Gingrich's Sour Grapes

by Joe Shea
American Reporter Editor-in-Chief

Fruitlessly trying to balance his own ethics case so that his corrupt practices no longer loom so large -- remember, he agreed to (and then had to back off) a $4 million book advance from Rupert Murdoch, while he hurried Murdoch's citizenship application through and relaxed the rules on Murdoch's ownership of multiple media outlets in the same major market -- Gingrich is insisting President Clinton's "crimes" be treated even more harshly than his own.

The problem is, of course, that Gingrich did things that were profoundly wrong: he was bought off by an Australian publishing magnate who just a few years later was thrown out of India for trying to bribe the government's telecommunications minister.

Gingrich got caught, and he paid a $300,000 fine. But if he only wants to make sure Bill Clinton is treated as harshly as he was, he only needs to open up the secret hearings of the Ethics Committee, and turn over to the American public the secret investigative documents concerning Murdoch and himself, before he himself has a chance to read them. Then he can compare himself with Bill Clinton in the depth of his travails.

While Gingrich's agony lasted a mere two years, the Whitewater non-event has been dragging Bill and Hillary Clinton through the mud for four solid years -- in which time they have been called drug dealers, murderers and traitors by a wide fringe of lamebrains for whom even Gingrich is not conservative enough.

Had Gingrich possessed the stuff to be a president, he would have seen the unfairness of it and called a stop to the charade. Instead, he became determined to see others suffer as he has, even if they were fundamentally innocent.

In the end, though, Gingrich will just make it worse for the Republicans; when they lose the House in November, he'll only have his own sour grapes approach to government to blame. He'll see it as a matter of principle, but that's like asking a blind man to describe an elephant. He has yet to see a principle he hasn't bent.