REWRITING HISTORY

I am surprised most people think the Seventh Cavalry was wiped out at Little Big Horn by the Sioux and Cheyenne. In truth, of the 650 officers and men, scouts and civilians engaged on June 25, 1876 (on the Army’s side) only some 286 were killed: a devastating 44% loss, but hardly the entire command. Most of the men under Major Marcus Reno made it out alive. And where Reno was able to hold his command together over three horrible days of combat, the 210 men directly under the command of “General” George Armstrong Custer were dead within three hours of the first shot being fired. The results for the U.S. Army were even worse in the Second Battle of the Little Big Horn, when, for fifty-seven years, they were mercilessly attacked by a five foot four inch Victorian widow with blue-gray eyes and chestnut hair. Her name was Elizabeth Bacon Custer. And in this engagement she wiped the U.S. Army out, leaving no survivors.

Immediately after the battle the military judgments were fairly unanimous. President Grant, who had been elevated to the White House based on his record as a military commander, told a reporter, “I regard Custer’s massacre as a sacrifice of troops brought on by Custer himself,…(which) was wholly unnecessary – wholly unnecessary.” General Philip Sheridan, the man who had lobbied for Custer’s inclusion on the expedition considered the disaster primarily Custer’s fault. “Had the Seventh Cavalry been held together, it would have been able to handle the Indians on the Little Big Horn."

And finally, General Samuel Davis Sturgis, overall commander of the seventh, whose son, James, had died on the Little Big Horn, reacted negatively to the suggestion that a monument be dedicated to the memory of “The American Murat”, Custer; “For God’s sake let them hide it in some dark valley, or veil it, or put it anywhere the bleeding hearts of the widows, orphans, fathers and mothers of the men so uselessly sacrificed to Custer’s ambition, can never be wrung at the sight of it.”Having dismissed Custer, the army also dismissed his 34 year old widow. Barely a month after her husband had died amid the Montana scrub brush, “Libby” Custer was forced to leave Fort Abraham Lincoln. As a widow Libby had no right to quarters on the post, and so lost the social support of her Army life and friends. Her income was immediately reduced to the widow’s pension of $30 a month; her total assets were worth barely $8,000, while the claims against Custer’s estate exceeded $13,000. And then, in her hour of need, Libby received support from an unexpected source.His name was Frederick Whittaker, and he scratched out a living as a writer of pulp fiction and non-fiction for magazines of the day, “…about the best of its kind”. He had met Custer during the Civil War, and the General’s death inspired him to write a dramatic eulogy praising the fallen hero in Galaxy Magazine. Whittaker also mentioned Custer’s “natural recklessness and vanity”, but Libby immediately contacted him. Libby provided Whittaker with the couple’s personal letters, access to family and friends, war department correspondence and permission to use large sections from Custer’s own book, “My Life on the Plains.”

