Joel's Rant

I’ve never been in a combat zone and I’ve never been in the military.  I avoided that in the 60’s when I was lucky enough, like many other men my age, to be safely ensconced in school.  Now, in my later years, I’m sorry I didn’t serve but I understand those words ring hollow today when I’m here in the present and some of my college classmates are remembered when I visit their names engraved in a wall. 

Negative campaigns work.
People claim they want to hear a positive message, they want to hear
optimism, they want to hear genuine solutions, but isn’t that really a bunch of
bullcrap?  Once the negative ads hit the
airwaves, all they want to acknowledge is the bad stuff, or what’s being
purported to be bad stuff.

Too many people can’t reconcile “good stuff” versus “bad
stuff”, and so they just go with the bad stuff.
It’s easier to believe bad stuff.
It’s the same kind of thinking that makes it far easier to be a liberal
than a conservative.  Conservatives are thoughtful;
liberals are emotional.  In a contest
between thoughtful and emotional, emotional wins almost all the time.  Same with good stuff and bad stuff; bad stuff
goes down easier and doesn’t take much sorting and thinking.  It’s easier to trick people with bad
stuff.  That’s why going negative is more
successful than going positive.  Barack
Obama’s counting on that human nature for his reelection strategy.

Too many Iowans’ seem to be buying into the easier to
swallow bad stuff.  They should be
embarrassed because now we can officially dismiss Iowa as a place where genuine
thought takes place.  Apparently it
doesn’t.

Newt’s obviously been the focus of a negative campaign;
promulgated by people who have either no record of their own, or a lesser
record than Newt’s, to run on.  But a
smart and outspoken guy, like Newt, who’s been in political office or in the
public arena for over 30 years, makes an easy target.  A guy who’s voted on about 8,000
congressional bills, testified numerous times before Congress, written hundreds
of position papers, written 24 books and given thousands of speeches has got a
huge paper trail to glean “bad stuff” from.
No other candidate in the race comes even close to the record of
involvement and public life that Newt commands.
And so those, with no record of accomplishment of their own, are trying
to take Newt out by attacking his record.

So what are the “bad stuff” people are clearly responding to
and what’s the truth.

Newt’s First Wife

First of all, Newt’s first wife is still alive and
well.  According to the urban legend, she
should have been dead since 1980 when Newt supposedly demanded a divorce while
she was literally on her death bed.  The
truth is that it was she who had sought the divorce and that action was already
underway when she had a benign tumor removed.
Go figure!

Freddie Mac

Newt was paid $1.6 million by Freddie Mac for, what his
opponents claim, was nefarious lobbying efforts.  But let’s put this into some
perspective.  That $1.6 million was paid
not to Newt, but rather to The Gingrich Group, a Washington consulting firm,
one of hundreds of others doing legitimate business in the nation’s
capital.  That seemingly huge fee was
paid out not in one lump sum, as his opponents would have you believe, but
rather in monthly “retainer” installments from 1999 through 2007, or about
$20,000 per month, which interestingly enough is about the “going rate” for
those kinds of services in Washington.
The Gingrich Group also is comprised of 3 separate offices, in
Washington, Atlanta and St. Louis and has a staff, and pays rent and utilities,
buys equipment and business products and services, pays for travel and does all
the other things normal to a business of that size and nature.  What this means is that the $1.6 million paid
by Freddie did not end up exclusively in Newt’s wallet.  It was business income, along with other
income, from other consulting work performed, and went in the coffers of The
Gingrich Group.

It should also be remembered that Newt was a private citizen
during this time, unlike Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and others driving Freddie
Mac.  He was allowed to make a living.  Did he lobby Congress?  I’m not sure myself, but Newt claims he
didn’t, his contract with Freddie said he wouldn’t, and I’m certain if he did,
those congress people who were lobbied would have come forward already if he
did, no?

House Ethics

The story goes that Newt was fined $300,000 by the House
ethics committee because he used a book deal to circumvent campaign-finance laws while he was
Speaker.  Compared to Charlie Rangel,
Maxine Waters, Diane Feinstein, and others, a book deal sounds almost quaint,
but even that is bullcrap.  There was
certainly a political effort among Democrats on the committee, as well as
Republicans not fond of Newt’s leadership style, who wanted him out.  Under pressure, Newt acquiesced and paid for
the cost of the “investigation”, not a $300,000 fine.  As it turns out, the ethics committee
initially investigated 83 so-called violations of which they dismissed all
except for one.  A year later, the IRS
dismissed even that one and claimed no conflict ever existed.

On a
Bench With Nancy Pelosi

The 31 second commercial Newt participated in with Nancy
Pelosi, in April 2008, rates as the worst time spent in his life.  But all Newt says in that commercial is that
he’s concerned about the future and that solutions need to be found.  All the details are left to the
imagination.  Newt claims what he was trying
to do was make sure that whatever action Congress decided, and at the time
you’ll recall the super majority Democrat House and Senate was hell-bent on cap
& trade action, that conservatives had a voice crafting that action.

If that sounds stupid and self-serving, compare that 31
second fluff piece with the over 1 hour of direct and detailed testimony Newt
gave, by himself, before the Waxman-Markey Environment Committee, in April 2009,
and how combative that was and where precisely Newt was coming from, and where
Waxman and Markey were coming from.  Even
if you hate Newt’s guts, after viewing that testimony you know he was talking
about small, measured steps, all done without government intrusion or taxpayer
funding.  You’ll note the extreme respect
Newt has for private industry and the free market and how leaving this issue to
the capitalists will solve this climate problem, if there even is a climate
problem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzDutBRMsXw

Characterizing Newt as some sort of climate complicit cap
& trader is dishonest in the extreme.
By the way, what are Mitt Romney’s thoughts on this exact issue?  What are Ron Paul’s?

Mandatory Health Care

Newt has been a deep thinker about health care in America
for over 20 years.  He formed the Center
for Health Transformation and has written books about the present and future of
health care and the insurance industry.
His involvement in this issue is not just sound bite slogan driven
baloney, like those of the other candidates.
Newt has spoken at the Heritage Foundation and given speeches about this
stuff long before he was even considering being a candidate in 2008, let alone
2012.  This is a guy who thought about
and struggled with the need of health care, and the ability to pay for it, for
a very long time.

He claims he flirted with the issue of mandating health care
as a way to sidetrack HillaryCare in the early 1990’s and more recently by
thinking it might be better to have people post “health care bonds”.  The important point to take from here is that
lots of ideas were being bandied about; lots of possibilities were being
considered.  Don’t forget, Newt’s been
involved with health care issues for a very long time, not just since he
announced in 2011, like the others, or like in Mitt Romney’s case, actually
signing into law the forerunner and template for ObamaCare, the single greatest
destroyer of American government in history, and the plan which has already put
Massachusetts in $4 billion in debt and cost over 28,000 jobs.

And listen more carefully to what Newt was saying about Paul
Ryan’s Medicare proposal. His point was that the government, or more
specifically the Republican Party, should not impose a change in Medicare
without first explaining the details to the public and getting their acceptance
before ramming it through.  Newt’s
thinking is that a really big change requires first a really big
discussion.  And that actually makes
sense, no?

This is only a sampling of the most audacious “bad stuff”
being used in an effort to knock Newt out of contention.  But you get the idea.  Most of it is bullcrap.  Some of it is purposely misconstrued stuff
taken from a huge body of work stretching 20 years or more ago when the
thinking on a particular issue was in its infancy but might be different now
after the passage of time.  This is the
price one pays when they’re in the forefront of public life for over 30 years
and during times of great change and danger.

And that’s all there is to it.