Columnist – John Sammon
The response from Newt Gingrich to the question at the debate asking him if he asked his wife for an “open marriage,” in other words the right to cheat on her right under her nose with her permission, and the reaction of the crowd in South Carolina, was chilling if one is rational.

It was the roar of the mob.

It was also a standing ovation. The crowd might as well have been in the Sports Palace in Berlin in 1938 giving Nazi salutes. Newt went after a representative of the despised “Liberal Media.” The crowd of Southern, Ultra Right-Wing nut-jobs loved it, because they want hate, they want revenge. They didn’t listen to the candidate’s response soberly.

Instead, it was a shriek from the cave. Who ever said America is the land of the free?

CNN debate moderator John King asked Newt the question he has to ask as part of his job, because the personal character of the candidates’ private lives can be just as important as their job records. That is, once a figurative sleeping dog goes public like Newt’s ex-wife did.

You take that scrutiny on when you run for president.

If Obama’s wife publicly accused him of hitting her, it would become an issue.

Or does Newt think the press should favor him and ignore sexual affairs the way they used to do for John F. Kennedy? Bill Clinton and Gary Hart, both Democrats, suffered for their sexual peccadilloes. But that’s okay with conservatives. In fact, Newt himself personally supported charges of impeachment against Clinton for fooling around with an intern.

He sees no hypocrisy or double-standard in this.

When Newt called King’s question “disgusting,” his crowd of worshippers roared their approval. King might have felt he was about to be lynched. But he’s white.

Juan Williams, a conservative black commentator, was heckled by the mob in the same way and may have been more uneasy. He is black.

South Carolina after all is the state that fired the first shot in the Civil War, and where today the Confederate Stars and Bars flies at the State Capitol.

Both Newt and Adolf Hitler seem to have similar ideas about the role of women in their personal lives. Hitler rationalized that he was “too important” to marry any one woman, in this case Eva Braun, because he was instead symbolically married to the nation as a great man.

Newt told his wife that his mistress didn’t mind if he fooled around, so he obviously feels himself big and important enough to make himself available to any woman he chooses. Asking your wife for permission to cheat on her after taking vows in church to supposedly “love, honor and whatever,” for a candidate of the family-values-oriented Religious Right, is an interesting form of megalomania all its own.

Newt’s way of dealing with it, saying he admitted mistakes, is unlike Herman Cain, who steadfastly denied any wrong doing until an army of flummoxed women came out of the woodwork.

That still doesn’t absolve Newt of the need to answer tough questions about his private life if they become character issues because of public disclosures (complaining wife). Is it fair for Herman to suffer and not Newt?

In newly deciphered vintage footage of a silent film where linguistic experts studied Hitler’s mouth movements so they can tell what he was saying, they show he is telling his long-suffering mistress (Braun tried to commit suicide twice) at his mountaintop retreat, “all you have to worry about is that dress you wear. What if you had my responsibilities?”

Good ploy Adolf. In other words, I’m too important for any one woman.

Newt likewise complained to his wife, “You want me all to yourself.”

Is that bad? Is that wrong?

Isn’t that what marriage is? Isn’t that what you promise when you get married? I wouldn’t expect my wife to agree to such a deal. Is there one set of rules for you Newt, and another for me? Are promises not important? They become lies if they’re not kept.

Newt like Hitler was is a supreme egoist. He’s also a hypocrite, always referring to his humble middle class roots. Hitler too thought himself a man of the people.

Newt, the little butter-ball man with the double chin has tried not quite successfully in recent months to portray himself as more reasonable, but naked hate is always just underneath the surface waiting to spring out.

His followers, themselves haters, love him for it.

Any man who cheats on his wife will likely cheat the voters. Any man who has the unmitigated gall to ask his wife for permission to cheat, when cheating behind her back would at least spare her feelings of humiliation, is a ruthless man. These skeletons remain private until somebody complains publicly, and then voters have a right to know the kind of person they are electing. What’s fair for Clinton, Gary Hart and Herman Cain is also fair for Newt.

If Newt had behaved in an honorable manner and had nothing to hide, he should be able to answer such questions calmly in a dignified way without going ballistic.

His followers should also act reasonable. Newt’s tirade was instead a Freudian type slip, a rare moment of candor that demonstrates his inability to handle personal crisis.

