I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (8 page)

Conservatives bitch that progressives think they’re all fucking stupid. That’s not true in the slightest. No Democrat would deny that a George Will or even a Dick Cheney is
bright
. Newt Gingrich certainly fits that bill. Gingrich is technically a very bright guy. He should probably be a professor somewhere teaching political science.

In 1994, Gingrich had a lot to do with the Republicans taking control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years. But he also had a lot to do with Bill Clinton looking so successful and earning a second term. Bill Clinton took that cat to the woodshed, and it cost Gingrich his speakership.
If you can’t win when you’re ahead, then you can’t win
. That’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory!

For a while, people forgot what a nasty dude Newt Gingrich really is. He may not have originated the principle of making political fights personal, but he sure as fuck mastered it. He did everything he could to take down Speaker Jim Wright, and he eventually succeeded. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, so he tried to pull the same political dirty tricks with Bill Clinton. He even said that there wouldn’t be an interview where he wouldn’t bring up the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Meanwhile, dude’s fucking his mistress in his office. I don’t get how you can be that intellectually bright and still have a little bit of Lil Wayne in you. It doesn’t make sense to me.

But politics is based on building coalitions in the population and alliances in the seats of power, and Newt Gingrich alienated even his closest allies. During his speakership, he was giving the Republican Party a very bad name. The House majority leader and the majority whip and several other major Republican congressmen all got
together. Their plan was to oust Gingrich from power in the name of helping the party. Then Dick Armey got cold feet and turned snitch, and it all fell apart. If your entire team is plotting against you, that doesn’t speak well of you as a person. Even Nixon had Republicans backing him until the very end.

Gingrich likes to talk about how President Obama is a dictator and how the presidency is becoming imperious. At the same time, he himself scored points with the Republican Party by lecturing reporters when they asked him questions. He even wagged his finger at them during debates, when he knew perfectly well that he signed up to be asked questions he might not like. What the fuck is he expecting them to do, throw him flowers and sing “Hosanna”?

In a technical debate, he probably is as bright a politician as we have on the scene.
But no one likes him
. He’s the smart dude who thinks people hate him because they’re intimidated by his intellect. But sometimes people hate you simply because you’re a nasty asshole who doesn’t know how to talk to others.

I don’t blame the Republicans for hating Newt Gingrich. Forgetting their political positions, who’s a worse person: Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney? Mitt Romney is tapioca, but Newt Gingrich is
evil
. He bragged about his role in imposing supply-side economics on this country, the very philosophy that is the reason we’re in trouble now. But even that is not the worst of his evil. I don’t call him evil for marrying his side piece, taking on her religion, and publicly parading her around in Tiffany’s jewelry. I’ve always thought the First Lady should be a
lady
, but maybe I’m old-fashioned that way. I don’t know what the fuck
that
whole thing is about. Because Gingrich thinks of himself as a man of science, he saw the dangers of climate change, an issue that is much bigger than any party or even any country. Trying to do the right thing, he cut an ad with
Nancy Pelosi, and in a bipartisan, apolitical way tried to do something about the crisis. As a presidential candidate, and in an act of blatant political hypocrisy, he said that ad was the dumbest thing he’d done in recent years. But even
that
isn’t why I call him evil.

I call him evil because of how the man ran his life.

I don’t consider it anyone’s business how a politician acts in the bedroom. If Bill Clinton wants to shove a cigar into a fat intern like it’s some kind of bizarre Cuban tampon, that’s his business. I like cigars myself, but I prefer to
smoke
them. But unless President Clinton’s actions affected how he treated the tobacco industry, his kinky ways were his affair (literally and figuratively).

One of the most overlooked stories about Newt on the long list of horrors on his résumé is this one. A neighbor on Newt’s block was babysitting Gingrich’s young daughters. As the neighbor was walking down the street with the two of them, he spotted Gingrich sitting in a parked car on the street. As the neighbor walked by, kids in tow, he saw a woman’s head going up and down in Gingrich’s lap. Mr. Speaker was getting a hummer in front of his own house in broad daylight. The neighbor was just glad that the girls weren’t tall enough to see what was going on. When you are getting a blowjob in front of your house as your children walk by, you are a depraved dude. But even
that
is not the worst of it.

Newt Gingrich told his wife that he was leaving her for his mistress while she was in the hospital facing a life-threatening illness. If he can’t have compassion for his woman, how can he have compassion for his country? How the fuck can he care about somebody he’s never seen, who’s brown or black? If he can leave a woman that is suffering and in crisis, he can fuck this country up. That speaks to a person’s
humanity
. A president has to be thirty-five years of age, and he has to have been born in the United States, and he has to be
a human being
. This is the problem I have with Newt Gingrich and political leaders like him (John Edwards is certainly on that list). They seem to have temporary morals—and that’s why they must
never
become president.

Our system was actually working really well to keep men like Newt Gingrich from the presidency. If not for the
Citizens United
ruling by the Supreme Court, Gingrich would have had to shut down his campaign much earlier simply due to a lack of funds. That ruling allowed unlimited political contributions and led to the creation of SuperPACs, which can spend anything they want on behalf of their candidate. The only reason Newt Gingrich remained in the race is because he knew a billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, who was willing to write $5 million checks. That’s not
democracy
. That’s rich people’s chess, and anyone can see how dangerous that is. This country is
nakedly
only for rich people, and the SuperPACs are doing everything they can to make sure it stays that way.

If this country weren’t for rich people, how else can you explain a major presidential candidate saying that poor minority children should be made into janitors? You would have to go back a hundred years to find such brazen anti-poor sentiment. Gingrich
specifically
said this was for minority children so that they could learn the value of hard work, which they weren’t learning at home.