What emerged, just six months after Little Big Horn, was “A Complete Life of General George A. Custer”. It was pulp as well, filled with inaccuracies and excessive praise for Custer, but it was also a best seller. “So fell the brave caviler, the Christian soldier, surrounded by foes, but dying in harness amid the men he loved.” This time there was no hint of faults in Custer. Instead the blame was laid elsewhere. Of Custer, Whittaker wrote; “He could have run like Reno had he wished...It is clear, in the light of Custer’s previous character, that he held on to the last, expecting to be supported, as he had a right to expect. It was only when he clearly saw he had been betrayed, that he resolved to die game, as it was too late to retreat.” http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/History.Whittaker (Sheldon and Company, New York, 1876).All but a few professional soldiers admitted that Whittaker had gotten it wrong. In fact one of the most serious charges laid against Custer while he had been alive was that at the Washita he had, in fact, deserted a junior commander and his men. But those same officers now withheld their criticism of Whittaker to avoid being forced to also criticize Custer's widow. Reno (above) eventually was forced to ask for and received a Court of Inquiry (not a Court Martial) on his conduct at Little Big Horn, which cleared his name and revealed the character of the people Whittaker had relied on for his version of the battle. But it made little difference to the general public, which declared the Inquiry a whitewash.Elizabeth Custer went on to support herself comfortably by writing three books; “Tenting on the Plains”,"Following the Guidon” and “Boots and Saddles”. In each her husband was idolized and lionized. In 1901 she managed to squeeze out one more, a children’s book, “The Boy General. Story of the Life of Major-General George A. Custer”: “The true soldier asks no questions; he obeys, and Custer was a true soldier. He gave his life in carrying out the orders of his commanding general… He had trained and exhorted his men and officers to loyalty, and with one exception they stood true to their trust, as was shown by the order in which they fell.” By the time Libby died, in 1933, at the age of ninety-one, her vision of Little Big Horn was set in the concrete of the printed page.The first who endorsed Libby's view was Edward S. Godfrey, who had been a junior officer at the Little Big Horn and a Custer “fan” from before the battle. His 1892 “Custer’s Last Battle” was unequivocal. “...had Reno made his charge as ordered,…the Hostiles would have been so engaged… that Custer’s approach…would have broken the moral of the warriors….(Reno’s) faltering ...his halting, his falling back to the defensive position in the woods...; his conduct up to and during the siege…was not such as to inspire confidence or even respect,…” .” These attacks on Reno continued for most of the 20th century. The 1941 movie staring Errol Flynn as Custer displays Libby's view of Reno as well as any tome, echoed even by respected historians such as Robert Utley who in the 1980’s described Reno as "… a besotted, socially inept mediocrity, (who) commanded little respect in the regiment and was the antithesis of the electric Custer in almost every way.”So for over a century Marcus Reno was reviled and despised as the coward who did not charge as ordered, instead pleading weasel-like that Custer had not supported him as promised. It would not be until Ronald Nichols biography of Reno, “In Custer’s Shadow” (U. of Oklahoma Press, 1999) that Reno received a fair hearing.About the same time the Indian accounts of the fight began to finally be given a serious consideration by white historians, including the story told to photographer Edward Curtis in 1907 by three of Custer’s Indian scouts. The three men said they watched amazed as Custer stood on the bluffs overlooking Reno’s fight in the valley, a story supported by some soldiers in the valley fight who reported seeing Custer on the bluffs. (Most historians had always assumed they were imagining things.)

One of the scouts, White Man Runs Him (above), claimed to have scolded Custer; “Why don’t you cross the river and fight too?” To which the scouts say Custer replied, “It is early yet and plenty of time. Let them fight. Our turn will come.”And it did. But sure was a long time coming.

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FAMOUS AMOS

I contend that, politically speaking, Amos Kendall was one of our founding fathers. The fact that he was born a generation after the American revolution is irrelevant. This child of poor parents from Massachusetts, by dint of his intellectual brawn, guile and his drive to succeed, reshaped the political landscape in America and he helped create the Democratic Party in his own image. He is mostly forgotten today in part because, for the next one hundred years, his sins became the Democratic Party’s sins. He was a partisan in the extreme and his politics were always personal. He never forgot and he never forgave. He served two presidents, and one of his enemies, President John Quincy Adams, said that those two chief executives were merely, “…the tools of Amos Kendall, the ruling mind of their dominion.”

Amos was tall, thin, asthmatic and prematurely white haired. His photos remind me of a vulture, for some reason. He was also a puritanical workaholic and a hypochondriac with such a talent for venom that he carried a pistol for protection; although he was so nearsighted it is unlikely he could have hit anything. In the election of 1828 it was Amos’s talent for invective which made Andrew Jackson President.

Amos, working under the guiding hand of campaign manager Martin Van Buren, eviscerated the incumbent, John Quincy Adams (above), day after day on the pages of his newspaper, “The Argus of Western America.” According to Amos, Adams was effete and too European. (Sound familiar?) Adams had permitted the rape of an American servant girl by the Russian Czar (a complete fabrication). He was living lavishly while average Americans suffered (a gross exaggeration). Adams had even, charged Amos, brought gambling into the White House. (Adams had bought a pool table and a chess set). Thanks in large part to Amos’ constant attacks, Jackson easily won the election. And when Jackson moved into the White House, Amos came with him.

Officially, Amos was given a vague job in the Treasury Department. But it was just a cover for his real career in Washington. According to Virginia Whig Henry Wise, Amos was…”the President’s thinking machine and writing machine and his lying machine… Nothing was well done without him”. English journalist Harriet Martubeau, while visiting the United States in 1834, noted, “I was fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of the invincible Amos Kendall, one of the most remarkable men in America. He is supposed to be the moving spring of the administration; the thinker, planner, and doer, but it is all in the dark.” And Virginia Democrat Colonel Augustine Clairborn described Amos as a “…little whippet of a man” who was “...the Atlas that bore on his shoulders the weight of Jackson's administration. He originated, or was consulted in advance, upon every great measure.”

