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Know More Newts!
by Alan Bisbort
Feb. 18, 2002 -- HARTFORD (APJP) -- Remember Newt Gingrich
Sure, you'd hoped to forget the former House Speaker, to relegate him to the distant mist of a bad dream from which you've happily awakened, but Newt is on the comeback trail. He's popping up as a talking head on the TV chat shows and as a "political correspondent" for FOX News, occasionally penning a syndicated column and snaking his way into corporate boardrooms, where post-Enron, they are desperate for new poster boy faces for the same old business as usual.
I recently caught Newt's act as part of the "Connecticut Forum" in Hartford. The forum's format was a panel discussion on the theme "Our Nation," and it featured Newt, Peggy Noonan, Andrew Cuomo and Jonathan Kozol. Newt was shooting sparks that night, extemporaneously opining on issues of the day with an authority that the others on the panel simply did not have readily at their command (And in Noonan's case, never had).
It is clear that Newt knows his own mind, and he only seems to come fully alive when a microphone is placed in front of his mouth. His verbal gifts are positively Clintonian, even if there is a dark hint of the Nixonian in his character. You see it when someone (such as the liberal educator Kozol) disagrees with or disputes something he has said. Newt's face flushes, his neck reddens, his mouth hardens into a thin diagonal line, his jowls open and…out comes the familiar old demagogue we knew and loved back in his Contract On America days.
And, just as it was with Tricky Dick, we will have Newt to kick around again, I fear. The man is barely 50 years old!
However, because Newt fell so precipitously from grace in 1998, we realize that some might have forgotten the salient points of the career of the former Speaker of the House and architect of the ill-fated Republican Revolution. Thus, I've designed a quiz to help prepare everyone for Newt's inevitable return.
1. Newt presented his first wife with divorce papers while she was in a hospital bed, recovering from surgery for what disease:
a. chronic boredom
b. intractable depression
c. cancer
d. rickets
2. Newt "wrote" a novel while a member of Congress, for which he received an advance so excessive that he was forced to take a royalty deal instead. The book was a bust, containing the dullest sex scenes in history. The title was:
a. I Wanteth Thy Sex, Please Master
b. 1945
c. Battlefield Earth
d. Thar She Blows
3. In order to advance his own career, Newt destroyed the career of a former Speaker of the House, by accusing this individual of questionable dispensation of the profits from a book, not unlike the situation Newt himself faced and for which he was reprimanded. This Speaker was:
a. Tip O'Neil
b. The Butcher Vachon
c. John Tower
d. Robert Livingston
e. Jim Wright
4. When Newt faced 65 separate charges of ethics violations, a member of Connecticut's Congressional delegation, as head of the House Ethics Committee, pushed to have 64 charges dismissed (the full House later reprimanded Newt and fined him $300,000). This same Connecticut representative was heard, over C-SPAN, congratulating Newt's lawyer and expressing regret that there wasn't enough time to probe liberal groups that used tax-exempt funds. Who was Newt's guardian angel?
a. John Rowland
b. Nancy Johnson
c. Gary Franks
d. Philip A. Giordano
5. Newt wrote a polemical tract that was used, theoretically, as the cornerstone for the so-called Republican Revolution. It was called:
a. Contract On America
b. Up America, Comrades!
c. Contract with America
d. Protocols of the Elders of Zion
6. Newt's political action committee was famous for fund-raising and spending infractions. His PAC, and his later Peace and Freedom Foundation, was used mainly for contributors to launder illegal campaign donations. These donors, in turn, got favors from government (subsidies, tax breaks, contracts). The corruption was as shameless as the lack of scrutiny. Newt's PAC was:
a. GOPAC
b. TUPAC
c. TAMPAX
d. NODOZ
7. Newt's Congressional district contained a sliver of what county in Georgia that still harbors an active Ku Klux Klan and has stringent anti-gay legislation on its books.
a. Corncob County
b. Cornhole County
c. Corndog County
d. Cobb County
8. Which of the following statements were said by Newt Gingrich.
a. "Any male who does not take care of his children is a bum and deserves no respect." (Newt's first wife had to sue this "deadbeat dad" to pay his children's electric bill).
b. "A 13-year-old drug addict is taught 'put your baby in the dumpter, that's ok'."
c. "In my name and over my signature, inaccurate, incomplete and unreliable statements were given to the committee."
d. "Are they taking DDT?" (Said at a Manhattan AIDS clinic).
9. Newt taught a course, through his Peace and Freedom Foundation, that purported to provide an overview of American history. It was distributed by video and was as eagerly perused as any of Richard Nixon's last 14 books about foreign policy. Newt's course was
a. Renewing American Civilization
b. America Must Never Let Its Meat Loaf
c. Tinkering with Greatness
d. Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge
10. In 1984, Gingrich manipulated C-SPAN to browbeat House colleagues for being "blind to communism" and "treasonous." Because C-SPAN's camera was stationery, viewers couldn't see that Gingrich was actually regaling an empty chamber. When the Speaker of the House discovered what Newt was doing, he called it "the lowest thing that I have ever seen in my 32 years in Congress." This Speaker was:
a. Tip O'Neil
b. John Tower
c. Robert Livingston
d. Jim Wright
Click here for the answers!
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