They were led in this charge by Newt Gingrich. Gingrich vowed in 1998 to bring up the affair as much as possible. Gingrich decided to create ads about the affair, and thought it would be a good issue to run on in 1998. It didn’t work, and Democrats gained 5 seats in the House that year.

As we now know, while Newt Gingrich was on this moral crusade, he was cheating on his wife and eventually divorcing her.

So now, years later, after his moral crusade built on a platform hypocrisy, Gingrich has the nerve to berate CNN for bringing up this story? Excrement, indeed.

The Left is carrying out a coordinated attack on Mitt Romney’s business career. One sees exactly the same allegations, often phrased identically, whether you look at the Daily Kos, the Associated Press, Slate or Think Progress, or listen to Newt Gingrich or Rick Perry.

Apparently Newt Gingrich, leader of the conservative revolution in the House and Rick Perry, George W. Bush’s number two in Texas and a few months ago The Great Conservative Hope, are now part of a coordinated campaign between the left, the Associated Press and Slate (?) to take down Mitt Romney. It couldn’t be that Romney has a spotty career in the private sector. It couldn’t be that Romney has tried to disappear his time as governor and has put his career front and center. No. It has to be a conspiracy.

Because with the right, its always a conspiracy. It has been since at least 1964 when they were going on about the water being fluoridated by communists or in 2008 when they claimed that the housing collapse was a conspiracy of Democrats and poor people and not Wall Street. It’s always a conspiracy.

Because they are morons.

Since then, there has been a meme from the right and now being echoed in the mainstream press. Don’t be too quick to dismiss Gingrich, they say. As evidence they cite 1980 and the fact that the Carter team preferred to face Reagan, thinking that his conservative positions would be a huge turnoff to the nation. That election, of course, ended in a landslide in Reagan’s favor and ushered in the so-called “Reagan Revolution.”

Those parallels are, at best, a major stretch.

For one, as bad as things are politically for President Obama, he is a far savvier politician than Jimmy Carter ever was. Carter repeatedly made the kind of tin-ear mistakes that Obama has largely avoided for the last three years. Obama is highly unlikely to emulate the foreign policy impotence of the hostage crisis, and this president simply doesn’t give “malaise” speeches.

The parallel becomes even more ludicrous when you compare Gingrich and Reagan. First, their pedigrees and legacies. Before being elected, Reagan was a B to C list actor, a national commercial pitchman, and the governor of one of America’s largest states. Gingrich, on the other hand, has never been elected to statewide let alone national office. And his tenure at the national level is remembered by moderates and liberals as one that ended in shame. Only conservatives remember the Gingrich tenure as Speaker with any sort of fondness. Post-Speaker Gingrich is also remembered by moderates and liberals as an abject hypocrite who was attacking President Clinton for an extramarital affair while he was cheating on his second wife.

The complete implosion of this meme comes when you compare Gingrich and Reagan as human beings. I’m a progressive who of course finds almost nothing admirable in the policies of Ronald Reagan, but it is a historical fact that he was a gregarious, well-liked leader (if conservatives were being honest they would acknowledge this about Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton). Reagan’s the best advocate conservatism has ever had in America for a reason. There is a reason “happy warrior” is synonymous with his name.

Newt Gingrich is not this. Even though the “new Newt” claims he has learned from his past mistakes, in his debate performances and media interviews you can still see the petulant, whining, arrogant, condescending jerk Newt right below the surface. Gingrich is only ever a few seconds away from the temper tantrums he had during the Clinton era. In the battlefield of a national political campaign this will come out in spectacular fashion. Reagan was able to communicate some form of humility, often using self-deprecating humor in order to lull his political opponents into a false sense of superiority. Gingrich, at all times, believes he is the smartest man in the room. He would believe it if he was attending a summit of rocket scientists, he surely believes it on the campaign trail.

This doesn’t even take into consideration the conservatism of the two figures. While Reagan is being held up as a lion of the right, he would be seen as far too moderate to make it through the modern Republican primary. Gingrich is pandering to the Tea Party base, which is all well and good for the GOP nomination, but the 2012 electorate will not look like the 2010 crew that elected the Republican House.

