We’ve heard it over and over during every primary debate since Iowa, and we were also treated to a very nebulous sounding warning from Nancy Pelosi of all people, about how everyone is prepared to spoil the Gingrich Candidacy if he doesn’t stop winning. Newt Gingrich resigned in disgrace seems to be the only words Mitt Romney is capable of saying with clarity. Just for the purposes of putting things in their proper perspective, I’m going to give you the spoiler first here. Following is the video of CNN’s final report on the Gingrich ethics investigation, so pay close attention.
As it turns out, this entire episode may have done something positive for American Politics after all. It has highlighted what is wrong with American main stream media, it has highlighted what is wrong with the Republican Party, and what is wrong with the Democrat Party. It has served as a character builder for the man that I hope will be the next President of the United States. It has shown us, who live here in the reality of the political right, the true cost of not fighting back.
As it turns out, even with the clarifying lens of history, very few seem to be able to get it right.
From the beginning of the assault upon Speaker Gingrich, it was painfully evident that the facts, or actual evidence were of no importance to anybody. Even when those of us on the right asked for some supporting evidence of actual wrong doing, we were told that Speaker Gingrich had to go because, “the seriousness of the charges were too ominous by themselves to ignore, even if untrue.” The entire concept of innocent until proven guilty was thrown out the window in favor of the more expedient ends justifies the means for the purposes of reclaiming political power for the Democrat Party.
At the center of the controversy was a course Gingrich taught from 1993 to 1995 at two small Georgia colleges. The wide-ranging class, called “Renewing American Civilization,” was conceived by Gingrich and financed by a tax-exempt organization called the Progress and Freedom Foundation. Gingrich maintained that the course was a legitimate educational enterprise; his critics contended that it had little to do with learning and was in fact a political exercise in which Gingrich abused a tax-exempt foundation to spread his own partisan message.
The Gingrich case was driven in significant part by a man named Ben Jones. An actor and recovered alcoholic who became famous for playing the dim-witted Cooter in the popular 1980s TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, Jones ran for Congress as a Democrat from Georgia in 1988. He won and served two terms. He lost his bid for re-election after re-districting in 1992, and tried again with a run against Gingrich in 1994. Jones lost decisively, and after that, it is fair to say he became obsessed with bringing Gingrich down.
Two days before Election Day 1994, with defeat in sight, Jones hand-delivered a complaint to the House ethics committee (the complaint was printed on “Ben Jones for Congress” stationery). Jones asked the committee to investigate the college course, alleging that Gingrich “fabricated a ‘college course’ intended, in fact, to meet certain political, not educational, objectives.” Three weeks later, Jones sent the committee 450 pages of supporting documents obtained through the Georgia Open Records Act.
Emphasis mine.
So, what we had, in actuality, was a complaint entirely fabricated by a person who had been ousted from congress by redistricting and denied his return through electoral defeat at the hands of the subject of his complaint. Is it just me, or is there some ulterior motive which seems possible here? The complaint was taken up by one of the most partisan hacks to ever embarrass our House simply by his presence there, David Bonior (D) Michigan. Nancy Pelosi, the new minority leader of the Democrats in the House, who by the way had noticed that she stood to be Speaker should the Republicans lose control of the House was also on the ethics committee at the time. I’m sure that there was no conflict of interest there.
It didn’t take long for the media to jump at the chance to take down a leader of the Republican Party. Undaunted by their complete lack of factual detail about the story on which they were reporting, they simply fabricated their own material to fit the template that they wished to report. Remember that Speaker Gingrich copped to having failed to seek adequate tax advice before teaching his college course, and for not providing adequate detail about the subject matter of that course. (The fact is that Speaker Gingrich had in fact hired two tax attorneys and provided the ethics committee with a complete video recording of each class session spanning the entire time period of the courses taught plus all appropriate course text and outlines.) His guilt plea was simply a man tired of the nonsense wishing to get back to the job his Congressional District had hired him to do.
Back in January 1997, the day after Cole presented his damning report to the Ethics Committee, the Washington Post’s front-page banner headline was “Gingrich Actions ‘Intentional’ or ‘Reckless’; Counsel Concludes That Speaker’s Course Funding Was ‘Clear Violation’ of Tax Laws.” That same day, the New York Times ran eleven stories on the Gingrich matter, four of them on the front page (one inside story was headlined, “Report Describes How Gingrich Used Taxpayers’ Money for Partisan Politics”). On television, Dan Rather began the CBS Evening News by telling viewers that “only now is the evidence of Newt Gingrich’s ethics violations and tax problems being disclosed in detail.”
Contrast that treatment in the press with the reports that followed the Speaker’s exoneration.
