Gingrich finally admits he doesn’t deserve to be president

By Stephen C. Webster/Raw Story

In a wide-ranging interview with NBC late night talk show host Jay Leno on Thursday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) finally admitted that he does not deserve to be president.

The famously confident Republican told Leno that he was “publicly, explicitly wrong” about President Barack Obama’s reelection chances.

“Why were you so sure? Were you just watching Fox News?” Leno asked to cheers and applause.

“No, actually it’s just because all the historical models I knew said if you have this level of unemployment, this price of gasoline, this size of the deficit, that the incumbent was gonna lose,” Gingrich replied. “I give Obama a lot of credit that he defied all the probabilities and he won.”

He added that Election Day was “a very hard time for all of us,” saying he felt like the Republican Party “suddenly went off a cliff.”

Leno interjected that during the Republican primary debates, Gingrich and fellow candidates appeared to be “killing” former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R).

“If I were a Democrat, I wouldn’t have to do anything here,” the host quipped. “When you guys were attacking a Republican for not paying enough tax, I thought that was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. That seems hilarious to me. Did you think you were hard on him? during the primaries”

“Not enough,” Gingrich lamented. “He won the nomination. Look, if you can’t get through the nomination process, you shouldn’t be president. It’s a tough business.”

Gingrich withdrew from the Republican Party primaries after his funds ran dry, winning the majority of delegates in just two states.

The videos below were broadcast by NBC on Thursday, November 30, 2012.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Hidden Tapes & Secret Emails: Right Wing Now Throwing Kitchen Sink At Obama On Libya

 By Hayes Brown/Think Progress
In the closing days of the election, Republicans are throwing everything they can think of at President Obama to rattle his position on national security. Though a CBS poll taken immediately after the final Presidential debate had 64 percent of undecided voters believing Obama would be better on national security than Mitt Romney, the right remains convinced that Libya will be Obama’s undoing.
Despite former Bush administration Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice imploring that attacks be held off until an investigation is complete, more partisan Republicans refuse to heed her advice. To facilitate this, the right wing is floating almost any theory, no matter how implausible, in hopes of bringing Obama down, for example:
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) on Fox News this morning claimed, without offering any evidence, that veterans no longer trust Obama post-Benghazi:

MCCAIN: I’ve been traveling all over the country on behalf of Mitt Romney and I can tell you, our veterans are angry. They’re angry, and they no longer trust their Commander-in-Chief. Because this debacle has been — not only what has happened infuriated them, but also the cover-up.

John Bolton, seeming to take cues from conspiracy theorists Frank Gaffney and Aaron Klein, speculated on Tuesday that the U.S. may have been buying arms from terrorists in Libya to give to Syrians at the time of the attack:

BOLTON: Well, there has been speculation about it. I’ll just say my personal opinion. If we were buying weapons from the al Qaeda or terrorist militias in Benghazi to give to the Syrian opposition, I’m outraged by that because these surface-to-air missiles and other weapons from Gadhafi’s arsenal falling into the hands of terrorists is bad enough. For the U.S. to be transmitting them to opposition forces in Syria I think would be beyond the pale.

Also on Tuesday, Newt Gingrich referred to “rumors” about emails implicating the White House in incompetence:

GINGRICH: There is a rumor — I want to be clear, it’s a rumor — that at least two networks have emails from the National Security Adviser’s office telling a counterterrorism group to stand down. But they were a group in real-time trying to mobilize marines and C-130s and the fighter aircraft, and they were told explicitly by the White House stand down and do nothing. This is not a terrorist action.

And Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) think Obama’s anti-torture pledge is keeping one of the arrested suspects away from U.S. interrogators:

CHAMBLISS: Once the president in January of 2009 signed the executive order, saying we are going to shut down Guantanamo … any enemy combatant, as this individual is, there are no policies in place to take possession and interrogate him in a way to gain valuable information.

Meanwhile, Sean Hannity is now claiming to have sources who heard “damning” audio tapes of those under attack in Benghazi:

HANNITY: [D]on’t you think, in fairness, in the complete spirit of transparency that the Obama administration promised, that if there are tapes that we could hear that caused Ty Woods to disobey orders, risk his military career, his life, and then he gave his life, why not release them to the American people before the election so we could get a picture of the full truth?

