Gingrich Shows Hastert How A Speaker Ought To Speak

I do like Newt Gingrich, more and more everytime he speaks in public:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Wednesday that Democratic sex scandals have been far worse than the suggestive Internet messages sent to teenage congressional pages by former Rep. Mark Foley.

Gingrich said Democrats have wanted to punish their offenders less than the GOP.

Well, okay, that lead isn’t quite so accurate and neither is the headline. Gingrich’s point isn’t necessarily that the Democrats have a dirty House, too, but that because they do have a dirty house and have done precious little to clean it up, they don’t have the room to moralize over what’s been happening in Congress the past few days.

And that, folks, is dead-on accurate and I’m glad he’s saying it. Here are a few quotes on the matter:

“What we don’t have to do is allow our friends on the left to lecture us on morality,” Gingrich said at a party fundraiser in Greenville. “There’s a certain stench of hypocrisy.”

…

After the speech, Gingrich was quick to defend Hastert and condemn Democrats and the media, calling the reporting on the scandal “pretty irrational.”

“It’s pretty hard to understand. The very people who say you shouldn’t be wiretapping for terrorists apparently think you should wiretap a congressman. I don’t understand the double standard,” Gingrich said.

While Gingrich said he could think of circumstances under which a speaker should resign, he could also think of times reporters should have resigned too.

“You want a hypothetical possibility? You would argue large parts of The New York Times ought to resign for publishing secrets,” he said.

That’s the difference between Gingrich, who was an effective Speaker of the House, and Denny Hastert, who has been about as effective as a plate of mashed potatoes sans gravy. Gingrich is pugnacious enough to speak up and be blunt where bluntness is warranted and he’s smart enough to know where the line ought to be. That line, as I see it puts Foley on one side, the rest of the Republican Congress on the other, and the Democrats firmly on the outside of this matter, disqualified by their own substantial history of negligence and cover-up).

As for Hastert, I still believe he needs to step down. Really this story has gone on far too long and it’s largely Hastert’s fault that it has.