The story was much different when Gingrich was exonerated. The Washington Post ran a brief story on page five. The Times ran an equally brief story on page 23. And the evening newscasts of CBS, NBC, and ABC — which together had devoted hours of coverage to the question of Gingrich’s ethics — did not report the story at all. Not a word.
This is another point, the bias of the Press, it has reached the point of being sickening. I hear from my liberal friends, “you need to stop listening to Faux News,” as if that mantra makes their idiotic claim true, that only liberal sources of news coverage will espouse the truth. It’s not just the tone of coverage that is maddening, nor is it that plus the selective amplification of certain facts to create the story to fit a predetermined template, but it also includes the despicable practice of choosing sides and actively using their cloak of being objective to aid one side of our political discourse over the other.
Examples you ask? Here is one. Cast your memory back to the ancient date of 2008. John Edwards was one of the contenders for the Democrat Nomination for his Party’s Presidential bid. As it turns out, he was not the faithful husband which every news report had been portraying him to be. He had a mistress tagging along with him, who was dubiously employed by his campaign. Not only was the media wrong about Edwards, as it turns out, members of that media were actively aiding in his covering up the affair. When the story did break, well after he had been shown the door electorally speaking, we were assured that such revelations were in fact salacious in nature, and had no business in Presidential Politics. Comparisons to the coverage of Newt Gingrich’s second former wife’s revelations would be too cheap and easy. Instead, remember the meme attempted during the 2008 General Election. The major news media began reporting on a story that someone thought it was possible that Senator McCain had at one time had an affair with a female aid, because their smiles to each other in crowded rooms appeared too affectionate for people who were just coworkers. Those stories appeared on all of the Sunday talk shows, (except of course for Fox,) and were blasted on the front pages of the NYT, Time, Newsweek, etc.
People are shocked that Speaker Gingrich would have the temerity to blast the media in the manner that he does. My question is this. After experiencing first hand the full brunt of the dishonest way in which news reporters go about their business, how could any conservative politician roll over and play dead for them? Newt Gingrich’s approach is the absolute correct course of action to take. He is not going out of his way to be overtly mean, but he is not simply accepting their biased starting points either. He is fighting back, and is doing so in a manner that is at the same time both respectful, and sets the record straight.
Which of course brings us to this second point, and perhaps the most damning of all. The complete lack of fight in the establishment of the Republican Party. I have read pundits both endorse and blast Newt Gingrich. I have seen a lot of folks on both sides completely miss the true points of their arguments with maddening imprecision. My support for Newt Gingrich is due entirely to the fact that I agree with most of his positions. The entire argument of electability may be one of the silliest arguments made in the history of discourse. Even with that though, I have to say that anyone who states the principles of conservatism, and does so with passion and without apology is electable. When Republicans feel the need to stop fighting back and start pandering and capitulating on their ideals, that is when they suffer electoral defeat. If you don’t believe me, just ask John McCain. You know, the Maverick, who lost that title for 3 months in 2008, and was suddenly treated in the press which had adored him for so long as just another Republican, in other words brutally. He refused to take Barack Obama on, and he refused to call out the media for its baloney. The result of course was this, John McCain remains today, Senator McCain. If we are going to lose fine, let’s at least have our say and have this fight which we have been avoiding for so long.
With the charges against Gingrich megaphoned in the press, Gingrich and Republicans were under intense pressure to end the ordeal. In January, 1997, Gingrich agreed to make a limited confession of wrongdoing in which he pleaded guilty to the previously unknown offense of failing to seek sufficiently detailed advice from a tax lawyer before proceeding with the course. (Gingrich had in fact sought advice from two such lawyers in relation to the course.) Gingrich also admitted that he had provided “inaccurate, incomplete, and unreliable” information to Ethics Committee investigators. That “inaccurate” information was Gingrich’s contention that the course was not political — a claim Cole and the committee did not accept, but the IRS later would.
In return for those admissions, the House reprimanded Gingrich and levied an unprecedented $300,000 fine. The size of the penalty was not so much about the misdeed itself but the fact that the Speaker was involved in it.
Why did Gingrich admit wrongdoing? “The atmosphere at the time was so rancorous, partisan, and personal that everyone, including Newt, was desperately seeking a way to end the whole thing,” Gingrich attorney Jan Baran told me in 1999. “He was admitting to whatever he could to get the case over with.”
What this highlights is the willingness to cave in order to avoid confrontation. Backing down is not a sign of strong leadership. Sarah Palin also backed down from trumped up ethics charges to avoid a prolonged and expensive fight for the benefit of her state. While I applaud the sentiment that it was better for the citizens of Alaska, it also puts an unjust cloud over the head of someone from our side. It has reached the point that we must start fighting these battles, and every last one of them where ever they pop up. That is a lesson that Speaker Gingrich learned the hard way, but he at least learned it.