Newt Gingrich isn’t Ronald Reagan. They were both nationally known conservative Republicans, but the similarities end there. Despite the sentiments of people like myself, Reagan is likely to be remembered fondly for a considerable time. The same will not be true of Gingrich.

The pinnacle of conservative ignorance was, of course, the never-ending support of an obvious moron in the guise of George W. Bush for president. Watching the GOP campaign, they are now realizing they may have gone too far with putting stupid up on a pedestal:

“It is an ‘Animal House.’ It’s a food fight,” said Kenneth Duberstein, a chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan. “Honestly, the Republican debates have become a reality show. People have to be perceived as being capable of governing this country, of being the leader of the free world.”

Even before his “oops” moment in one of the debates last week, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas stumbled his way through an answer about Pakistan and nuclear weapons. Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota has offered a series of historical goofs. And after mistakenly saying China does not have nuclear weapons, Herman Cain on Monday painfully gave an answer to a question about Libya in which he all but acknowledged having little grasp of the military actions that took place there.

Too late, geniuses. You’ve ingrained ignorance in the modern GOP and the conservative movement. You deny verifiable science. You deny obvious facts. You attack those who use intelligence over their “gut.” And on and on and on.

This is the world you made, conservatives. Swim in Lake Ignorance.

Even better, they get to play the race card they’ve bitched and moaned so much about in the most disingenuous way ever.

Your modern conservative movement, rotten to its very core and then some.

Evelyn Apoko, a survivor of atrocities committed by the Lord’s Resistance Army, has recorded a video appeal to Limbaugh.

On his radio show today, Rush Limbaugh launched another religion-based smear of President Obama: that he is sending troops to Africa to kill Christians. Limbaugh declared that “President Obama has deployed troops to another war, in Africa,” adding that the group being targeted, the Lord’s Resistance Army, “are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them. … So that’s a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians.” Limbaugh then claimed that Obama supports “help[ing] the Egyptians wipe out the Christians.”

Sick. Always sick. Eternally sick. And he’s one of the right’s top “thought” leaders.

Add this one to the “Big Lie” pile. Here’s Ron Futrell, trying to make the case that the media is responsible for creating the image of Obama attempting to unite the country:

Here’s just one example of the story line from 2007 with this little bit from the Washington Post about Obama, “he has the capacity … to unify the country and move it out of what he called “ideological gridlock.” Wow, good thing we don’t have gridlock and we hired the guy for the job who could stop it with a beer summit or the wave of his magic cigarette.

Whenever I see conservatives use ellipses, a warning bell goes off indicating that there’s trouble afoot. So, here is the text from the story Futrell links. I will highlight what he chose to excerpt and you can read for yourself what he left out on purpose.

Drawing a sharp contrast with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, his main rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama said in an interview that he has the capacity she may lack to unify the country and move it out of what he called “ideological gridlock.”

To make that really clear, Futrell has taken Dan Balz’s reporting on what Obama said about himself and magically attributed it to The Washington Post’s expressed opinion. I’m not fan of a lot of what the Post does, but they didn’t express an opinion here. They reported the words of a candidate for office. You know, reporting?

Futrell does this because he knows 99.9% of the people on the right who will read what he wrote will never click through, but even for someone in the Breitbart stable this is mighty dishonest.

On purpose.

Frank Turek is a man whose contract was terminated by a major corporation when human resources found out he had written a book opposing same-sex marriage. He is on the front lines of an emerging trend we are hearing about: people losing jobs or other economic opportunities because they have written, spoken, donated, or otherwise peacefully exercised their core civil rights on behalf of marriage as the union of husband and wife.

Frank’s day job is leadership seminars for Fortune 500 companies. He also runs a ministry and has written a book against same-sex marriage titled Correct, Not Politically Correct: How Same-sex Marriage Hurts Everyone.

