Newt Gingrich Lied: Says British Shoe Bomber 'Richard Reid Was An American Citizen' (VIDEO)

From excerpts of articles posted on huffingtonpost.com on 02-10-10

Gingrich Stewart Richard Reid American Citizen

Newt Gingrich said that Richard Reid was an American citizen. Reid is a British citizen.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich appeared on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Tuesday, leveling harsh criticism against the Obama administration.

After Gingrich assailed the administration for reading Miranda Rights to Detroit undie bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Stewart drew a comparison to something that happened under George W. Bush.

"Didn't they do the same with Richard Reid, who was the shoe bomber?" he asked the Republican icon.

"Richard Reid was an American citizen," insisted Gingrich.

Reid is actually a British citizen of Jamaican descent.

Stewart started to raise the Miranda Rights issue again, but Gingrich pushed the conversation along.

Later, when Gingrich acknowledged that part of his job is to reach out to the emotions of the American people, Stewart shot back, "I think that's wise. And don't let reality get in the way."

At the end of the show, Stewart realized that Gingrich had falsely claimed the shoe bomber was an American citizen and noted that to his audience.

The relevant portion of the interview begins at the 2:15 mark.

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Newt Gingrich Trips Up Again With Daily Show Correction

In a post on his Twitter page, Gingrich explained that when he made the Reid comment to the Daily Show's Jon Stewart his reference was actually Jose Padilla. Reid, after all, is a British citizen. Padilla is American.

But Gingrich wasn't done there. In a dig at the Obama White House, he added to the tail end of his tweet: "Treating terrorists like criminals wrong no matter who is Pres."

That's a standard GOP talking point, and yet when President Bush moved the Padilla case from a military setting to the criminal system, it was Gingrich who came to his defense despite conservative howls, a Democratic source points out.

Appearing on Fox News in November 2005, the former speaker said the following when asked whether it was "a loss" for the Bush White House to have tried Padilla in civilian courts after holding him for three-and-a-half years as an enemy combatant.

"Well, I think if they believe they have enough evidence to convict him, going through the process of convicting him and holding him, I suspect, may be for the rest of his life without parole would not be -- would hardly be seen as a loss," Gingrich said.

The former speaker would go on to note that Bush was "wrestling with what are the real ground rules for dealing with people who are clearly outside of normal warfare" -- suggesting, implicitly, that a criminal setting was appropriate for Padilla because it was the most effective at the time. "We don't have a good set of rules," he declared.

But that is a mirror of the Obama administration's current argument -- the one that Gingrich criticized on Twitter.

It is always risky to attempt to give a history lesson to an old history professor, but Newt Gingrich's column in this morning's Washington Post, requires that someone try. His attempt to attach the label of "secular socialist machine" to the Obama administration by placing it in a "historical" context has nothing to do with history and everything to do the kind of brass knuckle politics which will be his living legacy to this city and the country.

The first question that should be posed is not why Gingrich and his collaborators are attacking President Obama but why they have chosen the word "socialist" in attacking him as opposed to the labels they attempted to attach to the likes of John Kerry, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Mike Dukakis and Walter Mondale. Is Obama more of a socialist then any of them? As Norm Orenstein has pointed out, the answer is clearly no.

Unlike most democracies in Europe, the United States has no major political party that embraces the basic tenets of socialism. Democrats have generally been seen somewhere on the political spectrum closer to European Social Democrats than Republicans but as a party they have been much more reliant on free enterprise and market based solutions than their left-of-center counterparts in Europe. Further, data collected over many years by Political Scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal indicate while the non Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic Party has moved little over the past half century, the Republican Party has moved dramatically to the right.

One does not need the complex data base used by these analysts to reach the same conclusion. When Richard Nixon sent a bigger, more intrusive, less market based health care bill to the Congress in 1973 than the measure that Barack Obama just signed, he was not labeled a socialist. Nixon, when compared to other prominent Republicans of his era did not even qualify as a moderate in his party. The Senate contained men like Chuck Percy Jacob Javits, Mac Mathias, Charles Goodell, Richard Shweiker, Ed Brooke and Mark Hatfield. Among the governors were Nelson Rockefeller, Dan Evans, Francis Sargent, George Romney and Dick Thornburg. All of them to the left of Nixon and considerably to the left of virtually any prominent figure in today's Republican Party.

On a right to left scale of Democratic politicians Obama can hardly be considered left, particularly on economic issues. His principle economic advisors are not only not socialists; they are probably somewhat to the right of most economists who identify with their party and probably no more than centrists when compared to U.S. economists generally. So why is Newt suddenly digging up labels from the 1950s? I think another history lesson is instructive.

In the early 1990s when Gingrich was attempting to lead the effort to win Republican control of the Congress through his Political Action Committee GOPAC, he prepared and distributed a series of taped lectures to Republican congressional candidates. The title of the lecture series was "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control." In the preface Gingrich explained, "The words...are tested language from a recent series of focus groups where we actually tested ideas and language."

Gingrich instructed Republican candidates:

Often we search hard for words to help us define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.

decay... failure (fail)... collapse(ing)... deeper... crisis... urgent(cy)... destructive... destroy... sick... pathetic... lie... liberal... they/them... unionized bureaucracy... shallow... traitors... radical... threaten... devour... waste... corruption... anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs

Arguing that the man who prepared these lectures is now labeling the President a "socialist," a "secularist" and a "machine" politician because of his analysis of modern American history is about as credible as arguing that Osama Bin Laden launched the 9/11 attacks to improve land use in lower Manhattan.

Newt believes in the use of focus groups today fully as much as when he prepared his candidate lectures in the early 1990s. He knows that Obama has certain strengths and certain weaknesses and among the weaknesses are certain, shall we say "exotic" qualities that Newt and his compatriots have invested much time and effort in learning to exploit. The terms may not have meaning that in any way helps define the real world policy orientation of the Obama administration but they do have meaning in terms of helping certain demographic subsets express their frustration with the "exotic" nature of the Obama White House--a nature that they do not wish to discuss in more direct terms.

Gingrich has always been a person who was willing to use his intellect and lack of character to achieve the impossible. He has done that again. This is truly a new low.