Face it, Mitt Romney comes across as a nice, honest, good-looking, down-to-earth guy. The kind of guy you might appreciate as a neighbor or enjoy a round of golf with. Surely, he would not lob falsehoods at his political opponent, but looks can be deceiving and in the case of Romney they are. This editorial from the Wall Street Journal informs that the Romney campaign continues to keep alive the bogus ethics charges against Newt Gingrich, despite being well aware that they are not true. The Morning Spew previously posted a CNN video about those false ethics charges here.
The ethics charges and Gingrich’s resignation, the editorial goes on to say, were all part of a Democrat vendetta designed to destroy the GOP. In an effort to minimize damage to his own party, Gingrich paid a fine and resigned.
Isn’t it amazing to learn that Romney, who claims to carry the GOP conservative banner, is the one to continue the attack? Isn’t is astounding that the old guard RINOs, who experienced first hand the damage inflicted by Democrats as they played their dirty tricks, have come out in support of Romney? The Romney who continues to damage the GOP for political gain. It’s a dirty play right out of the Democrat attack handbook, if ever there was one.
Let’s not replace the Chicago Machine with the Romney Machine.
From The Wall Street Journal
Professor Gingrich’s Ethics
The facts that Romney omits in his 1990s history lesson.
Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are having a spirited debate about whose record is worse, and the pity is that usually they both make good points. One notable exception is Mr. Romney’s misleading attack on the former speaker’s House ethics case in the 1990s.
Mr. Romney often invokes the episode, which turned on the financing for a history course Mr. Gingrich taught at Kennesaw State College and Reinhardt College, and then implies that his eventual House reprimand and $300,000 fine led him to “resign in disgrace.” This week Mr. Romney has been calling on Mr. Gingrich to release “all of the records” from the investigation. This is strange, since the 1997 document “In the Matter of Representative Newt Gingrich” is online—all 1,280 pages of it, including exhibits.
Even casual readers will learn a lot about Mr. Gingrich’s political method, but what they won’t find is evidence of impropriety because the accusations were a partisan vendetta. Democrats saw Mr. Gingrich’s low approval ratings and wanted to force the GOP to make an embarrassing floor defense. The pettifogging was also meant to counterbalance the Clinton White House’s own ethical woes.
On the merits, the claim was that Mr. Gingrich diverted funds from a tax-exempt 501(c)3 organization for political activity. The Progress and Freedom Foundation sponsored his seminar “Renewing American Civilization,” and Democrats charged its real purpose was advancing Professor Gingrich’s career.
In 1997, the speaker basically copped a plea and accepted the House rebuke to avoid further political damage. Yet a formal IRS investigation in 1999 exonerated Mr. Gingrich and found that the course was intended to educate students about American government and society.
The quality of the education they received in l’affaire Gingrich is another matter. The curriculum and lectures detailed in the ethics report are laden with Mr. Gingrich’s pop theories on the five pillars of this, the 14 ideas for that, “the Triangle of American Success.” The conservative scholar James Q. Wilson called it “bland, vague, hortatory and lacking in substance.” But Mr. Gingrich wasn’t running for academic tenure.
Read the rest at the Wall Street Journal
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