of margins.
Want something more recent? Take the firing of eight US Attorneys, and the administration's claims that none of them were about politics. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' top deputy claimed the firings were necessary because of "performance-related" issues; then it came to light that all but two of the dismissed prosecutors had outstanding evaluations for competence. Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse called the prosecutors "disgruntled employees grandstanding before Congress." In fact the fired attorneys had refused to appear voluntarily before Congress, and only did so after being subpoenaed by the House Judiciary subcommittee. Where is the truth in all this?
Of course we all are familiar with the administration's many lies over reasons for going to war with Iraq (Saddam Hussein's connections with 9/11, Iraq's nuclear weapons program, mobile biological labs, weapons of mass destruction etc.), lies incorporating various heroic myths in the prosecution of the war (the Jessica Lynch fable, the Pat Tillman fable, the Saddam capture fable, etc), lies over monumental waste and fraud, lies over exactly what was happening at Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib, lies about the numerous innocent people kidnapped and sent abroad for torture in black prison sites the US wouldn't even admit existed.
And in today's news we learn that the FBI has illegally used the Patriot Act to obtain personal information about ordinary US citizens! Who'd a thunk it? On Friday, a Justice Department audit concluded that for three years the FBI has underreported to Congress how often it forced businesses to turn over customer data, telephone records and other private materials. The Justice Dept. and FBI have misused National Security Letters literally hundreds of times to gain warrants for surveillance, multiple news sources report today.
"Many of us have been saying that the potential for abuse of the Patriot Act's National Security Letter authority is almost without limit," says Judiciary Committe Chairman John Conyers. "This report demonstrates how that potential has now become a reality."
So I guess we can't really trust that big ol' head of hair, Alberto Gonzales, to be telling us the truth either when he says that, like eating all our peas and carrots, all this stuff is for our own good. Nope, it's for Big Brother's own purposes and the Bush administration is happy to see to that. Gotta make the executive office impregnable to the will of the people, so the sneering dick Cheney and the Deciderer-in-Chief will no longer be bothered by techinicalities like, say, elections. Just a straight-line quid pro quo between themselves and the big money club.
The democratic, small-business old American way is being supplanted by all-powerful contractors with names like Halliburton, Blackwater Security, CACI and various defense industries such as those in the Carlyle Group. It's all guns and no butter now. Bankruptcy laws are written by big banking corporations, just as environmental laws are being written by major pollutors. Soldiers' treatment at Walter Reed and federal response to Katrina are just metaphors for the whole philosophy of government under the Bush administration. It is sink or swim, and the little guy be damned. The only time Mr. Bush moves with alacrity on the behalf of the everyman is when all eyes are on his incompetence, which times only demonstrate how unaccustomed he is to such activity.
Congress has abdicated its oversight role for so long the media-bewildered, sports-besotted public has all but forgotten how things are supposed to be. The elections of '06 may have been too little, too late to change the essential character of America now. The new Speaker of the House took impeachment off the table as she entered office, and why? (be patient, I'm coming full circle now...) Because the Clinton impeachment sickened the public.
Nobody really wanted impeachment for such a precariously engineered offense as Clinton's lie under oath. The public saw how tens of millions of taxpayer dollars were spent in a fruitless partisan witch hunt, after which Mr. Clinton finally was maneuvered into that ridiculous lie. Never mind that the issue being lied about was mere consensual sex – nothing fundamentally different from what Mr. Gingrich now admits also being guilty of. But the Republicans impeached anyway.
And so it is that now the public doesn't have the stomach for impeachment – at just such a time for which the remedy of impeachment was created. Lying a nation into war is a matter of gravity many magnitudes beyond adultery – even receiving fellatio from a star-struck subordinate. Literally tens of thousands of marriages are violated when soldiers are marched into purgatory and come home missing limbs, faces and sound minds – even if they are provided the best of medical treatment.
And how often the Iraqi losses are simply written off! By now hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have met violent deaths. How many broken homes does this represent? How many 9/11s might this equal? Responsibility for their suffering cannot simply be deflected onto terrorists and insurgents, for who created the conditions that allowed anarchy to flourish in Iraq? Who dissolved Iraq's military? Who ringed the oil ministry with tanks after a cakewalk into Baghdad, yet left Saddam's munitions dumps unguarded? Who taunted the insurgents to "bring it on"? Who created the policies that allowed detainees to be tortured and dehumanized in places like Abu Ghraib, creating a legacy of burning hatred and resentment toward anything American?
Fast-forward to the present: now millions of Iraqis – mostly successful, educated and resourceful – have fled the country. Many of these have become refugees, destitute and hiding in cities like Amman and Damascus, others more fortunate have joined relatives abroad. Left behind are those with the very least resources to feebly try to avert civil war, and cling to the tattered simulacrum of a government the Bush administration has foisted on them. What is the punishment for pre-emptively destroying an entire nation that did no harm to us?
Numerous impeachments are not only warranted now but essential – to redress high crimes, misdemeanors and lies to Congress and the American people, to vindicate the Constitution of the United States and to restore faith in the high offices of our land. Impeachments are needed to remove incompetent bunglers from the levers of power and make room for reasonable men and women to repair the damage they have done. The future of our nation, indeed, the future of world peace, depends on impeachment – right now when the public has the least stomach for it.
I urge one and all to contact your representatives and keep
reminding them relentlessly of the need to put impeachment back
on the table. Make America matter once again the way it did a
generation ago – as a symbol of human rights, of diplomacy
and integrity in public affairs. Purge our leadership of the
cancer of partisanship and profiteering from the misfortune of
others. Restore America's good name. Rid us of these parasites
who now occupy our highest offices. As for the impending announcement
that Newt Gingrich will be running for president in 2008, can
any man who was so hypocritically instrumental in engineering
an impeachment on a legal technicality deserve leadership of
our nation? Now when we are fighting a unique and potentially
deadly national rigor mortis brought about by that very impeachment,
I think the answer is a resounding "No".
Dennis Crews is a Yurica Report Op Ed columnist.
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