Gingrich wants to take these jobs away from janitors and give the money to, by his math, thirty or so kids. I know a little bit about this, because my father was a maintenance man—in other words, a
janitor
. My childhood street was
full
of janitors. Mr. Tarver, Mr. Price, Mr. Ivy, Mr. Hamilton: Maybe fifteen out of the twenty houses on my street had their bills paid by janitors. Every lesson that the Republicans now talk about, my father the janitor taught me.

I’ll work on a comedy special; I’ll have an interview; I’ll go
do the radio thing; that is my janitorial service. It’s my mop and broom, and my suits are my uniform. My father didn’t wear a suit, but his uniform was always fucking neat. My father wasn’t on the radio, but he busted his ass every day and didn’t complain or make excuses.

My father didn’t
like
sweeping the floors at the steel mill. He did it because it needed to be done. He worked the same job every day and came home at the same time
every day
. He got a watch from them for
never
being late. He never wore it and never took it out of its case. But the one time I borrowed it, he got so mad. “You can’t be taking my shit!” he yelled. “That’s my watch!” I shared
underwear
with this man. My mom would wash all the men’s underwear together and it just went into a pile that you picked out from. But that watch was a point of pride for him, even if he never said so. Taking pride in your work is something my father taught me.

This motherfucker Newt is so good at ruining families on a personal level that he wants to implement it as federal law. Who would
want
to teach his son to be a janitor? Every father wants his children to surpass him. My father, and all the fathers on my street, would be mortified if their sons had their job. “This broom was handed down from generation to generation”? If the notion is to take janitor jobs away so kids can learn work habits, what happens to the janitors? What of those men who are supporting their families and buying homes? They’re obsolete now. The family doesn’t need them, and Gingrich isn’t proposing retraining them. It would mean
more
families without father figures, not less.
The quickest way to get a black man to leave his home is to devalue him
.

The speaker actually said it best himself: “I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering.”

I have no idea why Rick Santorum was being given airtime. By objective apolitical standards,
the man is a loser
. He lost his last senatorial campaign by eighteen points. When people think of Pennsylvania, they think of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. But it’s a huge state, and there’s a lot of real estate outside those cities filled with Republicans. The rest of that shit is practically Alabama. He even lost
there
.

He’s crazy, vicious, and just not a bright guy. He’s like Richie Cunningham, only carrying a switchblade. I can’t imagine any world figure talking to Rick Santorum. Is there
any
other country in the world where someone that unsophisticated becomes a leader? That’s what
makes
a national leader: They are sophisticated and knowledgeable, not just about their own country but about the world around them.

At this stage in America, being unsophisticated is practically a choice. We don’t have a monarchy or an aristocracy, where people are born and bred to be some sort of ruling class. Barack Obama is the son of a single mother. Bill Clinton is the son of a single mother. Both men educated themselves past their circumstances. Bill Clinton was as country as you got. Now he might be the most respected politician, certainly in America and maybe the world. He’s still greeted like a hero no matter what nation he goes to. Let George W. Bush land in certain other countries and see if he doesn’t get arrested at the airport. It’s a good thing he never wants to go anywhere, because he can’t. That motherfucker is practically trapped here in the United States.

Santorum has Bush’s lack of sophistication, but he lacks Bush’s political finesse—or at least Bush’s finesse via Karl Rove. It’s cynical and it’s a dirty trick, but Karl Rove very effectively used gay
marriage to turn out his people to vote. The way Rove figured it, if people came to the polls to vote against gay marriage, they’d probably end up pulling the lever for the Republican candidate as well.

But things have changed a great deal since those days, even though it’s been less than a decade. When the Pentagon took an internal poll of the military, a majority of servicemen and women had no problem serving alongside gays. When President Obama kept his campaign promise and repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the only person who had a problem with it seemed to be John McCain—and I’d wager that’s as much a function of McCain’s age as anything else.

When Governor Cuomo passed marriage equality in New York State through the legislative process, not one national Republican politician attacked it. Not even politicians in the South, who one would think would be free to speak their minds on the matter. This country is in the process of accepting legal rights for gays and lesbians. The issue is a political loser—and the only politician left
fighting
against gay marriage is Rick Santorum. Everybody got the memo but him.

Santorum claims his opposition to gay marriage is based on the fact that marriage means one man and one woman, and it has meant that for thousands of years.
That is a lie
. There are many cultures on earth
today
where polygamy is practiced. Even the Bible, that book that Santorum claims to love so well, has many instances of polygamy. King David had several wives, and Jewish people revere him so much that the necklace they wear is
called
the Star of David. I’m not saying I’m for polygamy. I’m saying that to claim marriage
must
mean one man and one woman doesn’t gibe with current events or the historical record.

But no one even cares about Santorum’s anti-gay message anymore. The Republicans are so worried about this black man in the
White House that they’ve put the gay hatred on pause. A majority of servicemen were in favor of repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell”—and Santorum wants to bring it back. That doesn’t make sense even given his theology. If the gay soldiers were being shot in lieu of moral, straight Christian soldiers, shouldn’t he consider that a
good
thing?

Poor Rick Santorum. I just can’t understand
what
he does well—except put his foot in his mouth. He said, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.” Let’s substitute a group that gets far more from the government: senior citizens. How would that sound? “I don’t want to make seniors’ lives better by giving them somebody else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.” The difference, in the mind of Santorum and those like him, is that black people
choose
to be unemployed and
want
to be on the dole. We are the “undeserving” poor. The argument would be that old people can’t really be expected to go out and work. Well, how in fuck is a person in the inner city supposed to find a job when unemployment is approaching
50 percent
? The level of unemployment is systemic—and Santorum
knows
this. He admits to it every time he attacks President Obama on the issue. Systemic means
it ain’t your fault
.