If Newt admitted it was a mistake, why can’t he calmly repeat so at the debate? Why can’t his followers act like sane people? Newt can’t answer in a manner that is not enraged because there is no way he can logically explain and justify it. So, he flies into a rage and whips his mob of supporters into a frenzy.

The courageous one was King. Thanks John. The guy who retains control of himself is the brave one. It says so in the Bible. I read it.

No Matter. Newt’s followers don’t care. He represents their most cherished fantasies, “I’m a tough, no-nonsense guy who puts liberal commentators and everybody else we don’t like in their place.”

Newt revealed his real old snarling, hating self.

PLAYLIST: Newton Leroy ‘Newt’ Gingrich — Scam Artist Extraordinaire

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   Columnist – John Sammon
The U.S. Marines seen urinating on the corpses of Taliban enemies, and those posing with the body of a 10-year-old Afghan boy proudly as though they’re readying to mount him on the hood of their jeep like you would a deer after a hunting expedition, will eventually be expected to rejoin American society as peaceful, productive citizens.

Yeah right!

We invade small impoverished countries, only small countries, and where a majority of the American people can ignore it and go about their everyday lives.

We let these wars drag on for years and not once in all that time has the government told the American people what exactly the goal is, what we’re trying to do. We train thousands, some of them simpletons, some malcontented dysfunctional nincompoops, to kill, then send them overseas among impoverished people, many of whom don’t even have shoes on their feet, people we consider backward and subhuman.

These people are poor, bearded, and by our standards, dirty. They don’t have huge tiled showers to be cleaner. They’re easy to hate, and so it makes it easier to kill them. The Nazi guards at Auschwitz had the same experience. As their victims became more starved and filthy, they looked less like human beings and became easier to murder.

You’re an American soldier in Afghanistan. You’re a not-very-bright misfit who in civilian life had few options and little money, unlike a politician who spends all his time accumulating money by preying on faltering companies. You’re not that clever. But you are filled with vainglorious macho fantasies, fears, neurosis, and hate, both for yourself and your fellow man (even some women soldiers are like this too).

You’re placed as a god, with the power of life and death, over a bunch of stinking, bedraggled, bearded, turbaned, foreign-looking what-are-to-you sub-humans. You go wild. This is heaven. The danger. The power. The possibility of instant death is an adrenaline rush, the ultimate narcotic high. For the first time in your miserable, nondescript life, as nothing more than a local yokel hanging out around the Seven Eleven Store, you feel real power in the high-powered high-tech rifle America put in your hands.

But this is war. You need to kill somebody. You don’t want the war to end and go home without having killed somebody. You don’t want the war to end. You’ve got to kill somebody. You do. You kill somebody and maybe it wasn’t justified. Nevertheless, you’re proud because you actually did it. You’re a killer. You actually have someone else’s blood on your hands.

You feel superior.

Now your hitch is up and you’re supposed to return home and resume an average life struggling for money and become a veteran like millions of others, the numbers swelled because of the endless deployments from two wars that dragged on forever without attempts to end them.

You’re expected now to become a peaceful, law abiding citizen who respects the rights of other people.

How can you do that when you’ve been a false god? When you’ve had the power of life and death over other lesser people (Afghans)? You had that rush of danger and hate and triumph. Now your biggest challenge is not to survive and kill, but to fix the clothes washer that’s on the fritz.

You can’t stand it. You drink, you do drugs. You get a gun and kill your wife, or a pain-in-the-ass co-worker who mouthed off to you.

This is just the beginning.

If the American people think there isn’t going to be any fallout from the kind of behavior they saw in the Marines pissing film, they are mistaken. You can expect a variety of atrocities here at home from the myriads of malcontents we sent over there. Below is a partial list of domestic tragedies to expect from veterans who were dysfunctional before they went to war and who can’t adjust to peaceful life.

I mean fallout beyond the economic strain to the Veterans Administration (VA) from millions of new veterans requiring services and help. And remember, the war in Iraq was launched over false weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist.

A guy shoots his wife and seven party-goers at a function. Then he shoots himself.

A former vet makes a bomb and blows up the convenience store where he was unhappily employed killing 17 people.

A guy goes on a rampage at a school and then kills himself (the usual story). He had been awarded a Bronze Star.

A former vet doesn’t like a local politician and assassinates him and 12 others at a rally.