For many years Frank Turek has done seminars for Cisco, among many other companies. A student who attended his class Googled his name, found out he opposed same-sex marriage and said “I’m going to get Frank fired because he doesn’t represent Cisco values.” And this student succeeded.

So, this guys contract was terminated and he doesn’t provide seminars any more to Cisco when it turned out he was preaching hatred. Gallagher has somehow morphed that into him being fired. So, in other words, Maggie Gallagher is still being a hateful liar.

One of the stories about the issue Carpenter linked to made this note:

The FDA finalized plans to phase out the products in 2008 and currently only Armstrong Pharmaceutical’s Primatene mist is available in the U.S. Other manufacturers have switched to an environmentally-friendly propellant called hydrofluoroalkane.

Now I, being a sentient human being, took notice of the fact that when the FDA made these plans in 2008, Barack Obama was not President of the United States. The President at the time was George W. Bush, someone who Carpenter was a big supporter of. When I pointed this out to her, her response was the following:

She acts now as if she wasn’t solely blaming Obama for this, as if she previously had said Obama is incorrectly enforcing a policy passed under Bush. But if you simply scroll down to a few minutes earlier, she’s very clearly blaming this policy on “Obama’s EPA” and claim that this is something the “Obama Admin wants to ban.”

EXCEPT THE BAN WAS AGREED TO UNDER BUSH.

This is how a liar operates. This is your modern conservative movement, in action.

(h/t to @toddgregory who is similarly appalled by this kind of blatant lying)

UPDATE: The Weekly Standard also blames this Bush administration decision on Obama, continuing proof that conservatives don’t or can’t read basic information.

After I posted about her lie, Amanda Carpenter has gone silent on this issue, and has not retracted her false allegation. Instead she went on to discuss relevant issues like the break-up of REM.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s official reaction to last night’s Republican presidential debate: Yikes.

Reading the reactions of thoughtful commentators after the stage emptied, talking with conservative policy types and GOP political operatives later last evening and this morning, we know we’re not alone. Most won’t express publicly just how horrified—or at least how demoralized—they are. After all, they still want to beat Obama—as do we. And they want to get along with the possible nominee and the other candidates and their supporters. They don’t want to rock the boat too much. But maybe the GOP presidential boat needs rocking.

The e-mails flooding into our inbox during the evening were less guarded. Early on, we received this missive from a bright young conservative: “I’m watching my first GOP debate…and WE SOUND LIKE CRAZY PEOPLE!!!!” As the evening went on, the craziness receded, and the demoralized comments we received stressed the mediocrity of the field rather than its wackiness. As one more experienced, and therefore more jaded, observer wrote: “I just thought maybe it’s always this bad…they’re only marginally worse than McCain and Bush.”

Now there are some legitimate excuses. With nine candidates on the stage, and answers restricted to one minute, it’s hard to really show your stuff. And two of the candidates—Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney—did provide respectable performances. But no front-runner in a presidential field has ever, we imagine, had as weak a showing as Rick Perry. It was close to a disqualifying two hours for him. And Mitt Romney remains, when all is said and done, a technocratic management consultant whose one term as governor produced Romneycare. He could rise to the occasion as president. Or not.

Kristol doesn’t even note the crowd booing a gay soldier. These debates are an excellent source of opposition research, that’s for sure.

The site is designed for Obama supporters to send in various pieces of misinformation, lies, etc. and then have them debunked. Obama ran a similar site in the 2008 campaign called Fight The Smears.

Simple, right?

Nooooo. Conservatives are now pretending as if this is an example of Big Brother. They now claim that a web form is on par with egregious violations of civil liberties. I mean, how dare Obama solicit links via e-mail????

Obama has been president for over 2.5 years now, and conservatives/Republicans have yet to attack him with anything that is actually real. Instead we’ve got one made-up thing after another, from “apology tour” to “death panel” to a supposed lack of exceptionalism from a President who regularly extols the exceptional values of America.

It’s all very childish and nonsensical of the right, but it is just what they do.