Before Jackson (above), a President would look to his cabinet for advice. But cabinet members had to be approved by the Senate, and often saw themselves as the President’s heirs, if not future competitors. And Jackson did not intend on taking any advice from either his opponents or his competitors. This produced a situation in which, wrote Nicholas Biddle, “The kitchen predominates over the parlor”. There was bitterness in that description, since Jackson and Amos were intent upon dismantling the Bank of the United States and firing its president, who happened to be Mr. Biddle. And they succeeded. But, whatever the spirit, Amos was a member of the original “Kitchen Cabinet”, “the common reservoir of all the petty slanders which find a place in the most degraded prints in the Union”, according to Mississippi Whig George Poindexter.

During Jackson’s second term Amos was appointed the Postmaster General, and proceeded to empty the bureaucracy of every Wig sympathizer, replacing them with reliable Democrats. In addition, every Wig contractor had their mail contracts cancelled, unless they hired only Democrats (duplicated in Republican Tom Delay's 2000-2004 K Street Project). Amos had thus created the “Spoils System”. This politicizing of entire departments of government was justified by New York Democratic Senator William Learned Macy, this way; “If (a politician is) defeated, they expect to retire from office. If they are successful, they claim, as a matter of right, the advantages of success. They see nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.” President Jackson himself argued, “In a country where offices are created solely for the benefit of the people, no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another.” The President  innocuously described this conversion of government into plunder merely as the “rotation in office”. But the brain behind the argument was Amos Kendall, and there was nothing innocuous about Amos' thinking.

It was Amos who ran Martin Van Buren’s (above) successful Presidential campaign in 1836. And when the “Little Magician” took the oath of office in March of 1837, it looked as if the Democrats would rule Washington permanently. But the destruction of the Bank of the United States came back to bite the Jackson Democrats.

During the first three weeks of April 1837, 150 businesses failed in New York City alone, wiping out $100 million in wealth. By the end of that summer unemployment nationwide had topped 10%, and mobs were raiding food warehouses. Van Buren’s only response to the “Panic of 1837” was to cut government expenditures, so tightly that they even sold the tools used to construct roads and bridges. As Republicans today might note, this action only deepened the depression, and insured that in 1840 the Whigs elected William Henry Harrison President.

Amos tried to go back to running newspapers. But the economic depression inspired at least in part by the Democratic economic policies, had become too deep. His publishing ventures failed. Then, in 1845, Amos became Samuel F. B. Morse’s business manager. He helped Morse create and run the International Telegraph Company (it would later become International Telephone and Telegraph). This venture finally made Amos a wealthy man. He retired in 1860. But that did not last for long.

While Amos had been running the Post Office, he had decreed that local postmasters could refused any mail which they deemed to be either abolitionist or pro-slavery. That was a purely political decision, made because the Democrats in the 1830’s were pursuing a “Southern Strategy”, which sought to shore up their base of support in the South. The postmaster's decision was just one of the myriad of compromises which brought on the American Civil War, and certainly not the most important one. Still, it must be counted against Amos that while he never owned slaves, he did nothing to encourage slavery’s demise, when he had the chance to. It is to Amos’s credit that, when the war finally came, he publicly supported the Union cause, which, for a Democrat who was unending in his criticism of the Lincoln administration, was not an easy thing to do.

The amazing Amos Kendall died on November 12, 1869, at sixty years of age. An obituary writer tried to explain his extraordinary career by listing his fields of endeavor. Amos had been “a newspaper editor, party organizer, political propagandist, postmaster general, telegraph builder, and promoter of language for the deaf.” Amos had helped found, and had left most of his fortune to, Gallaudet University, the unofficial national school for the deaf. And that is to his credit as well. And while the Democratic Party that he founded has changed so much in the last 150 years as to be all but unrecognizable, still, he was a midwife at its birth, and that deserves to figured toward his credit, as well.

-30-

PEACE Part One THEORY

I have begun to wonder just how we can end will the war in Afgahnistan. In this endevor we are haunted by

the old dictum from American Civil War General,  U.S. Grant; "No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender." But the reality was that when Grant demanded those terms at Fort Donaldson in 1862, they immediatly were rejected by the Confederate commander. And Grant immediately modified them. Dispite this President Roosevenlt issued the same demand in World War Two. And because Germany was crushed and occupied, the “Greatest Generation” and their children, still expects all American wars to end like World War Two in Europe did. But the truth is that even WWII did not end in "total" victory.  So just how do you end a war, particularly after you back yourself into a corner by demanding "unconditional surrender"? Let me try to show the reality of the situation we face in Afgahnistan by looking at how we ended World War Two in the Pacific, the most heartless bloodbath America has ever been caught up in.

