"If you look up 'hypocrite' in the dictionary, you should see
a picture of Newt Gingrich." This is how Burt Rosen, the famed
television producer, saw the man who was Speaker of the House from 1995
to 1999.
A self-made millionaire, Newt was elected to Congress as one of the
Bible belt's favorite sons. Once he had manipulated Bob Michel out of
his position as Republican leader, Gingrich became a chief promoter
of the Republican plank on family values.
Similar to Bill Clinton, Newt had smoked pot, dodged the draft, and
engaged in one affair after another before and during marriage. While
busily denouncing Clinton for his tryst with Monica Lewinsky, the Speaker
himself had an affair with a clerk of the House Agriculture Committee.
While happily endorsing Rev. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Rev.
Pat Robertson's Christian coalition, Newt served his first wife with
divorce papers when she was in the hospital dying of cancer. In the
case of his second wife, he chose the 84th birthday of her mother asking
for a divorce and admitting his four-year affair with a woman 23 years
younger.
"We in this House are role models," Gingrich once revealed.
"People all over the world watch us and study us. When we fall
short, they lose hope. When we fall, they despair."
While Newt pontificated as moralizer par excellence on Capitol Hill,
Harvard graduate Dr. William Bennett criticized America's moral standards
as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and as Secretary
of Education. The elder President Bush gave him another bully pulpit
when he appointed him the nation's "drug czar."
After he left public office, Bennett wrote a digest of parables entitled
The Book of Virtues. Like Gingrich, he slammed Bill Clinton's sexual
promiscuity and, appalled by the Senate's failure to oust him, bemoaned
The Death of Outrage in another treatise subtitled "Bill Clinton
and the Assault on American Ideals."
At $50,000 per lecture, Bennett scorned every moral weakness from drinking
to fornication and from dishonesty to parental permissiveness. He only
omitted one vice from his exhortations consistently: compulsive gambling.
According to Joshua Green of The Washington Monthly, Bennett "has
made millions lecturing people on morality--and blown it on gambling."
On July 12, 2002, for example, Bennett lost $340,000 at Caesar's Boardwalk
Regency in Atlantic City. Last March 29 and 30, he lost more than $500,000
at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. "We should know," Bennett used
to preach, "that too much of anything, even a good thing, may prove
to be our undoing."
Both Gingrich and Bennett admired the verbal fortitude of another American
who unflinchingly described himself as "epitome of morality and
virtue": the incomparable Rush Limbaugh. His 9-year contract with
Premier Radio Networks takes his show to 600 radio stations and an estimated
20 million listeners for a total salary package of almost $20 million.
Heaping scorn on those who disagree with him, Rush likes to stress that
"character counts." Although he was telling a Christian journal
that Jesus has the answers to life's problems, he did not seek spiritual
help when his third marriage kept falling apart.
Last October, after his name came up during an investigation into a
drug ring in Florida's Palm Beach County, Rush admitted that he has
long been addicted to pain killers. Police indicated that he might have
illegally bought the prescription drugs OxyContin and hydrocodone.
Some years ago, Bennett hyped his "Index of Leading Cultural Indicators"
on Limbaugh's show, excoriating the moral decline of American culture
over the past 30 years. "It's time to start championing old-fashioned
values," Limbaugh responded, "like fidelity, chastity, sobriety,
self-restraint, self-discipline, self-reliance, and responsibility.
Is that unthinkable? Is that too much to ask?"