posted March 09, 2007 03:27 AM            

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."

Widely considered a mastermind of the Republican revolution that swept Congress in the 1994 elections, Gingrich remains wildly popular among many conservatives. He has repeatedly placed near the top of Republican presidential polls recently, even though he has not formed a campaign.

Gingrich has said he is waiting to see how the Republican field shapes up before deciding in the fall whether to run.

Reports of extramarital affairs have dogged him for years as a result of two messy divorces, but he has refused to discuss them publicly.

Gingrich, who frequently campaigned on family values issues, divorced his second wife, Marianne, in 2000 after his attorneys acknowledged Gingrich's relationship with his current wife, Callista Bisek, a former congressional aide more than 20 years younger than he is.

His first marriage, to his former high school geometry teacher, Jackie Battley, ended in divorce in 1981. Although Gingrich has said he doesn't remember it, Battley has said Gingrich discussed divorce terms with her while she was recuperating in the hospital from cancer surgery.

Gingrich married Marianne months after the divorce.

"There were times when I was praying and when I felt I was doing things that were wrong. But I was still doing them," he said in the interview. "I look back on those as periods of weakness and periods that I'm ... not proud of."

Gingrich's congressional career ended in 1998 when he abruptly resigned from Congress after poor showings from Republicans in elections and after being reprimanded by the House ethics panel over charges that he used tax-exempt funding to advance his political goals.

posted March 10, 2007 03:58 PM              

"When assessing the legacy of Bill Clinton, we can't overlook his shameful sexual behavior in the Oval Office... Indeed, it is my belief that no man has ever done more to debase the presidency or to undermine our Constitution -- and particularly the moral and biblical principles upon which it is based -- than has William Jefferson Clinton."

-James Dobson, discussing President Bill Clinton’s extra-marital affair while in office, January, 2001

In 2001, James Dobson condemned President Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky, saying Clinton had done more than anyone before him to "undermine our Constitution."

Today, Dobson provided a platform on his radio show for former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to admit to his own extra-marital affair -- at precisely the time he was leading the call for the impeachment of President Clinton. Did Dobson attack Gingrich -- as he did Clinton -- as an enemy of the Constitution, our nation, or even his proclaimed "moral and biblical principles?"

No, he praised Gingrich as a national leader and applauded his "friend's" willingness to discuss such issues on his show.

This double standard cuts to the heart of the religious right's hypocrisy.

Instead of holding their own leaders and allies -- from Ralph Reed to Ted Haggard and Newt Gingrich -- to the standards they attempt to impose on America, they craft excuses and create exceptions.

What is even funnier than this is that a few weeks ago Dobson came out and announced that after he counseled Ted Haggard regarding his homosexual extra marital affairs, that after 3 weeks of counseling Ted Haggard is now completely cured of his homosexuality. lmao I like the way he talks about homosexuality as if it is a disease.

posted March 10, 2007 04:21 PM            

Commander Corruption created a Constitutional crisis when he, as the highest law enforcement official and highest prosecutor in America perjured himself and committed the crimes of perjury and obstruction of justice in a court of law. He did that as President of the United States; THE person to whom all executive branch personnel report..including the FBI and the Justice Department.

posted March 10, 2007 09:58 PM              

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Virgo Rising 8'57, Sagittarius Sun/4thH 3'26, Pisces Moon/6thH 8'22

"Our passions are not too strong, they are too weak. We are far too easily pleased." - C.S. Lewis

posted March 12, 2007 01:07 AM              

No one here said that Clinton was impeached for his affair with Monica Lewinsky either. All that was stated is that while Gingrich was busy getting Clinton impeached he was having an extra marital affair as well.

posted March 14, 2007 01:36 PM              

i've included it here, as it contains important stuff, that the news doesn't report very often.

KATRINA: ADDING INSULT TO INJURYIN NEW Orleans, locals call it the "Grand Canyon effect."

"You know about it, you have seen it on TV," says Bill Quigley, a public-interest lawyer and Loyola University law professor. "But when you see it in person, it can take your breath away."

When I saw New Orleans last summer while volunteering with an interfaith group, it was more dramatically breathtaking even than seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time. Unlike the canyon, there's so much of New Orleans that hasn't been shown on TV.

For a brief time immediately after the catastrophe in August 2005, some people dared believe that New Orleans would provide a wake-up call about the "two Americas" divided by race and class that we've become. But in those weeks, an alternate narrative was also created: It blamed the victims for being poor and daring to expect help from the rest of us. Some people have used it to provide a rationale for the continuing neglect, fraud and discriminatory government policies.

Last week, Newt Gingrich took it beyond the right-wing talk-show circuit. Gingrich, an undeclared candidate for president, was in the news on another matter, admitting to what already was obvious: At precisely the moment he was loudly condemning President Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky, Gingrich was cheating on his second wife with an aide 20 years his junior, who is now wife No. 3.

In an interview with James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Gingrich said he has "gotten on my knees and sought God's forgiveness." (For the adultery, not the hypocrisy.) He should have begged forgiveness for the comments he made last week blaming the victims in New Orleans for causing their own suffering.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference, Gingrich criticized government failures after Katrina, but then faulted "the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane."

Gingrich must think that message will resonate with the base, and so he perpetuates the myth that it was Hurricane Katrina that caused 1,800 deaths and damage so incomprehensible that it has to be seen to be believed. In fact, the death and destruction was due to walls of water unleashed when federally-built levees were breached.

Many homeowners learned this to their dismay when they tried to collect on their hurricane insurance. If they didn't have flood insurance, and many had been told by insurers that they didn't need it, they weren't covered.

Besides, hundreds of thousands of people did manage to "get out of the way" of Hurricane Katrina - and still lost everything but their lives. Now they face serious obstacles to coming home, obstacles that appear to Quigley and others to be more than random.

It's not only that fewer than 700 of the 109,000 homeowners who applied for federal assistance to fix up their homes have gotten it. It's that renters, who made up the majority of New Orleans residents, get nothing at all, and rents of the few units available are sky-high. Even though most of the public housing units are structurally sound, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development still plans to raze them.

In surrounding parishes, Quigley says, government policies appear motivated to keep out the poor: One restricts homeowners from renting only to "blood relatives." Another passed a resolution opposing all low-income, tax-credit multifamily housing.

About 60,000 families who have tried to return are still living in FEMA trailers. Half of New Orleans homes still don't have electricity. Not surprisingly, the African-American population of the city has shrunk by 61 percent.

"If we are really serious about our national community, if we are really sisters and brothers of each other, we would not blame the victims of a disaster for being victimized," says Quigley.

He says his city is fighting for its "spirit and soul." Gingrich's comments suggest that that struggle isn't limited to New Orleans.

Carol Towarnicky

"Not surprisingly, the African-American population of the city has shrunk by 61 percent."

posted March 14, 2007 02:49 PM              

Even at the time that Clinton was being persecuted in the press for the Lewinsky affair he publically apologized to the American people and stood before his church congregation and admitted his wrongdoing and asked for their forgiveness as well.