Watch all of their claims here:

As varying and disparate as they are, these right-wing claims all focus more on attacking the Obama administration than any desire to seek the truth on Benghazi. For the last month and a half, after Ambassador Susan Rice’s Sept. 16 appearance on several news shows, the right has taken every opportunity to try to politicize the attacks. So far all of their attempts and claims have gone down in flames.
In comparison, the State Department’s investigation is set to be completed in the coming weeks, which will lay out in full any security failures. Likewise, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will be convening hearings after the election to determine what intelligence failures actually happened on Sept. 11.

Gingrich Concedes Romney Wasn’t Honest About His Tax Plan During Debate

By Judd Legum/Think Progress

This morning on Meet The Press, Obama campaign adviser Robert Gibbs confronted Newt Gingrich on a fundamental inconsistency in Romney’s description of his tax plan. During the primary debates, Romney insisted that everyone in America would get a 20% tax cut, including the 1%. But last week’s during his debate with Obama, Romney insisted that his tax cut would not reduce taxes at all for wealthy Americans.

Gingrich acknowledged the clear inconsistency, saying “I think it’s clear he changed.” He described the change as “good politics.”

Watch it:

Of course, while Romney’s spin regarding his plan has changed, the plan itself has not. Independent experts have concluded that, even if Romney eliminated every tax deduction, it still wouldn’t counterbalance his massive tax cuts for the wealthy.

His tax plan was one of 27 issues where Romney was less than honest during the debate. Romney’s campaign also conceded he misstated the truth on green jobs.

Gingrich: ‘We have no proof’ to support Romney’s welfare attack

By Stephen C. Webster/Raw Story

Appearing on CNN Wednesday night, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) admitted “we have no proof” to support the most recent attack at by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney hitting President Barack Obama for supposedly scrapping a welfare work rule.

The ad is blatantly false; a fabrication critics say is aimed at stirring up resentment toward people of color. Yet, amid a flurry of negative speculation in the media over why Romney refuses to release his tax returns, the deceptive welfare attack has suddenly emerged at the very epicenter of the Republican’s struggling presidential campaign.

And on Wednesday night, Anderson Cooper just wouldn’t let Gingrich explain that away.

After pressing the issue several times trying to get Gingrich to say whether he believes the ad is accurate, the former speaker seemed to crack. “If the ad makers had asked me, I would have said, ‘This makes it possible’ would have been a good way to enter into the wording of what was said,” he tried to explain.

“We have no proof today, but I would say to you under Obama’s ideology, it is absolutely true that he would be comfortable with sending a lot of people checks for doing nothing. I believe that totally,” Gingrich added later in the interview, explaining that if it were his ad, it would have called Obama “the leading foodstamp president in American history.”

The number of Americans reliant on government assistance to buy food grew by more than 70 percent between 2008 – 2011, driven by a lack of jobs and the unavailability of credit as the country grappled with a near total economic collapse at the end of President George W. Bush’s second term.

Despite the nearly unprecedented economic pressure on working class Americans, President Obama did not scrap a rule that requires welfare beneficiaries to look for work. Instead, the administration gave states the option to waive federal welfare work rules if officials come up with a plan that can increase employment among the poor even more.

That change was initially sought by Republican and Democratic governors alike, and even Romney, as the former governor of Massachusetts, signed on (PDF) in 2005. Republicans in Congress, however, turned against the waivers after the president agreed to it.

Far from being the opponent of welfare reform the Romney campaign is trying to depict him as, President Obama moved from saying as a state senator that the bi-partisan welfare reform of the Clinton years had “problems” to actively touting its successes in a 2008 campaign ad.

This video was broadcast by CNN on Wednesday, August 8, 2012.

——

Rev's take on Newt Gingrich

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As Gingrich Is Assailed By Conservative Press, Conservatives Blame "Liberal Media"

by Eric Boehlert/Media Matters

Talk about throwing good money after bad.

