Chupacabra Report

Not a roundup today, what’s got my goat is seeing Newton Leroy McPherson Gingrich on TV and in the press described as a possible presidential candidate. It’s time for your correspondent do a hatchet job on this rank hypocrite.

Let’s start with little Newtie in high school, where to advance his quest for popularity, poon, and political power, he went out for the football team. His sports career was notable only in that the coach had to send off special to the Riddell Company for a helmet to fit his freakishly large cranium. He did however find romance, carrying on a furtive affair with his geometry teacher.

Newt went on to college, marrying Jackie Battley ( the math teacher) after his freshman year. Jackie Gingrich worked and reared their two children while Newt earned a BS, MS, and PHD. All this gave student/family man Gingrich draft deferments through the Viet Nam war years. This is an unusual background for a war hawk that compares himself to Winston Churchill.

Liberal republican Gingrich worked on Nelson Rockefeller’s campaign in 1968. He took a teaching job at West Georgia College because it was located in Georgia’s 6th Congressional district, held by Jack Flynt, purportedly the weakest member of the Georgia delegation. Newt ran against Flynt and lost, twice.

Newt’s third race is against a moderate, so he becomes a conservative. He’s elected.

It’s 1981 and Newt’s wife has just had cancer surgery. He wants a divorce, shows up at her hospital bed with a legal pad, to work out their settlement. He later refuses to pay alimony and child support. Friends collect money from the First Baptist Church so the family has rent and groceries.

Six months later he marries Marianne Ginter Gingrich. He is cheating on her with a congressional aide while he presides over the republican inquisition into Clinton’s sex life. They divorce and Newt marries the aide, Calista Bisek.

Gingrich hounded Speaker Jim Wright out of office for using “sales” of his book to collect campaign cash. Later, Gingrich seeks a $4.5 million book advance from Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch, who needs congressional approval to buy a US television network.

The House Ethics Committee fined Newt $300,000 for using non profit money for politics. He finally paid the fine, but later deducted it from his tax bill.

Gingrich left politics before his moral turpitude became widely known. I remember a friend who refused to believe all the sex stuff until I finally showed it to him in the pages of The National Review. (If William F. Buckley says so it must be true.)

Now Newt appears on Murdoch’s Fox news, spouting his elephant shit. He hosted a documentary on Fox called “One Nation Under God.” Funny, that’s a slogan widely flogged by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church. Moon owns the Washington Times newspaper and Insight magazine, both cheerleaders for the republican right wing.

So if you happen to hear somebody speak about Newt running for president, you might point out that he’s a serial philandering deadbeat father, an unprincipled opportunist chickenhawk who is unfit for decent company, much less public office.