Logically, America and Japan's war in the Pacific should have ended on Sunday, July 9th, 1944. On that day, at 16:15 hours (4:15pm local time), the American commander Admiral Richmond J. Turner declared the island of Saipan secured. The battle had been decisive. In defending Saipan the Japanese Imperial Fleet had lost its offensive arm. In the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot three Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk and 600 aircraft and pilots were destroyed. The United States lost just 123 planes, and 80 of those experienced crews had been  rescued. On the ground, on Saipan  30,000 Japanese soldiers and 22,000 civilians had died for the emperor. The United States lost about 2,949 dead, and 10,364 wounded. That ratio of 10 Japanese dead for every one American dead, had been fairly constant throught the war in the Pacific.

While some Japanese soldiers would hold out in the jungles on Siapan until December of 1945, they were no more than a minor annoyance. And before Admiral Turner’s pronouncement, U.S. Navy Construction Battalions (the amazing C.B.’s) had begun turning the island into the world’s largest airport, from which, eventually, 2,000 B-29’s heavy bombers would turn Japanese factories and cities into torches. The combination of the loss of the Japanese  fleet air power and the loss of the Marianas islands, bringing bases for the massive American bombers within range of most of Japan, meant that the Japanese had lost the war.

The Japanese knew it. Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, the architect of the war with America, and his entire cabinet resigned, nine days after Admiral Turner's pronouncement. This was unambigous proof that every Japanese senior commander knew that the Japan could not withstand the American onslaught, that with the fall of Siapan Japan had lost the war. But Japanese leaders now held onto the idea that if they could bleed America enough, if the Japanese could kill enough Americans in just one more big battle, they would win a more favorable peace from the Americans. But this would prove to be just another fantasy. Following the fall of Siapan, in conquering the Philippines the U.S. suffered 14,000 dead and 48,00 wounded, at Iwo Jima 8,621 dead and 19,189 wounded, and at Okinawa, on the threshold of Japan itself, America suffered 12,513 dead and 38,513 wounded And still the American military continued to advance.

They continued to advance even tho Japanese loss ratio had broken the 10 to disadvantage; 336,000 dead in the Philippines, but 21,000 on Iwo, and 130,000 on Okinawa. The Japanese strategy was not working. But even after those bloodbaths, no Japanese commander even hinted, in public or in private, that they might be willing to negotiate a peace with the Americans. In part this was because the Japanese saw no evidence that America was having any second thoughts about its "Unconditional Surrender" strategy. And at each stage in this progression of defeats, the Japanese military continued to insist to themselves that one more massive sacrifice would buy Japan a "better" peace. Japan's silence on the issue of a negotiated peace, amounted to the mass murder of their own citizens and soldiers,  and of the U.S. forces closing in on them, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of civilians from occupied nations (mostly China) caught between the avenging Americans and the silent fatalistic fanatics of Japan.

But, just as it takes two nations to make a peace, it also takes two nations to continue a ward. And over the last 18 months of World War Two in the Pacific, the Americans were just as responsible as the Japanese for the continued slaughter.

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DEAD PRESIDENT

I would call it the worst Presidential inaugural speech in history – and just in part because it was also the longest. By my count it ran to 8,424 words (the first sentence was 98 words long!), and it took darn near two hours to deliver. When 68 year old William Henry Harrison started droning on, at around noon on Saturday March 4, 1841, it was barely 48 degrees, in a cold, cutting rain and wind. His audience of 50,000 were in agony, and he just kept talking. And at the end of the sixth paragraph the new President actually delivered his punch line – he would not run for re-election. From that moment he was a lame duck. He had voluntarily surrendered half of his political power, and he wasn't even half way through his inaugural speech. And he just kept talking! In fact it has been alleged that this speech actually killed the President.

“CALLED from a retirement which I had supposed was to continue for the residue of my life to fill the chief executive office of this great and free nation, I appear before you, fellow-citizens, to take the oaths which the Constitution prescribes as a necessary qualification for the performance of its duties; and in obedience to a custom coeval with our Government and what I believe to be your expectations, I proceed to present to you a summary of the principles which will govern me in the discharge of the duties which I shall be called upon to perform.”

