Newt Gingrich’s “Work Ethic”

Make sure your irony meter is turned off when you read this; otherwise it’ll squawk loud enough to wake up your whole neighborhood.

Newt Gingrich has become famous as a no-nonsense hard-driving Boss from Hell who wants young children to become janitors so they’ll develop a strong work ethic.  And yet Newt Gingrich himself never worked during his own school years; not even in college.

It figures.  Just as a chickenhawk is willing to fight to the last drop of somebody else’s blood, Newt Gingrich’s “work ethic” only applies to other people.  And of course it’s the same with Gingrich’s “family values” rhetoric.  It comes in handy for whipping up the Biblehumps during a campaign speech; nevermind the fact that Gingrich himself has had more marriages than most Hollywood VIPs.

And yes Newt Gingrich is a chickenhawk in the literal sense.  While Gingrich was getting one college deferment after another, the Vietnam War was raging and the draft was grinding up and spitting out every person over eighteen who couldn’t buy his way out of it.  Apparently chickenhawks apply the same “preach it but don’t practice it” motto to everything; not just war.

Gingrich spent his college years asking and pleading for money from his father and step-mother, so he wouldn’t have to work.  And after he married his first wife — yes, the same wife he served with divorce papers while she was in the hospital receiving cancer treatments — it was HER income that put Gingrich all the way through the rest of his education; right up to his Ph.D.

In a final bit of sick irony, Newt Gingrich actually confirms the rightwing meme about welfare creating a nation of helpless incompetent parasites.  After all, Newt Gingrich lived on other people’s money for the first three decades of his life — and look what it did to him.