Newt Gingrich says impeaching Clinton over sex scandal was a mistake

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: msn/The Independent

12h


Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich admitted in an interview that it was a “mistake” to impeach former President Bill Clinton over the sex scandal involving Monica Lewinsky, saying it drew attention away from Clinton’s perjury charge.

Gingrich, a Republican congressman from Georgia and Speaker of the House, led the 1998 House impeachment inquiry into Clinton, which arose after the affair between Clinton and Lewinsky became public. But reflecting on his role to “Pod Force One with Miranda Devine,” the Republican expressed remorse.

“I think it was a mistake because the real problem wasn’t Lewinsky,” Gingrich said. “The real problem was he had committed perjury in a case involving sexual harassment while he was governor.”. Gingrich was referring to Clinton’s comments stemming from a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by Paula Jones in 1994, when Clinton was still governor of Arkansas. In a deposition, Clinton denied Jones’s allegations, though he settled out of court with her in 1998.

Gingrich said the perjury stemming from that deposition was more serious than the affair with Lewinsky, an unpaid White House intern. “I realized we were really off course in August of that year,” Gingrich explained, saying that his two daughters had pointed out that the fallout from the scandal wasn’t worth the effort to impeach Clinton. “I realized at that point I had completely misunderstood how the culture was evolving,” Gingrich said.

Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/newt-gingrich-says-impeaching-clinton-over-sex-scandal-was-a-mistake/ar-AA24d74z

[Vogon_Glory]

1. So Newt now thinks that impeaching Bill Clinton was a mistake, eh?

And we’re supposed to believe that this gem of wisdom came from hindsight and reflection?

Sorry, I don’t buy it. I find the idea that Gingrich said it to discourage current senators and congressional representatives from impeaching Orange Julius to be much more plausible.

[rampartd]

3. vogon for the win

https://onionpatch.net/files/NewtGingrichMemo.html

[Vogon_Glory]

4. Thank you

And for the health and well-being of the DU community, I will refrain from posting any Vogon poetry.

[Festivito]

24. Warn Congress, yes. Plus distract and denigrate with the Clenis.

And for a second, he almost sounds bipartisan. BIG NOT!

[CTyankee]

2. Yeah, Newt...got that...

[no_hypocrisy]

5. I'll tell you why Gingrich thinks impeaching Clinton over a sex scandal

was a mistake: HE WAS DOING IT TOO SIMULTANOUSLY!!!

Gingrich was found in a parked van, rocking away, with Calista while he was still married to Marianne.

In 1993, while still married to Marianne, Gingrich began an affair with House of Representatives staffer Callista Bisek, more than two decades his junior. Gingrich was having this affair even as he led the impeachment of Bill Clinton for perjury related to Clinton's own extramarital affair. Gingrich filed for divorce from Marianne in 1999, a few months after she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The marriage produced no children. On January 19, 2012, Marianne alleged in an interview on ABC's Nightline that she had declined to accept Newt's suggestion of an open marriage. Newt disputed the account.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newt_Gingrich

[dalton99a]

19. +1

[AZ8theist]

6. "Newt" Who??

[jls4561]

7. Aka the adulterous amphibian.

[Ferrets are Cool]

8. Newt ever having ANY political influence was a bigger mistake.

[BumRushDaShow]

9. Unfortunately he has and set the stage for our current dystopian nightmare

With the 1994 election, he was able to put the GOP back in control of Congress for the first time in 40 years, and because of that, they still keep him around.

[Rebl2]

23. Absolutely he did!

[oasis]

10. Newt Gingrich has been a scheming scumbag

his entire political career. He has shown the same pattern in his private life.

[hadEnuf]

11. Who really cares what Newt Gingrich thinks.

He pops his head out of the sewer every once and a while.

[BumRushDaShow]

14. He's still directing a lot of GOP policy shit behind the scenes

IOW, he is still working as an operative.

[hadEnuf]

25. Yeah, that would add up.

The GOP wouldn't waste good sleaze like him.

[BumRushDaShow]

27. He's the architect of the current Republican party

Something I post often -

The Man Who Broke Politics

Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump’s rise. Now he’s reveling in his achievements.

Story by McKay Coppins
November 2018 Issue

Updated on October 17, 2018

[snip]

On June 24, 1978, Gingrich stood to address a gathering of College Republicans at a Holiday Inn near the Atlanta airport. It was a natural audience for him. At 35, he was more youthful-looking than the average congressional candidate, with fashionably robust sideburns and a cool-professor charisma that had made him one of the more popular faculty members at West Georgia College. But Gingrich had not come to deliver an academic lecture to the young activists before him—he had come to foment revolution.

“One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told the group. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.” For their party to succeed, Gingrich went on, the next generation of Republicans would have to learn to “raise hell,” to stop being so “nice,” to realize that politics was, above all, a cutthroat “war for power”—and to start acting like it.

The speech received little attention at the time. Gingrich was, after all, an obscure, untenured professor whose political experience consisted of two failed congressional bids. But when, a few months later, he was finally elected to the House of Representatives on his third try, he went to Washington a man obsessed with becoming the kind of leader he had described that day in Atlanta. The GOP was then at its lowest point in modern history. Scores of Republican lawmakers had been wiped out in the aftermath of Watergate, and those who’d survived seemed, to Gingrich, sadly resigned to a “permanent minority” mind-set. “It was like death,” he recalls of the mood in the caucus. “They were morally and psychologically shattered.”

But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. “His idea,” says Norm Ornstein, a political scientist who knew Gingrich at the time, “was to build toward a national election where people were so disgusted by Washington and the way it was operating that they would throw the ins out and bring the outs in.”

[snip]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/

[PatSeg]

15. Still trying to be relevant

Whenever you finally forget about people like him, they pop back up to remind us they're still alive.

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

12. We tried telling people that when it happened.

Thanks for nothing Newt.............

[ToxMarz]

13. The real problem was he didn't really have a problem to impeach him for.

So he tried to manufacturer one and he will keep manufacturing alternative shoulda/woulda/coulda scenarios to placate himself as long as he's still breathing

[Icanthinkformyself]

16. Gingrich

is the mistake, His mother should have given his sperm donor a blowjob that night, taken birth control, the after pill, had an abortion or the donor could have saved us all this headache by wearing a condom. Giving birth to this piece of shyt was the mistake. Same applies to the Convicted Felon.

[City Lights]

17. GFY, Newt. nt

[Aristus]

18. It drew attention to his own fucking around.

Fucking GOP hypocrites...

[dalton99a]

20. POS is almost 83. Hope he joins Ken Starr and Rush Limbaugh in hell

wherever the hell that is

[Bengus81]

29. Special corner spot for all of them. Trump will be joining them soon the way

he looks.

[Bengus81]

21. That asshat get a medical diagnosis that will be life ending soon?

Trying to somehow rationalize the shit he caused for years during the Clinton administration?

He Nudie...FUCK YOU!!

[malthaussen]

22. He's still alive? n/t

[Walleye]

26. So is he now saying we can impeach a president for the crimes committed before he was in office? Hmmm

[badhair77]

28. Newt is slimier than one can imagine.

Having oral sex with another man’s wife while he sat in a car with his kids nearby. What a prince. And yet the Evangelicals still forgive him because he was so “passionate” about his country.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newt/vanityfair4.html

[Emile]

30. Coming from a hypocrite who was cheating

on his wife.

[mdbl]

31. Any headline quoting New Gringrich should start with..

"Vile, corrupt and immoral Newt Gingrich" blah blah blah