A vet drives a car under the influence of drugs into a crowd waiting to enter a theater, killing 17.

The message you get from the film clip of Marines pissing on corpses is that a portion of America has lost its soul.

There’s an old saying about war that says, “Even the victors are undone.” In other words, the winners lose too. This has always been the case. The ancient Greeks returning from burning Troy, (except for Ulysses), all eventually died or went mad.

Nothing has changed.

   Columnist – John Sammon
Aside from his reputation for flip-flopping on issues and tailoring every speech to suit the crowd he’s speaking to, until this week Mitt Romney has run an almost flawless campaign if such a word can be used, basically making fewer mistakes than his rivals.

Until this week, when he said he “enjoys firing people.” Now in fairness, Mitt meant that you should get good service from service providers and you should replace them if they don’t provide good service.

Mitt, until he used the word “fire,” had unlike his opponents, admirably, marvelously, common-sense-ically and to a large degree, avoided using flashpoint, controversial, lightening rod words. Until this week. Mitt! Don’t use the word fire. Instead, you say, “we have to let you go.”

That’s the modern, intelligent, politically correct way to say “fire,” although that opens you up to the possibility the person being fired could say, “That’s a lie, you don’t have to let me go. You are not required to let me go. That’s a choice you made.”

Using the word “fire” establishes you as a heartless corporate bastard, which perhaps in reality you really are.

The fallout from this to Mitt is unclear as Tuesday’s primary is being held as I write this. However and whatever, what you say or don’t say, and how you say it, should be required study for all potential future candidates. You can say almost anything and not take heat for it as long as you follow two simple rules.

Either don’t say it, or if you do, use what I call “benign double speak.” In other words, you say something that sounds profound, but in doing so, you don’t really say anything.

Let me give an example. Newt Gingrich said we could save money in schools if kids became janitors. Newt! Don’t say that.

Are you stupid Newt? You won’t gain anything by saying that. First of all, we know it’s not going to happen. Kids are not going to become janitors. So why say it at all? What do you have to gain by saying it? Nobody wants their kid to be a janitor at their own school. They want their kid to learn and get a good paying job. Everybody wants the janitor at the school to have the janitor job.

Not some kid.

Newt, why would you, a supposedly intelligent man, say something like that?

Instead of saying, “kids should become janitors,” say, “I would like to see children take a more active role in the day-to-day activities of their school so that education can be a meaningful and cost-effective experience.”

See Newt? Who would disagree with that? Newt! If you can’t practice restraint or common sense in what comes out of your mouth, I don’t want you in the White House. Ever!

What about Rick Santorum? In his anti-gay campaign, he said “marriage is not about affirming love for somebody else, it’s about uniting together about being open to (having) children, to further civilization.”

Really dumb Rick. How many people (voters) Rick, straight or gay, marry not for love, or at least what they think is love, but simply to procreate more ideal future conservatives like yourself? Maybe you would if you’re a Gestapo SS officer at a Nazi-run Lebensborn SS stud farm.

Instead of saying, “marriage is not for love,” use benign double speak. Say, “Marriage is uniting to produce the best that we have within us.” Don’t qualify the sexual persuasion of who is to enjoy this non-love bliss if you want gay voters to vote for you.

One of the fascinating things about conservatives like Newt and Rick and that Mitt had largely avoided during the campaign is the apparent belief that they can insult or alienate huge blocks of voters, gays, African Americans, whoever, and still be elected. They seem unable to comprehend that only a more centrist inclusionary candidate can win.

Rick Perry said in June 2011 about the economy “we are going through difficult times for a purpose.” Rick. C’mon! If you’re trying to say that poverty is good for poor people because it builds character, it’s not going to fly with all those voters out of a job.

Instead, say, “we’re going through difficult times. I can help get us out.”

How hard is it to say that?

Mitt Romney up until the “firing” remark has run a campaign of understatement reminiscent of both Tom Dewey in 1948 and Bob Dole in 1996. Dewey ran against Truman by saying little while tough little Harry barnstormed the country winning hearts. In Dole’s case it was hard to tell he was running at all. He never said anything memorable. Dewey lost to Truman. Dole to Clinton.

Mitt’s understatement campaign, acting more moderate and superior, above it all, letting his opponents tear each other up, appear like fringe lunatics, unless Mitt says something else stupid, might just work this time out.