William Henry Harrison Inaugural Address

After that it was all anti-climax. Harrison droned on and on about ancient Rome, and why the ancient Greeks had collapsed. He did not get around to discussing what he hoped to achieve while he was in charge until paragraph 17, just four paragraphs from his closing. This was not the speech most people huddled freezing in the bleachers had been expecting from the man his Democratic opponents had dubbed, “General Mum”, because he'd said almost nothing during the campaign. This was the “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” campaign, the log cabin and hard cider campaign of nothing but empty phrases, when Harrison had kept his mouth shut because the only time he had ever been in a log cabin was when he had visited his mistress Dilsia, in her slave quarters. The overly fecund Virginian had fathered six children with the unfortunate lady, and ten more with his legal wife. Did I mention it was snowing during his interminable speech? And raining? And cold? The second time George Washington took the oath, he disposed of his speech in 135 words, wham-ban, thank you, Ladies and Gentleman. But then Harrison had so much more to say about so much less than Washington did. 

“It was the remark of a Roman consul in an early period of that celebrated Republic that a most striking contrast was observable in the conduct of candidates for offices of power and trust before and after obtaining them, they seldom carrying out in the latter case the pledges and promises made in the former. However much the world may have improved in many respects in the lapse of upward of two thousand years since the remark was made by the virtuous and indignant Roman, I fear that a strict examination of the annals of some of the modern elective governments would develop similar instances of violated confidence.”

William Henry Harrison Inaugural Address

William Henry Harrison achieved a number of firsts as President. He was the first President to actively campaign for the office, and the first President to have received one million votes - altho he won by only 147,000 popular votes his electoral college victory was a landslide. He was the first (and only) President to have been born in the same county as his Vice President (Charles City County, Virginia). He was also the first President to arrive in Washington via a steam locomotive. And he was the first president (that we know of) to have given away four of his own children (by Dilsia), to avoid being embarrassed by their existence. The unlucky youngsters were sold “down the river” to a planter in Georgia. What a nice guy. You know, if Harrison had not been such a lousy human being, I would be a lot sadder that he was also the first President to die while in office; 30 days, 12 hours and 30 minutes after starting his never ending inaugural address.

“Although the fiat of the people has gone forth proclaiming me the Chief Magistrate of this glorious Union, nothing upon their part remaining to be done, it may be thought that a motive may exist to keep up the delusion under which they may be supposed to have acted in relation to my principles and opinions; and perhaps there may be some in this assembly who have come here either prepared to condemn those I shall now deliver, or, approving them, to doubt the sincerity with which they are now uttered...”

William Henry Harrison Inaugural Address

What was wrong with this man? He had been running for President since November of 1811, when he had won the battle of Tippecanoe. But Democratic President James Madison had not even thanked him for removing the Indian threat to the western border on the eve of war with Britain. Yes, Harrison was a Whig, but it took another quarter of a century before his own party was willing to name him as their nominee. What was wrong with this patrician that so few of his contemporaries, of either party, were willing to trust him with power? About the only friend he had in Washington was Daniel Webster. The two men were close enough (thank God) that Harrison had allowed Webster to cut several minutes out of the never-ending speech – Webster claimed later that he had “killed 17 Roman Counsels” Can you imagine how many useless words Harrison would have used without Daniel Webster?

“... In other words, there are certain rights possessed by each individual American citizen which in his compact with the others he has never surrendered. Some of them, indeed, he is unable to surrender, being, in the language of our system, unalienable. The boasted privilege of a Roman citizen was to him a shield only against a petty provincial ruler, whilst the proud democrat of Athens would console himself under a sentence of death for a supposed violation of the national faith—which no one understood and which at times was the subject of the mockery of all—or the banishment from his home, his family, and his country with or without an alleged cause, that it was the act not of a single tyrant or hated aristocracy, but of his assembled countrymen....”

William Henry Harrison Inaugural Address.

He waited to take the oath until he had almost finished his speech. But as soon as he had been sworn in by Chief Justice Taney , he quashed his audiences' frigid hopes by starting to talk again, for two more rambling protracted paragraphs. It seems that William Henry Harrison, saw the anti-climax as his milieu.. Still, he felt fine after his speech. He even stayed around for the entire inaugural parade - the first President to watch the parade as opposed to marching in it. And this was the first inaugural parade with floats, little fake log cabins pulled by horses, sort of mobile homes. That night he attended all three of the inaugural balls – the official one, the Tippecanoe ball, and... and the other one. On Monday morning (March 6^th) Harrison felt good enough to meet with his Secretary of the Treasury, Thomas Ewing to discuss the national financial crises, which he had not mentioned in his endless speech. He mentioned everything else, just not that the banking system had collapsed. But, he seemed perfectly healthy, even after all that, which proves that this loquacious aristocrat was perfectly healthy until he fell under the care of a doctor.