Last week, cantankerous media watchdog Brent Bozell announced his group, Media Research Center, was launching the largest initiative in its 25 years history -- a $5 million marketing campaign urging the "liberal media" to "tell the truth!" Bozell urged Americans to stand up during this election year and "declare, once and for all, that the leftwing so-called news media are no longer going to pick winners and losers."

Featuring mobile billboards and "Tell The Truth!" placards, the MRC campaign is drawing inspirationfrom Newt Gingrich's candidacy, and specifically Gingrich's calculated pushback against the press. That crusade reached its peak on the night of the South Carolina debate when he won a standing ovation after castigating moderator John King for opening the debate by asking about allegations Gingrich's former wife had made in the press that week about their marriage.

Bozell soon announced Gingrich's primary win in South Caroline represented a "defeat for the liberal media." He  urged GOP candidates to pick up Gingrich's anti-media mantle and to denounce the elites' "mission to destroy" Republican hopefuls.

All of this, as usual with Bozell, is a charade.

In fact, all that the MRC's new "Tell The Truth!" campaign does is highlight the dubious nature of the long-running "liberal media" bias production. The punch line surrounding this multi-million dollar marketing drive? It's being rolled out at the exact moment the conservative press is attacking Gingrich.

It's true. Last week Gingrich likely received better, or at least fairer, treatment in the pages of The New York Times than he did at The Drudge Report, which dedicated several days to posting a litany of harassing headlines and relentlessly targeting the former Republican Speaker of the House, treating him as if he were the political reincarnation of Bill Clinton.

It seems conservative pundits are the ones on a "mission to destroy" Gingrich's candidacy. But Bozell can't say that out loud because he has a phony, "liberal media" campaign to launch.

Here are the facts on the ground, as reported the Associated Press [emphasis added]:

Right now Newt Gingrich's most ardent critics are conservative pundits and columnists, many of whom have launched aggressive campaigns to discredit him and trip up his run for the Republican nomination.

Indeed, Gingrich surrogate Fred Thompson made the media rounds echoing the same message, that Drudge was "in the pocket" of the Romney campaign. And it's hard to argue otherwise.

Even conservative bloggers can't miss the startling turn of events:

Thursday the Drudge Report had no less than 13 anti-Gingrich links scattered across the page with somewhere around five "above the fold." The same day, National Review Online, the American Spectator, and pundit Ann Coulter all published missives railing against the former House Speaker.

Large portions of the conservative opinion press spent the last week taking Gingrich out at the knees, and seemed to do it with glee. Yet against that backdrop Bozell announced a $5 million marketing campaign to call out network news because they're the ones trying to undermine the likes of Gingrich? 

Gimme a break.

As part of his "Tell The Truth!" public relations push, Bozell bemoaned the personal attacks and "onslaught of character assassination" against Republican candidates like Gingrich. Character assassination, by airing a sit-down, on-the-record interview with one of the candidate's ex-wives, the way ABC News recently did? If Bozell's looking for the real media assassins circling Gingrich's campaign he might want to keep an eye out for Emmett Tyrrell at the conservative American Spectator, who recently uncorked a jarring, anti-Gingrich broadside:

His public record is already besmeared with tawdry divorces, and there are private encounters with the fair sex that doubtless will come out.

And if Bozell's looking for pundits mercilessly mocking Gingrich, he should  scold conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, who dismissed Gingrich as an "angry little attack muffin," or Ann Coulter who smacked down the Georgia Republican,  declaring "hotheaded arrogance is neither conservative nor attractive to voters."

This intramural phenomena has been documented over and over this month: Spooked by the prospect of a Gingrich nominee, key members of the so-called Republican Establishment orchestrated an attack campaign against the candidate. And where have most of those attacks being launched? In the conservative press. This while Bozell, the right-wing's Captain Ahab, sets his sights in the opposite direction, on ABC, CBS, NBC.

Even Beltway journalists suggest that far from attacking Gingrich or attempting to drive him out of the race, the press has been helping him try to derail Mitt Romney's march towards the nomination. Why? The press prefers a to cover a long, drawn-out nomination fight because it's good for business.

That loyalty to ratings and a solid click-through rate explains the media's "institutional rooting interest" in Gingrich's campaign,  wrote John Heilemann in New York this week. 

