Gingrich defends Hastert

From NewsMax...

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said his successor, Dennis Hastert, appropriately handled the aftermath of a scandal involving a Florida congressman and salacious, explicit instant messages to underage male pages.

Gingrich dismissed a call for Hastert's resignation by The Washington Times, a conservative newspaper whose editorial page editor is Gingrich's former press secretary, Tony Blankley.

"I do not agree with that, and I think it's very premature and very inappropriate," said Gingrich, who was in Lexington to give a speech to the University of Kentucky's Sanders-Brown Center on Aging Foundation.

Watch carefully when the MSM speaks about the information Hastert had. There are two types of evidence that was presented. The borderline, inappropriate emails and IMs that while not obscene or suggestive, raise questions. Then there are the obviously obscene IMs that only surfaced at the end of last week, about a day before Foley resigned.

Hastert's staff had been shown the former (not incriminating evidence), and said Hastert had been told. The only people we know had the latter before the story broke were the pages, certain members of the MSM, some bloggers and possibly the DNC (who it is believed sat on the info so they could release it at the most politically opportune time, while then screeching about the GOP's inaction)

Calls for Hastert's resignation are silly. The Speaker of the House before during and after the expose about Gerry Studds wasn't called on to resign, and Studds continued in office even after he'd been exposed as a pedophile. Is pedophilia somehow a worse evil today that it was in the 80s? Did the children somehow suffer less back then?

Remember, elections are based on votes made by the solid left, the solid right and the Mindless Middle. If the Liberals can convince the Mindless Middle that something matters enough for them to shift their vote, then the election will tilt that way. We don't need to be helping them with unnecessary calls for resignation, which raises the volume on their hypocritical wailing about the "Evil GOP". We need to be reminding people that the ONLY reason it's more of a big deal with a Republican is because everyone expects Democrats to do evil things, and are hardly surprised when they do. It's not considered "news". 

But ask yourself this: 

You want a new pet and your choices are a cat and a skunk, but the cat just hacked up a hairball. Is that grounds for choosing the skunk and rejecting the cat? 

You want to go swimming and there are two ponds, a clean one, and one that has raw sewage pouring into it. But you can see an empty pop bottle floating in the clean pond. Do you dive into the raw sewage?

Maybe someone could find a better word picture, but that's the message we need to be emphasizing. 

Posted by Danny Carlton at October 5, 2006 12:24 PM