Will Romney’s ‘I Like Firing People’ & ‘Corporations are People’ Rhetoric Hurt His Campaign?

   Columnist – John Sammon
We committed what amounts to a genocide in Iraq. I’m ashamed of this country for its role in Iraq.

A foreign head of state participating with the president in laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier?

Let me get this straight. We invade Iraq based on false weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there, destroy much of the country and kill a million Iraqis. And Obama has the puppet Iraqi leader we set up in power in Baghdad lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington. [ READ: THE WAR CRIMES COMMITTED BY THE UNITED STATES IN IRAQ ] [ MORE CRIMES ]

How would you like to be the puppet? A country that invaded your country and killed a million of your citizens. You’re forced (or invited?) to come to that country and honor the soldiers of a foreign army that attacked your country and killed a million of your own citizens (bad citizens and innocent citizens for alleged reasons good and bad) based on false, concocted premises.

The leader of Iraq is a good puppet ruler.

America can hold its head high because it’s walking away from this fiasco with no remorse. We can do anything and it doesn’t matter because even if it’s wrong we’re still right. If there’s only one person left in this country who says morality is not determined by who wins or who’s powerful then I have to stand up and demand that the American people hear it.

Even if they never hear.

Asking a foreign ruler we set up in power by force after concocting false reasons for going to war to come to Washington D.C. and pay homage to the foreign power that invaded his country is wrong, immoral, and obscene.

Here are some suggested ways we can have the puppet ruler we set up in Iraq pay homage to the United States in a way that will remove even the slightest pretense of the sovereignty of Iraq.

1.   Have the puppet of Iraq serve as Obama’s chauffer complete with uniform.

2.   Have the puppet sweep out the Washington Monument.

3.   Have the puppet engage in campaigning for Obama during the 2012 election.

4.   Declare Iraq a new American state and down-grade the puppet to a governor with a foreign accent.

5.   We got their oil, we killed a million of their citizens based on falsehoods. It’s a win-win.

6.   Instead of “War,” we can re-label this a “Humanitarian Project.”

7.   Of course, other Arab countries overthrew their dictators without the help of U.S. troops.

8.   I think the Founding Fathers envisioned America only going to war when its national security was directly threatened and without the bogus weapons of mass destruction it wasn’t threatened, but the Founding Fathers were out of touch. They had no understanding of the new Roman Empire-style America and its “ends-justify-means” mentality.

9.   If Obama wants to promote good relations with Vietnam he could go to Hanoi and lay a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Vietcong.

I DO NOT ASK, I DEMAND, A COUNTRY THAT IS WILLING TO FACE THE TRUTH. A COUNTRY THAT IS HONEST. Once again, Obama disappoints me.

Obama before he became president called Iraq a “dumb war.”

It was also dishonest, wrong and immoral.

We’re not right just because we’re America. I won’t let this country hide behind the shield of its power. Somebody has to have the courage to say it.

The war in Iraq was engineered based on lies by George Bush and Dick Cheney. We had equipped, supplied and encouraged the dictator of Iraq (look at the picture of Donald Rumsfeld shaking the no-good bastard’s hand). We thought he was our puppet. When he acted too big for his britches, we attacked his country in a false effort to tie it to 9-11. Bush and Cheney needed to sell the war to the American people so they created the false weapons of mass destruction scam.

Americans want to feel good and the president has to justify what happened. He can’t admit wrong or risk being called a traitor. The system has built-in protections to safeguard it from the truth. Obama, as good a man as he is, is a pawn of the system.

No one will ever discuss what we did or learn from the mistakes. [ SPECIAL READ: BUSH'S MIDEAST DISHONOR ]

Iraq War Crimes

George W. Bush — A War Criminal

   Columnist – John Sammon
This letter is a formal apology to the generation to come in the year 2060, for the sorry depleted state we left to you of the world.

Our world.

The world we left to you is sadly a much more drab and inhospitable place because we lacked the courage to do what was right and to work together to curb the greenhouse emissions and resultant global warming and damage that you, the generation of 2060, can now see with your own eyes.

You have a right to hate us for what we did, and for what we failed to do.

Entire sections of the earth, what had been verdant areas, became rainless deserts, wastelands seared by heat. Populations migrated from these formerly productive regions and were forced to jam into the fewer remaining habitable, livable locales. This put strains on what little was left for a decent living, adequate housing, food and resources.