But Bozell and the MRC can't admit that, and they can't admit it's conservative pundits who are actively undermining Gingrich's candidacy. Bozell can't admit the reality because it would undercut the existence of the "liberal media" bias complex within the conservative movement.

It turns out, Brent Bozell can't "tell the truth." 

Gingrich claims college students don't work hard enough

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Confronted At Debate, Romney Does Not Dispute He Profited From Foreclosures In Florida

By Travis Waldron/Think Progress

ThinkProgress reported Wednesday that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) has profited from thousands of Florida foreclosures through a Goldman Sachs investment fund. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R) blasted Romney on the trail today for those investments, and re-upped those attacks in tonight’s CNN debate.

Romney attempted to explain away the investments, saying he didn’t control them because they were part of a blind trust:

GINGRICH: Governor Romney has investments in Goldman Sachs, which is today foreclosing on Floridians. So maybe Governor Romney, in the spirit of openness, should tell us how much money he’s made off of how many households that have been foreclosed by his investments.

ROMNEY: First of all, my investments are not made by me. My investments for the last 10 years have been in a blind trust, managed by a trustee. Secondly, the investments they’ve made, we’ve learned about this as we made our financial disclosure, have been made in mutual funds and bonds. I don’t own stock in either Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. There are bonds the investor has held through mutual funds. And Mr. Speaker, I know that sounds like an enormous revelation, but have you checked your own investments? You also have investments through mutual funds that also invest in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Watch it:

Notably, Romney never denied the charge that he made money off of foreclosures. Later in the debate, Romney was asked about the $3 million he kept in a Swiss bank account before it was closed in 2010. Again, Romney attempted to brush aside the question, saying, “I have a trustee” who manages a blind trust.

Romney’s reliance on blind trusts is interesting, considering it was he who called them “a ruse” when running against former Sen. Ted Kennedy (D) in 1994. And as ABC News noted, the trusts are “not so blind,” since they have been noted on his financial disclosure forms. The trusts are also maintained by Romney’s personal lawyer and don’t meet federal standards for elected officials. Romney’s original investments into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, meanwhile, werenever in a blind trust.

Gingrich promises moon base that could become 51st state

By David Edwards/Raw 

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on Wednesday vowed to build a lunar colony that he said could eventually become the 51st state.

Speaking to Republicans on Florida’s Space Coast, the former House Speaker explained that the “grandiose” idea would be possible because the government would fuel innovation by awarding prizes and incentives to private businesses.

“At one point early in my career, I introduced the Northwest Ordinance for Space,” Gingrich recalled, referring to it as the “weirdest thing” he’d ever done. “I said when we got — I think the number is 13,000 — when we have 13,000 Americans living on the moon, they can petition to become a state.”

“By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American,” the candidate insisted. “We will have commercial near-Earth activities that included science, tourism and manufacturing.”

“I accept the charge that I am an American and Americans are instinctively grandiose because we believe in a bigger future!” he exclaimed. “I want you to help me both in Florida and across the country so that you can someday say you were here the day it was announce that of course we’d have commercial space and near space. Of course we’d have a man colony on the moon that flew an American flag.”

Gingrich later joked to reporters about his chances with voters stationed at the lunar colony.

“I think the moon primary would come late in the season,” he said.

Watch this video from CNN, broadcast Jan. 25, 2012.

Radio host: Gingrich’s race rhetoric still indefensible

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Romney berates Gingrich for making ‘$35,000 a year’

By David Edwards/raw story

Multimillionaire Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney blasted former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Monday for the way he made a living in recent years.

During a NBC debate in Tampa, Florida, Romney charged that Gingrich had “peddled influence” in his role as an advisor for the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), also known as Freddie Mac.

“You said you were paid $300,000 by Freddie Mac for an historian,” Romney explained. “They don’t pay people $25,000 a month for six years as historian. That adds up to $1.6 million.”

As the head of venture capital firm Bain Capital, Romney made millions for himself by buying and selling distressed companies, sometimes eliminating thousands of jobs. Earlier this month, Romney claimed that the $374,327.62 he made in speaker’s fees the most recent year were “not very much.”

