Your Daily Newt: Romney Would Have Fired Columbus!

Are callous disregard for human life and general ineptitude fireable offenses?<a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CristobalColon2.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>

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As a service to our readers, every day we are delivering a classic moment from the political life of Newt Gingrich—until he either clinches the nomination or bows out.

Newt Gingrich was speaking to supporters in Georgia on Tuesday when he decided to relay to the audience an exchange he’d had just a few hours earlier: “I was describing the other week some ideas and Romney said, you know, boy if someone came in to see him with ideas like that, he’d have fired him!” he said. “And somebody in Chattanooga said to me this morning, they said, you know, ‘Romney was the kind of guy who would have fired Christopher Columbus.'”

It’s a provocative charge. But is it true?

The Facts: In his remarks in Georgia, Gingrich explained that Columbus’ value rested in the power of his ideas. As he put it: “Lincoln had a vision of a transcontinental railroad. The Wright Brothers had a vision that they could fly. Edison had a vision that we could have electric lights…Henry Ford had this idea you could build a low-cost car with mass production.”

Christopher Columbus had a vision that if he sailed southwest from Spain for 3,000 nautical miles, he would reach Asia. Instead, he got lost, landed on a small island approximately one-sixth of the way to Asia, enslaved all of the inhabitants, set about searching for gold, did not find gold, falsely informed his supervisors—then in the act of purging their kingdom of Jews and Muslims—that he had reached Asia, and promptly ruled over his newfound land so poorly he was sent back to Spain in chains.

As a candidate, Romney has expressed zero tolerance for insubordination, firing debate coach Brett O’Donnell after arguably his best debate because Romney felt O’Donnell had taken too much credit. At Bain Capital, Romney likewise demonstrated a knack for stripping new companies of their nonessential parts—a euphemism, really, for firing people.

Our Ruling: Romney’s actions at Bain Capital have drawn from immense scrutiny from the press and his fellow candidates. But there’s no hard evidence that he’s ever illegally seized someone else’s company and enslaved its employees. Given Romney’s quick hook, it’s hard to think he would have tolerated such behavior for very long.

Besides, Mitt Romney likes being able to fire people who provide services to him.

We rate this claim “True.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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