“I proceed to state in as summary a manner as I can my opinion of the sources of the evils which have been so extensively complained of and the correctives which may be applied. Some of the former are unquestionably to be found in the defects of the Constitution; others, in my judgment, are attributable to a misconstruction of some of its provisions...”

William Henry Harrison Inaugural Address

His fatal mistake was that on March 27 (three weeks after the endless speech) when he told Dr. Thomas Miller he felt “mildly fatigued and under the weather.” Dr Miller was dean of the George Washington Medical School, and he diagnosed the President as suffering from “bilious pleurisy”. Dr. Miller felt obliged to do something. So he slapped a mustard plaster on Harrison's stomach, and he was given a mild laxative. The next morning, Harrison felt worse, so Dr. Miller bled the President, until his pulse weakened. Then he subjected the 68 year old to another plaster of laudanum, which caused the old man to fall asleep. While he was sleeping, Miller called in another doctor, and over the next few days these two gave the President opium, camphor, brandy, wine whey, and some petroleum. Oddly, after these treatments President Harrison felt so bad he was now certain he was dying. The doctors agreed, so they bled him some more. Anyone who inquired was told the President was “feeling better”, right up until Harrison died, thirty minutes into April 4^th, 1841, one week after falling into the hands of two of the most respected doctors in the nation. So it wasn't the endless speech that killed the old man after all, it was modern medicine.

“Fellow-citizens, being fully invested with that high office to which the partiality of my countrymen has called me, I now take an affectionate leave of you. You will bear with you to your homes the remembrance of the pledge I have this day given to discharge all the high duties of my exalted station according to the best of my ability, and I shall enter upon their performance with entire confidence in the support of a just and generous people.”

William Henry Harrison Inaugural Address

- 30 -

IDES OF MARCH 2012 PORTENT OF CRY BABY

I greet you on this dawning of my own personal annual political holiday, The Ides of March – my commemoration of that day 2,055 years ago when the aristocrats in the Roman Senate imposed terminal term limits on Julius Caesar. And each year some deserving political hack has earned my “Knife-in-the-Back” plaque for outstanding professional ineptitude and moral arrogance over the preceding 12 months. But before announcing this years political putz par excellence, allow me to place our honoree in context alongside of previous years' recipients.

The winner in 2008 was New York Governor Elliot (Ho-No!) Spritzer, who lost his moral war against corruption on Wall Street when he lost his morals at the Emperor's Club Escort Service web site. In 2009 Illinois Governor Rod (the sleaze) Blagoevich won when he was convicted for plotting his crimes on telephone lines he had alleged were tapped - they were and he will report to the Federal Correctional Institution in Englewood, Colorado – today!  In 2010 Kentucky Senator Jim (Bean-Ball) Bunning was a stand out winner for his petty, mean-spirited filibuster holding up unemployment benefits for tens of thousands of his own constituents, while simultaneously thumbing his nose at his own party. And in 2011 Wisconsin Governor Scott (Union Killer) Walker earned the “Laural and Dagger” award after his atrifical budget crises drove his state into civil war and himself into a recall election battle, without creating any of the promised benefits.

Each of these undistinguished demagogues became famous, if only briefly, by managing to snatch humiliating defeat from the jaws of victory and earning in at least one case actual jail time for their abhorrent behavior. But this year the competition was particularly tough, with the field of candidates ranging from the predictably bizarre (Michelle Bachmann) to the numbingly idiotic (Governor Rick Perry). So morally obtuse did they seem at times that collectively they reminded me of the words of that great depression era humorist Will Rogers, who observed a similar collection of rabble rousers and sycophantic parasites almost a century ago; “The best thing about this group of candidates”, he said, “is that only one of them can win.” And yet, before we had even entered the primary primary season, there was a standout loser, a monumental mega mouth, a kamikaze-minded moral warrior, making him my clear winner.