“As a business man, you know that the gross revenue of Bain wasn’t your personal income,” Gingrich told Romney. “We had a company. The company was being paid. My share was about $35,000 a year. … What’s the gross revenue of Bain in the years you were associated with it?”

“Very substantial,” Romney admitted.

“Did Bain ever do any work with any company that did any work with the government like Medicare?” Gingrich pressed.

“We didn’t do any work with the government,” Romney insisted.

“I understand your technique which you used on McCain, you used on Huckabeee,” Gingrich shot back. “You used consistently. OK? It’s unfortunate.”

Romney’s claim that he never did any work with the government while at Bain may not be exactly true.

According to Deseret News, Bain purchased Damon Corp. in 1989, a medical medical testing firm that eventually pleaded guilty to defrauding the government to the tune of $25 million. The company later paid a $119 million fine.

Romney also has $500,000 invested in Freddie Mac’s sister organization, Fannie Mae.

Last week, liberal comedian Bill Maher noted that the reason many Americans disliked Romney wasn’t because of his massive wealth.

“It’s not because he’s rich,” Maher said. “It’s how he got rich.”

The former Massachusetts governor now has a net worth of up to $250 million. Gingrich sports a net worth of about $6.7 million.

Watch this video from NBC News, broadcast Jan. 23, 2012.

Romney Blasts Gingrich’s Payments From Freddie Mac While Also Profiting From The Mortgage Giant

By Pat Garofalo/Think Progress

2012 GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney today broke out a harsher line on Newt Gingrich, Saturday’s winner of the South Carolina GOP primary, once again saying that the former speaker of the House should give back the $1.7 million in payments he received from mortgage giant Freddie Mac. “He said in a debate, actually, that people who profited from the failed model of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae ought to give back their money,” Romney noted. “Well, the speaker made $1.7 million in his enterprises from providing services to Freddie Mac. He ought to give it back.”

But Romney is throwing stones from within his own glass house, as he also profits from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, as the Boston Globe detailed back in September:

On his financial disclosure statement filed last month, Romney reported owning between $250,001 and $500,000 in a mutual fund that invests in debt notes of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, among other government entities. Over the previous year, he had reported earning between $15,001 and $50,000 in interest from those investments.

And unlike most of Romney’s financial holdings, which are held in a blind trust that is overseen by a trustee and not known to Romney, this particular investment was among those that would have been known to Romney.

Over the weekend, Romney intends to start airing an ad that will say, “While Florida families lost everything in the housing crisis, Newt Gingrich cashed in. Gingrich was paid over $1.6 million by the scandal-ridden agency that helped create the crisis.” Shockingly enough, the ad fails to mention Romney’s own investments in the government backed mortgage giants, which have netted him tens of thousands of dollars.

Gingrich Says ‘Work’ Is A ‘Strange, Distant Concept’ To Juan Williams

By Alex Seitz-Wald/Think Progress

Newt Gingrich launched a now-infamous tiradeagainst moderator Juan Williams during Monday night’s GOP debate after Williams dared to ask him if he could understand why some African-Americans were offended by Gingrich’s obsession with food stamps and child labor. “No, I don’t see that,” Gingrich sneered back.

Williams later insisted he wasn’t offended by Gingrich’s pointed defense, but did say his food stamps rhetoric is “very racial and…unless I missed it, black people haven’t been out there demanding food stamps, or marching for food stamps.”

Today, during a campaign stop in South Carolina, Gingrich recalled his exchange with Williams and used the same kind of suggestive language that Williams had objected to — this time directed at Williams himself:

GINGRICH: I had a very interesting dialogue Monday night in Myrtle Beach with Juan Williams about the idea of work, which seemed to Juan Williams to be a strange, distant concept.

Watch it:

Many pundits have seen racial undertones in Gingrich’s belittling of Williams during the debate. “That’s the way I like to spend my Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: watching Newt Gingrich sneer at Juan Williams, a black man, for having the temerity to ask him” a tough question, New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote.

Gingrich’s equally insulting assessment of the debate exchange likely won’t help.