Tagged: Newt Gingrich

Posted: June 18, 2012 at 7:29 am

GOP Convention Embarrassing on Many Levels

This weekend, local Republicans used speeches, displays, and fundraising gimmicks to showcase the state of the current state of the Montana GOP. Anyone who stops to consider the Montana GOP’s 2012 Convention can only find the party a complete embarrassment.

First, there was the raffle to win a gun, duct tape, and a shovel. Then there was “the bullet-“pocked” outhouse,” that was labeled as President Obama’s presidential library. Lee Newspapers reported that these “might have pushed the envelope” for what’s acceptable to regular people. For Republican candidates, these didn’t seem to be a problem.

Then, things really got weird. The Missoulian reported that Rick Hill and his wife had wanted to ride into the Hilton Garden Inn in Missoula on their motorcycles.

“The lawyers and the fire department said we couldn’t,” Hill told a lunchtime gathering Saturday at the Montana Republican convention.

“Motorcycles are a metaphor for freedom. … The people who would take away our freedom do it by introducing the concepts of risk and fear.”

Put aside for a moment the fact that a retired insurance executive and his wife trying to ride into the GOP convention of blue hairs only makes the GOP’s gubernatorial aspirations more ridiculous.

Rick Hill is clearly trying to tie the fact that he was prevented from embarrassing himself thusly to his rusty belief that it is government regulation that is the enemy of freedom. But the metaphor doesn’t work. Hill’s shame was blocked by the private business at which the event occurred–and the insurance policies for the GOP convention and hotel. The insurance concept of “risk” is one with which Hill is intimately familiar. As an insurance executive he made his living preventing people from taking it–and making a hefty profit doing so.

As an aside, the Missoulian also reported that the bike Hill had wanted to ride was a Harley, though Hill is more well known as a BMW rider. He has been frequenter of BMW motorcycle forums, as these screenshots below indicate.

These are forums where people look to meet up with other BMW riders:

Hill’s BMW is the bike he seems to prefer, as it is the one he takes with him to California for his annual four month vacation to the state.

It’s also a place where BMW owners can discuss their bikes.

Finally, the Convention planners made a poor choice for the keynote speaker in Newt Gingrich, whose presence only highlighted the problems with the candidates at the top of the GOP ticket and did not fit the bill very well, as I wrote about when the choice was first announced.

Besides Gingrich’s personal foibles, other prominent Republicans have pointed out that Gingrich humiliated the party when he was House speaker, citing Gingrich’s $300,000 payment to resolve allegations of giving misleading information in a 1997 ethics probe.

When Hill entered the House of Representatives, Gingrich served as Speaker, and they reportedly were close while serving together. In fact, Hill and Gingrich were so close that Hill was accused during his 1997 re-election campaign of selling his vote to make Newt Gingrich Speaker of the House again after Gingrich’s Committee donated $10,000 to Hill’s campaign. And, Congressman Hill voted for Newt Gingrich’s re-election for Speaker of the House despite accusations that Gingrich had made false and misleading statements to the House Ethics Committee in 1997.

When Speaker Gingrich decided to step down from his position while embattled by controversy in November 1998, Hill told the Associated Press: “It’s sad to see a friend step down.”

Posted: June 12, 2012 at 7:52 am

Gingrich a Bad Choice

The Montana GOP announced that New Gingrich will be the keynote speaker at the state party convention this weekend in Missoula.

The GOP has made a poor choice, for Newt does not fit this bill very well.

Back a few years ago, Gingrich repeatedly praised Governor Schweitzer for having gotten fiscal conditions under control in Montana. Why would you want a keynote speaker who supports the standard bearer for the other party? And why would the GOP want a keynote speaker who implicitly (whether he realizes it or not) espouses the view that Schweitzer inherited a fiscal mess and wove it into gold?

Also, Gingrich is a fat old pervert, an image that Hill, himself, is having to deal with due to past marital infidelities.

When Gingrich was in Congress he had a young female aide named Callista, who had several important roles: converting Ginrich to Catholicism, and giving Gingrich sexual favors. The favors were highly persuasive, evidently, because Gingrich left his wife to be with Callista, but not before living a long spell in an open relationship with his wife and Callista both. Gingrich essentially practiced polygamy for many years, openly enjoying both a wife and a mistress.