Last night, Mitch Daniels gave the Republican Response to the President’s State of the Union Address. it appears as though the leaders of the Republican Party are finally beginning to get this. Last night we got the first message from the Republican leadership that was not a watered down version of the message delivered by the Democrats only moments earlier. We want the march towards Socialism not merely slowed down, but stopped and reversed. Speaker Gingrich gets this, and that is why he has gained in momentum. At the very least, Newt Gingrich has served to change the discourse within the Republican Party to begin reflecting the views held by the Republican voters. Free markets, freedom to determine our own destinies, constitutional principles, these are values worth having a battle over.
Here lies a great illustration of what is wrong with the Democrat Party, besides of course their insane agenda.
Cole developed a theory of the case in which Gingrich, looking for a way to spread his political views, came up with the idea of creating a college course and then devised a way to use a tax-exempt foundation to pay the bills. “The idea to develop the message and disseminate it for partisan political use came first,” Cole told the Ethics Committee. “The use of the [the Progress and Freedom Foundation] came second as a source of funding.” Thus, Cole concluded, the course was “motivated, at least in part, by political goals.” Cole argued that even a hint of a political motive, was enough to taint the tax-exempt project, “regardless of the number or importance of truly exempt purposes that are present.”
Cole did not argue that the case was not educational. It plainly was. But Cole suggested that the standard for determining wrongdoing was whether any unclean intent lurked in the heart of the creator of the course, even if it was unquestionably educational.
In his paper bringing charges against Newt Gingrich, Cole had admitted that the facts did not support any violations of ethics. In his own words, it was not whether or not Newt Gingrich was actually guilty that mattered, but whether or not it would help the cause of switching power back to the Democrats that mattered.
The Democrats can not win an open debate, they must cheat and lie in order to get their agenda pushed forward. Of the two sides, my anger is mostly with ours. We allow them to get away with it, believing that we are better off not risking a voter backlash by defending ourselves. I am tired of it, and thank goodness Newt Gingrich is also.
The conclusion of the ethics complaints? Well I tipped them earlier, but here they are anyhow.
It was a huge victory for Democrats. They had deeply wounded the Speaker. But they hadn’t brought him down. So, as Bonior suggested, they sought to push law enforcement to begin a criminal investigation of Gingrich.
Nothing happened with the Justice Department and the FBI, but the IRS began an investigation that would stretch over three years. Unlike many in Congress — and journalists, too — IRS investigators obtained tapes and transcripts of each session during the two years the course was taught at Kennesaw State College in Georgia, as well as videotapes of the third year of the course, taught at nearby Reinhardt College. IRS officials examined every word Gingrich spoke in every class; before investigating the financing and administration of the course, they first sought to determine whether it was in fact educational and whether it served to the political benefit of Gingrich, his political organization, GOPAC, or the Republican Party as a whole. They then carefully examined the role of the Progress and Freedom Foundation and how it related to Gingrich’s political network.
In the end, in 1999, the IRS released a densely written, highly detailed 74-page report. The course was, in fact, educational, the IRS said. “The overwhelming number of positions advocated in the course were very broad in nature and often more applicable to individual behavior or behavioral changes in society as a whole than to any ‘political’ action,” investigators wrote. “For example, the lecture on quality was much more directly applicable to individual behavior than political action and would be difficult to attempt to categorize in political terms. Another example is the lecture on personal strength where again the focus was on individual behavior. In fact, this lecture placed some focus on the personal strength of individual Democrats who likely would not agree with Mr. Gingrich on his political views expressed in forums outside his Renewing American Civilization course teaching. Even in the lectures that had a partial focus on broadly defined changes in political activity, such as less government and government regulation, there was also a strong emphasis on changes in personal behavior and non-political changes in society as a whole.”
The IRS also checked out the evaluations written by students who completed the course. The overwhelming majority of students, according to the report, believed that Gingrich knew his material, was an interesting speaker, and was open to alternate points of view. None seemed to perceive a particular political message. “Most students,” the IRS noted, “said that they would apply the course material to improve their own lives in such areas as family, friendships, career, and citizenship.”
The IRS concluded the course simply was not political. “The central problem in arguing that the Progress and Freedom Foundation provided more than incidental private benefit to Mr. Gingrich, GOPAC, and other Republican entities,” the IRS wrote, “was that the content of the ‘Renewing American Civilization’ course was educational…and not biased toward any of those who were supposed to be benefited.”
The bottom line: Gingrich acted properly and violated no laws. There was no tax fraud scheme. Of course, by that time, Gingrich was out of office, widely presumed to be guilty of something, and his career in politics was (seemingly) over.
Cross Posted at Musings of a Mad Conservative.
Tags: Newt Gingrich