A judge in Chicago issued a preliminary ruling Wednesday against U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh in the Tea Party favorite’s child-support dispute with his ex-wife, ordering him to explain why he appears to be $100,000 behind on child-support payments, the Sun-Times is reporting.

Cook County Circuit Judge Raul Vega also wanted to know why Walsh wasn’t in court for the hearing — the McHenry Republican’s ex-wife, Laura Walsh was — and said he expects him to show up at the next hearing, in November.

Walsh’s new attorney, Janet Boyle, asked Vega “for what purpose” he wanted the congressman in court.

Vega gave her a puzzled look.

To which Boyle responded: “Mr. Walsh is a U.S. congressman.”

“Well, he’s no different than anyone else,” the judge said.

Following the 5.8 magnitude earthquake that shook the D.C. region this afternoon, conservative media figures have responded the only way they know how: by twisting it into an attack on Obama’s vacation in Martha’s Vineyard.

I’ve been reading Rick Perry’s book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington. You should read it too. A thoughtful argument for reviving federalism and taming our out-of-control welfare state, Fed Up! also helps makes sense of Perry the man and the phenomenon. The book provides enough context to defuse what are sure to be a long line of bogus attacks on Perry, while also setting up a legitimate argument about the size and purpose of government. Fed Up! is going to help build Perry a mass following. It’s certain to ignite a series of bitter anti-Perry attacks as well. More than your typical campaign book, Fed Up! is going to play a role in the 2012 presidential election.

Unfortunately for Kurtz, Rick Perry seems to have a different POV about Rick Perry’s book. From a couple days ago:

But since jumping into the 2012 GOP nomination race on Saturday, Mr. Perry has tempered his Social Security views. His communications director, Ray Sullivan, said Thursday that he had “never heard” the governor suggest the program was unconstitutional. Not only that, Mr. Sullivan said, but “Fed Up!” is not meant to reflect the governor’s current views on how to fix the program.

The issue bubbled up Thursday, when a gaggle of protestors confronted Mr. Perry outside a café in Portsmouth, N.H., accusing him of trying to destroy Social Security and Medicare. Mr. Perry didn’t respond when one of the protesters inside the café accused him of believing the Social Security system was unconstitutional.

In an interview, Mr. Sullivan acknowledged that many passages in Mr. Perry’s “Fed Up!” could dog his presidential campaign. The book, Mr. Sullivan said, “is a look back, not a path forward.” It was written “as a review and critique of 50 years of federal excesses, not in any way as a 2012 campaign blueprint or manifesto,” Mr. Sullivan said.

Michael Bendis is the writer behind Marvel’s Ultimate Spider-Man, and he enjoyed Glenn Beck’s freakout over the new multiracial Spidey.

The announcement that Miles would be the star of Bendis and Pichelli’s new Spider-Man series received a lot of media attention, far more than Bendis had foreseen. “The media stuff has been crazy surreal. Like I said, Joe [Quesada] saw it coming a year ago, but I don’t see how we control any of that stuff. We hit a slow news day twice with the death of Spider-Man. It was really cool and I’m very grateful, but this one was surreal,” Bendis said. “We pissed off Glenn Beck, and that was amazing. I don’t think Glenn Beck is an idiot because he’s a conservative. I literally think he’s just an idiot. Regardless of his belief system, he’s just a lunatic. So that was hilarious. Not that I’m going out of my way to find ways to piss people like that off, but boy is it so nice when you do it by accident. I told my wife that she doesn’t have to get me anything for my birthday because nothing will make me happier than this made me. I was happy all day.”

(via)

And it gets worse. What’s Ms. Hahn been up to?

The chairwoman of the Republican Party of Columbia County resigned Friday after a drunken crash with her three children in her car.

Amber Hahn, 35, of rural Poynette, said she crashed her car Thursday night while driving drunk, but that no one was hurt and that no other vehicles were involved. The Columbia County Sheriff’s Office arrived at the scene from the OnStar alert in her car, she said.

Remember this when these people lecture you like they’re your moral betters.
(via Wonkette)