Callista, incidentally, says she sings in her church choir several days a week.

In addition to having his pants around his ankles, Gingrich is emblematic of Washington in other ways, too. The minute he skipped out of Congress, he took fat contracts in the private sector, kickbacks from years of doing favors for private industry while Speaker. Like Fannie Mae, who paid him almost half a million bucks for his “expertise.” Or Phrma, the drug industry lobbying group, or Astra-zeneca and Pfizer, two of the biggest drug companies on earth. They all sent him big checks soon after he left Congress, so that he would use his influence to kill a bill that would have allowed Americans to buy cheap medicine from Canada.

Two-timing your wife. Cashing in on your influence as Congressman to get sweet contracts so that you can live a fat life. Sounds like somebody we know.

Posted: February 7, 2012 at 5:11 pm

Another GOP Candidate Caught Scrubbing Infidelity from Wikipedia Page

CNN this week chided the Newt Gingrich campaign for attempting to scrub references to Gingrich’s infidelity and ethics problems from his Wikipedia site.

Gingrich is the latest Republican to be caught trying to keep voters in the dark about his extramarital activity. Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Hill was caught doing the same here in Montana.

The Billings Gazette reported that:

Wikipedia locked down former U.S. Congressman Rick Hill’s biography page Monday, after more than 30 attempts to add or scrub details about Hill’s past campaigns and his 1976 divorce.

The edits by Hill’s campaign manager included links to articles about Hill’s infidelity to his first wife, and articles describing his nasty campaign tactics in past elections. I guess they didn’t want us to read about things like this Associated Press article from back in the 1990s, describing an episode during Rick Hill’s affair with a cocktail waitress at the Sip N’ Dip Lounge in Great Falls, the bar with the live mermaid tank.

Spaulding remembered learning about the affair after Hill began coming home very late at night. She recalled packing their three sons, aged 18 months to 8 years, in a car once and driving to the Sip-N-Dip lounge where she saw Hill with the other woman. She said she begged him without success to come home.

To be sure, it is probably pretty commonplace for candidates to monitor and ask for edits to their Wikipedia pages. What’s interesting here is the obsessive number attempts to make the same edits. It shows how far Republicans are willing to go to try to keep the public in the dark about their boss’s true characters.

Posted: January 4, 2012 at 7:04 am

Gingrich Shows He’s Still a Joke

This GOP presidential primary campaign offers an important reminder; for every scathing political comeback that makes it into the history books, there are loads more that flop—or worse. The latest attempt to one-up a rival comes from Newt Gingrich. It falls into the latter category.

Newt recently took issue with rival candidate Mitt Romney’s quip that Gingrich’s failure to get on Virginia’s primary ballot was like “Lucille Ball and the chocolate factory.” It means basically that his operation was a botched effort.

So Newt, rather than proving that his field operation was sound, decided it was time to get witty. He’d show Romney…er…by showing up at a real chocolate factory Wednesday, apparently thinking this was some kind of clever comeback.

“Gov. Romney had a cute line yesterday about my team resembling Lucy in the chocolate factory, and I just want to say, here I am in the chocolate factory and now that I have the courage to come to the chocolate factory I hope Gov. Romney will have the courage to debate me one-on-one,” Gingrich said Wednesday to reporters.

Then, he seems to thought he would look even more clever if he actually got in there and started making the chocolate himself. There’s even video:

I guess it is possible he hadn’t seen the Romney pic. Still, if he had thought about it, he probably would have realized that what he thought was some kind of brilliant comeback ended up making him look more Comedy Central than C-Span.

Posted: January 3, 2012 at 6:02 pm

Presidential Candidates Get A Favor from Rehberg

The Hill has a running list up of which members of Congress are endorsing which presidential candidate. As of this posting, the tallies stood at Romney – 61, Perry-13, Gingrich-8, Paul-3, Cain-1 Bachman-1, Santorum-0.

Montana Congressman Rehberg is not on the list.

