I’ve told the story of meeting Newt Gingrich before and how my wife completely insulted him as he reached out to greet her.  However, the context of current events merits revisitation because clarity has to be made as to why that event occurred in the first place.  We are seeing now why politics has changed, why people feel the way they do about Trump, and how the political left has lost forever a trust they abused recklessly.  And so did Republicans.  It goes back a few years for us, back in the 1990s.  My wife and I were young back then but every bit as involved in politics, and I was deeply involved in the antics of the Clinton administration. When he got in trouble for lying under oath over the Monica Lewinsky affair, we knew we had him dead to rights.  Even carrying around his little Bible wasn’t going to save him.  He was going to be removed from office and even possibly thrown in jail, and at that time, Bill Clinton deserved it.  It would have destroyed the Clinton global initiatives, which opened the door later for Barack Obama’s communism, and would have saved the nation a lot of headaches if only they had destroyed Bill Clinton when they had a chance.  Bob Dole was the head of the Senate, and Newt Gingrich was the Speaker of the House.  Things were poised well for Republicans.  Bill Clinton had done wrong with his affair with legal gymnastics that were not going to save him, and we knew the blood in the water meant the end of the Democrat Party.   But then the mistakes were made, and Slick Willy, as Clinton would be called, and the family name would stay with politics, bringing in an era of mob-style politics in the Democrat Party that has brought our nation to its knees now permeated the next two decades once these mistakes were made.  And those mistakes were and are unforgivable. 

The mistake is old, where outrageous evil thrown in front of Puritans locks them up to action, allowing the evil to grow even more, which is a Saul Alinsky tactic.  The mob and Larry Flynt challenging the Supreme Court on First Amendment rights perpetuated this evil, but it was that kind of time when Bill Clinton was caught in so much scandal for the sexual relationship that he lied about to all of us, under oath, which was the actual crime, had the media come to his defense much the way they had with Larry Flynt on the charges on smut peddling.   The media turned the whole story into a sexual one rather than a legal one, and the entire case moved from a crime to the behavior of two people, in the case of the Clintons, most of Washington D.C., behind closed doors.  That’s when the wheels came off the Republican case, starting with the tough guy Newt Gingrich and his second in command, Bob Livingston.  To defend Clinton, Larry Flynt put up a 1-million-dollar bounty on anybody who had slept with a Republican in Congress and that they would be exploited as hypocrites.  The media story about “it’s just about sex” began to swing the other way unbelievably, and my wife and I watched the Republican Party completely lose on the issue when they had all the moral and legal high ground needed to preserve justice.  It slipped right through their fingers because the head of Congress, Newt Gingrich, had been found out to have had an affair with one of his interns. At the same time, his wife was sick with cancer in the hospital, And his do-gooder second in command, Bob Livingston, had an affair with an intern too, and it was exposed, marking him and other Republicans as forever tarnished. Much of that brand damage still occurs today.  When people wonder why Trump, a guy who has been married three times, is leading the conservative movement, it started with soul searching during these critical years in the 1990s.  

Of course, Bill Clinton got off the hook, and the whole story became about hypocritical Republicans who couldn’t keep their pants on. That’s when the entire RINO movement started, and the party needed to be purged of them.  Newt left office in disgrace.  Bob Livingston had to resign, and he did so to inspire Clinton to do the same.  Of course, Democrats don’t feel guilty about anything.  So the reaction from Clinton was essentially, “I’m good; Hillary likes to watch me have sex.  So go suck on that.”  Hillary enjoyed her husband’s affairs; she controlled him with them the way people who like to have dirt on people love such information.  It was the closest Hillary ever became to being President when she could push her husband around every time he got caught with another woman.  She was herself a sexual deviant.  But she enjoyed the power such knowledge gave her over her husband and president.  So the whole thing came up flat and embarrassing because Republicans couldn’t live up to the lofty image they presented to the public when it counted most.  To this day, it’s much worse, and most people can’t have an opinion on morality because they are out there doing the same embarrassing stuff, and the FBI, CIA, and many members of the media know all about it.  So when it comes time to have an opinion, Republicans can’t express it because many times they are just as dirty as Democrats.

Fast forward about 20 years, and my wife and I talked to Newt Gingrich; I shook his hand and spoke to him a bit.  He’s a brilliant political commentator.  And I can talk to people politely and find something to like about them.  Find some valuable attributes to them that can be used politically.  My wife can’t.  If a person is not authentic, she wants nothing to do with them.  She was still mad at Newt Gingrich and Livingston, who had gone on to become a power lobbyist, indicating that he was a party guy in D.C., not a rock of morality, and my wife couldn’t forgive any of them for compromising the Republican Party.  To her point, we didn’t live that way; why couldn’t Republicans in elected office resist the temptations of the flesh and decadence to keep the party on the moral high ground?  Why give that up for anything?  Yet they did, and she refused to shake Newt’s hand when it was just the three of us at an event, making it very awkward for me.  But I understood my wife’s position, and ultimately she was right.  Many Republicans, even now, cannot speak on moral issues because they are committing violations of the flesh as much as anybody.  And God’s forgiveness isn’t enough to save our country.  That’s a lot of the reason we are in the position we are in now, and so much evil has been allowed to grow.  It’s not enough to have opinions about smaller government and taxes and have a pro-business platform.  You must be a good person to your family, community, and country.  And so many officeholders fall short.  And when they do, my wife and I have never forgiven them.  I have lower expectations of people than she does.  But that doesn’t make her wrong.  If only Livingston and Gingrich could have maintained lofty morality when the temptations of the flesh permeated their conduct, the world would be much better off now.  And we wouldn’t have to fight as hard as we do to undo those sins of the past.  Once you give up your moral authority, you can never get it back, and such authority is needed for running a government, which is missing now.

Rich Hoffman

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