Newt’s Hypocrisy

Newt Gingrich’s confession that he had an affair while Clinton was under investigation for his affair with Monica Lewinsky hardly came as a surprise. This is just one more entry on a long list of hypocritical Republicans who claim to be the defender of family values against godless liberals. This includes Henry Hyde and Bob Barr, leaders in the impeachment battle against Clinton.  This isn’t even the first time Gingrich’s personal ethics have been questioned. As Tapped summarizes, Gingrich “served his first wife with divorce papers while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery, had an affair with a young aide (now his third wife) while married to the second wife.”

Republican apologists would argue that there is no hypocrisy since Clinton was impeached for perjury, not for his affair. From a technical legal point of view this is correct, but anyone who recalls the Clinton years recalls that the main focus of the attacks on Clinton from the right were over his morals, starting long before the perjury issue. If the litmus test is one of values, Clinton fails, but so do many prominent Republicans. Conservatives care far less about real values than they do about backing those on their side of the culture wars and attacking liberals regardless of the merits of the case.

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