To be sure, Rehberg’s absence could simply be explained by his fear to make a choice this early. But given that we already heard his de facto endorsement of Bachmann in February of 2011, it may be that he was asked by the campaigns to do them a solid and stay out. After all, Rehberg has been at the center of Congress’s failure and brinksmanship throughout the budget debate. As David Weigel theorizes in Slate, the brinkmanship and failure to accomplish anything is tanking the popularity of House Republicans:

there has been a rarely-admitted fatigue with the Republican House, and its inability to get anything done unless there’s last-minute stop-the-clock brinkmanship…it started to mean that you were part of Washington machinery that was creaking and belching acrid smoke.

Posted: December 16, 2011 at 5:51 pm

“Faithful Republican, Unfaithful Husband”

A series of events this week highlights the ways that Newt Gingrich’s campaign to be the Republicans’ presidential pick will reveal how GOP primary voters will react to a candidate with extramarital affairs.

First, Newt Gingrich penned a letter to an Iowa family values group pledging that he wouldn’t cheat on his current wife. (We aren’t supposed to remember that he did cheat with her on his former wife I guess). He wrote the letter in lieu of signing an official pledge that he would not cheat, as the other candidates did. The value of such a promise is dubious, given that Gingrich’s pledges of “I do” to his former wives have all ended with his infidelity.

At the same time he was hoping to assure the GOP faithful that he would keep it in his pants if they would just please just vote for him, the GOP opinion-maker news magazine the National Review came out with an editorial urging conservatives against a vote for Gingrich:

Very few people with a personal history like his — two divorces, two marriages to former mistresses — have ever tried running for president.

The editorial points out that Gingrich’s weaknesses include the fact that he “has not run for anything since 1998,” and that he was ousted by his own party “who had lost confidence in him.” The GOP was “right to bring his tenure to an end,” the National Review continued, because, among other things,”again and again he put his own interests above those of the causes he championed in public.”

As I read the opinion, I was struck by how easily the same could be written about Montana GOP gubernatorial candidate Rick Hill.

Hill also has a past full of baggage, including an affair with a cocktail waitress at the Sip ‘N Dip Lounge and mermaid pool in Great Falls. Hill, like Gingrich, is establishment to the bone. Like Gingrich, Hill has not run for office in over a decade. And, like Gingrich, Hill was ousted by his own party. In Hill’s case, he was edged out of the race so that Rehberg could run instead, after it became evident that Hill had too many problems to be electable. In an attempt to save face, Hill was forced to claim “poor eyesight” forced him to drop out, since the typical excuse of “dropping out to spend more time with the family” was out of the question after Hill’s affair and subsequent divorce.

Gingrich’s flaws bear enough similarities to Rick Hill that the races will likely see similar arcs of peak and decline even though they don’t have much else in common. Gingrich (at least before his fall) had somewhat of a reputation for leadership and smarts, while Hill…is kind of a nothing-burger.

What happens to Gingrich’s campaign next could easily be in the cards for Hill’s. Already, Gingrich is becoming somewhat of a pop culture joke. In fact, a billboard went up this week in Pennsylvania reminding voters of Gingrich’s infidelity. What’s hilarious is that it wasn’t a political billboard. The billboard advertisement for an extramarital hookup site. A picture of the billboard, which proclaims Newt Gingrich a “Faithful Republican” but an “unfaithful husband” can be seen here.

Posted: December 5, 2011 at 7:09 pm

Bowen Greenwood Craves Santorum‏

The head of the Montana Republican Party has announced his support for Rick Santorum despite the fact that Newt Gingrich is leading all other presidential primary candidates by nearly 30 points in Montana. GOP Executive Director Bowen Greenwood announced his yearning for Santorum in a recent Tweet. Here’s the screenshot:

It is surprising to see a major party figure getting behind a candidate without an official party action—like a primary or caucus.

Perhaps Greenwood feels so comfortable being out there for Santorum because Greenwood believes that Santorum is the most anti-gay candidate in the mix (that hasn’t yet totally imploded anyway.) Last June, the MT Republican party adopted an official platform that keeps a long-held position in support of making it illegal to be gay. Santorum has said publicly that he is the the candidate who is most focused on social issues (as opposed to jobs and the economy–sounds just like the GOP legislature). It’s hard to deny that Newt Gingrich isn’t the right guy to lead the antigay crowd–he isn’t exactly the poster boy for making anyone want to sign up for “man woman marriage.”