So allow me to now announce the latest bucolic baby-kisser to be immortalized in my hall of shame – the winner of the Ides of March 2012 Award, that hawker of hate hauteur, the revolting revolutionary, the militant nihilist disseminater of double talk, the egregious ego maniac of the end game, architect of anarchy, the morally mailable munchkin mutineer who refuses to be embarrassed, the Big Giant Head from Dunwoody, Georgia, NEWTON LEROY “NEWT” GINGRICH!

“I discourage a cult of personality.”

Newt Gingrich

When Newt Gingrich went out for Pennsylvania high school football, they had to go to Illinois to find a helmet to  fit his enormous cranium. He has spent the rest of his life living up to that attribute. “The Big Giant Mouth that Roared” has been in Congress representing Georgia since 1974. According to a member of his 1976 re-election campaign, Newt was mating with so many female staffers that “...there were just so many of them and I didn’t think any of it serious.”

“It doesn’t matter what I do. People need to hear what I have to say.”

Newt Gingrich

After two decades as a undistinguished back-bencher, in 1990 Newt co-authored a memo entitled “Language, a Key Mechanism of Control”. He wrote, “I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty.” In order to “build a much more aggressive, activist party”, he encouraged his fellow Republicans to “speak like Newt”, by referring to Democrats as “radicals” and “traitors”. He called Speaker of the House Tip O'Neil (D-Ma.) a thug. He called the wife of Massachusetts Democratic Governor Micheal Dukakis a drug addict. He announced that “In Washington, D.C. 800 babies are left in dumpsters a year.” (The actual number was four.) He called the incoming Clinton administration “The most disciplined set of (drug) addicts in the world..”

“You have to give the press confrontations.”

Newt Gingrich

The news media loved his style, and in 1994, under his guidance, Republicans won control of the House for the first time in forty years. In January 1995 the hooligan was himself elected Speaker. And from that moment almost nothing Newt touched continued to function. He cut the staffs of all other House members by 1/3, while increasing his own. He eliminated many Congressional committees, and then created 35 new ones. He engineered two complete government shutdowns which began Congress' long decline in public respect and effectiveness.

“I have enormous personal ambition. I want to shift the entire planet.”

Newt Gingrich

Eventually, Speaker Newt's behavior led to 84 charges being filed against him by the Republican controlled House Ethics Committee. Eighty-three charges were dropped, but the House voted 395 to 28 to convict its own Speaker of that last one and fined him $300,000. He redefined the fine as “a negative reimbursement” and promised to deduct it from his income taxes. Even after this humiliation the happy Hun hung on as Speaker until fellow Republican leaders threatened to release details of his ongoing affair with his now third wife, Callista Bisek. In January 1997 Newt stepped down as Speaker and apologized for having weakened "the faith people have in their government.” (Ten more years of 'speaking like Newt' and that charge would be a matter of pride amongst Republican politicians.) Back in 1998, Newt won his own re-election, but the very next day the chief chief of the Republican bacchanal announced he was resigning from congress, because “"I'm not willing to preside over... cannibals.” He had not objected to the feast of bile he had brought to national politics - he just had not planned on being an aperitif.

“I'm not a natural leader. I'm too intellectual; I'm too abstract; I think too much.”

Newt Gingrich

Newt the private citizen did not retreat back to Georgia, but remained in Washington, and over the next decade his “Political Consulting Services” (as opposed to lobbying firms) took in revenues of over $100 million. His “Center for Health Transformation” paid him $2.4 million a year, in addition to the $60,000 he got for each of the eighty speeches he gave each year, and the $1.6 million fee his Gingrich Communications Group received from Home Mortgage mismanager, Freddie Mac (as an historian, according to Newt) . And Newt was a forerunner (along with acolyte Tom Delay) in creating the combinations of tax-exempt non-profit political organizations to support his profit making political “Consulting Services”  which are so common in Washington D.C., today - i.e. The C.H.T., Gingrich Productions and The Gingrich Communications Group. Despite a qualified promise made in November of 2011, Newt has yet to produce even a partual list of clients and amounts donated to any of these organizations.

“The party that has the cliches that ring true, wins”

Newt Gingrich

Since he joined the 2012 campaign trail, the “human Roman candle” has been source material for political pundits, such as Dana Milbank, writing for the Washington Post, on January 30, 2012: “It was approaching 11 p.m. at the Hyatt hotel bar (in Jacksonville, Florida )....and reporters covering Newt Gingrich’s campaign were enjoying a few drinks when...Gingrich...imparted a big scoop. “There’s a new poll coming out,” he announced. “I’m within five points of Romney.”. . .It’s hard to know what the most pitiful part was: That a presidential candidate was whiling away the night at a hotel bar...Or that the pollster who did it used to work for Gingrich?”