The simple joy of eating a peach became a memory. Massive crop failure caused by pollution and destroyed, dried-up water supplies made the growing of fruits untenable. There were no bees left to pollinate them anyway.

You, the generation of 2060, can view what once was the diversity of earth life on your new telepathic lazer lights, and you no doubt despise us for squandering these natural wonders.

For example:

Massive die-offs of entire species of animals took place and the ocean polluted and fished out to the point that all its former creatures became mere memories. You can say a polar bear is such an exotic animal and needs such a wide habitat free of people that like the dinosaur, it couldn’t exist with humans, it had to give way.

We used to justify this by calling it “progress,” in reality exploitation and then destruction.

But as long as such animals lived in the wild, they also existed in our active imaginations. We knew they existed in the wild, that there still was a wild, and that made the world a more wonderful, colorful place. Without color, you have drab. Variety is the spice of life.

Now, by your time, there is mostly nothingness.

By 2060, the world became a gray neither-world of struggling millions competing for the greatly shrunken prize, a livable existence, with a few power elites living in luxury, the very few, attempting to manage and control the restive masses. This started long ago, in my time.

People started killing each other for dwindling food and power resources, in the forms of war, famine and anarchy. In the end, when people are hungry enough, they kill. When people are hopeless, without hope, they kill. When there’s nothing else left to kill, the forests, the oceans, the very air we breathe. Then we finally kill each other, more than ever before.

We dream amid our diminishing world of sailing to more livable planets, or inventing new gadgetry to rescue us.

I apologize to you, the future generation of 2060, for this fiasco.

It was ultimately the inability of nations to work together and the basic concept of borders and nations pursuing their own separate national interests that proved fatal. The United States often meddled in the affairs of other countries and in sometimes extending its energy by picking fights with smaller impoverished countries, ruled the world like a modern Roman Empire. Failing in positive leadership, we in turn did not select leaders of either imagination or idealism. In what could have been a more productive aspect of control and an extension of our power, we failed to use our influence to ask for cooperation and to line up the mostly smaller countries of the world in a concerted effort.

Half of Americans refused to believe in the alarming decline in the earth’s health that became as plain as the nose on their face, and that most scientists had long-agreed was happening and warned about. Some Americans, close-minded and stupid, didn’t want to be bothered. Some were only concerned about riches and short-term pleasures.

There were some who were alarmed.

But no effort based on supreme urgency won bipartisan support. In this case, the rights and freedoms we enjoyed actually worked against us. Since it’s my right to ignore the problem for my own selfish reasons, many of us chose to do so. Until it was too late.

Ingrained in our souls was the need to accumulate riches and possessions over the need to do right.

Third World Countries could hardly be blamed in the same way. They had less and were motivated by the luxury seeking status we had. We set a bad example. They wanted to emulate our increasingly wrong values.

The end result was the same. The East Coast of the U.S. became a hurricane-lashed hell world of erosion and fleeing populace. The expanding Sahara Desert founded a twin in Texas and Oklahoma. Synthetic, fake meat, bread and poultry to replace the natural kind that had been lost produced more cancers in humans.

The Amazon Basin became a parched salt flat depriving the world of billions of its oxygen-generating plants. Islands disappeared under rising seas, coral reefs disappeared. Especially anything that had color, or beauty, disappeared.

Dullness reigned.

We left to you the generation of 2060 a depleted, exhausted planet eking by on the forlorn hope that new technology will replace the damage. But breathable air and drinkable water and fish in the ocean un-caught and un-poisoned by pollution are very hard things to replace with fake living replicas.

Animals disappeared, water disappeared, abundant crops disappeared. Methane gas escaping from a thawing Arctic Circle poisoned the air. It became a multi-national riot of the few haves versus the many have-nots in an inter-continental collision similar to a long-ago but futuristic movie called “Mad Max.”

Life became again like what it once was in the Neolithic Age, a grim struggle for survival and a short miserable life, but without huge areas to expand.

You, the generation of 2060, can view what we bequeathed to you. You must hate us for it.

I can’t say I blame you.

Could it have been different?

I’ll always wonder. I admit I myself have been a part of the problem. Though it is somewhat reassuring to me that I have already lived most of my life, I can however express sorrow for what happened and pity for future generations.

I don’t expect forgiveness.