"The fact is, we can afford a fairly ignorant presidency now."

Newt Gingrich

After Newt's insurrection in insurrectionist South Carolina, Governor Mitt Romney ambushed him in Florida, where the Captain of Capitalism outspent Newt 5 – 1 ($15 million to $4 million) in negative advertising, and by volume alone beat Newt at his own game – smear and exaggeration. But, as Milbank said, “Gingrich is going down in his own style, leaving fabrications, insults and scorched earth all the way from Miami to Pensacola....President Obama is “increasingly dictatorial” and has a “war against religion.” Romney is a “liberal” and “out of touch with honesty” and he “refused to allow [Catholics] the right of conscience” and “cut off Kosher meals for Jewish Medicaid recipients.” Gingrich, his midsection bumping against the lectern as he delivered his broadsides without notes, promised there would be more earth to burn. He said there shouldn’t be “any doubt” that he will remain in the race after Florida. “The establishment in both parties is terrified,” he boasted Well, at least the Republicans are.”

You can't have a corrupt lobbyist unless you have a corrupt member (of Congress) or a corrupt staff.”

Newt Gingrich

After Florida Richard Cohen, also for the Washington Post, described Newt the ab irato, as “the grandiloquent, bombastic and compulsively dishonest Gingrich” , with an Alfred E. Neuman grin and a “nihilistic campaign for the White House”. And Robert Williams, of the conservative Tax Policy Center, said, “The problem with the Gingrich....is that he would go in and throw the bomb, and then maybe there would be pieces that you would pick up afterwards.” Newt Nuked; could it be mere chance that the charter airline he used in Florida was “Moby Dick Airways"? After Florida Newt's great white whale became no longer  President Obama, but more vitally, Mitt Romney. Newt was determined to harpoon him at all costs.

“The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry...is essentially a socialist argument.”

Newt Gingrich

At the Conservative Political Action Conference, the cost became apparent. Politico writer James Hohmann (2/12/12) listed Newt among the losers. “The former Speaker of the House, who won South Carolina just three Saturdays ago...was an after-thought at CPAC...Few carried around his signs or wore his stickers.” And worse news was coming. A mid-February poll by the Atlanta Journal Constitution showed “native son” Newt leading with 57% support in Georgia's primary scheduled for the Republican Super Tuesday, March 6. But when asked to name the Republican candidate Georgia GOP voters thought had the most integrity native son Newt came in third, with only 16%, half of Rick Santorum's 34% and even well behind the hated Mitt Romney's 23%.

 "Morality...now mostly concerns boobs on TV and denying queers pursuit of happiness."

Newt Gingrich

Now, with the outcome of the Mississippi and Alabama primaries it seems that we are left with Zombie Newt the candidate who will not die. Newt Gingrich has been reduced to a characterization of his younger self, a bitter cartoon of the revolutionary as a young man. As he storms into his twilight years, what once seemed impetuous and brazen now appears more a self centered self-obsessed spoiled adult who delivered a major political party into the hands of boobs and idiots, because he wanted a little more attention. He gets little sympathy now that his own offspring are eating him alive. 

“These people...are so consumed by their own power, by a Mussolini-like ego, that their willingness to run over normal human beings and to destroy honest institutions is unending.”

Newt Gingrich

But perhaps the place to end this tale of Newtonian hubris would be with the man whose fate first convinced Newt that the path to glory lay through the destruction and devastation of others,  former Speaker of the House, Democrat Jim Wright, whose fall was engineered in large part by 'Nuclear Newt' in 1989.  Wright described Newt as "an arsonist who torches the building without supposing that the flames could consume his own bedroom.” Its taken over twenty years, but that is where we find our winner, Newt Gingrich,  standing alone in his pajamas and slippers, clutching his remaining matches to his breast, feeling the hungry flames nibbling at his own toes for a change, and wondering who could have ever started this terrible fire. He is the sad sack spoiled sleaze King of venom politics past, prancing and strutting toward his final exit from the national stage, and going out not with a bang but with a whimper, the Winner of the 2012 Ides of March Award - Newt Gingrich. Adios, and good riddance, you pyromaniac.

You can't trust anybody with power.

Newt Gingrich

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