Newt Gingrich: Gore, Trump and liberal hypocrisy

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally, Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2016, in Ocala, Fla. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci) (Associated Press)

The media is beside itself that Wednesday night, in the final presidential debate, Donald Trump said he would wait until the election actually occurs to judge whether or not it was carried out fairly.

Apparently, some people think that when a Republican says he will watch closely to make there’s no corruption of the vote, he is a “threat to democracy” and even a “domestic insurrectionist.”

While on the other hand, they think that when a Democrat sends thousands of lawyers and observers to every polling place in the country to monitor voting and watch for irregularities--as Hillary Clinton will undoubtedly do--they are heroic defenders of the American people.

If the media and the left were actually concerned about the corrosion of our democratic institutions, as they self-righteously characterized their complaints, they might be a little more troubled than they appear to be by the presidential candidate who knowingly took tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments that fund ISIS. And they might be a little less worried about the candidate who says he wants to make sure the vote is fair.

But the people complaining about Trump’s debate answer aren’t actually concerned about the democracy. They're concerned about the Democrats.

No Democrat complained in 2000 when Al Gore exercised his legal right to challenge the result. In fact, Democrats have been saying ever since that the election was illegitimate.

The left and the media weren’t bothered this week by the news that senior State Department officials tried to strike a secret deal with the FBI to change the classification on Hillary Clinton’s emails and thereby cover up her misconduct.

They didn’t complain when one day last week the major network newscasts spent a combined 23 minutes on allegations against Trump, and a combined 57 seconds on Wikileaks’ damaging revelations about Hillary Clinton.

And they are thrilled that of the money donated to presidential campaigns by people identified as journalists, 96 percent went to Hillary Clinton.

If these so-called journalists and others on the left were actually concerned about our democratic institutions, we might have heard a similar outcry when, in the Republican nominating contest, party elites canceled the Colorado primary so that not a single Republican in Colorado could vote, and then organized to hand the delegates to Trump’s opponent.

We might also have heard something when, after Trump got the most primary votes of any Republican in history, a small contingent of party elites tried to deny him the nomination anyway.

And there was certainly no outcry from the media and the left--nonetheless press coverage--when this week a hidden camera video revealed Democratic operatives talking about committing mass voter fraud.

In one video, a Democrat operative describes at length how Democrats might bring people from out-of-state to vote fraudulently in Wisconsin. While busses might make the conspiracy easy to discover, he says, using cars with Wisconsin plates makes the fraud much more difficult to detect.

Another clip features Robert Creamer, a high-level Democratic consultant who visited the White House 342 times during the Obama administration, and who works closely with the operative who outlined the Wisconsin plan. In the video, an undercover journalist describes to Creamer an obvious voter fraud scheme--a means of registering voters who don’t actually live in the state. Creamer replies, “There are a couple of different organizations, that's their big trick.”

In another video, the same pair describe how the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign funded paid agitators to incite violence at Trump rallies and even staged elaborate confrontations between paid actors.

In light of a Republican establishment that conspired in an attempt to deny Trump the nomination, a Justice Department that is nakedly corrupted on behalf of his opponent, a media elite that Wikileaks revealed to in constant collaboration with the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign, and new evidence of high-level conspiracies to commit voter fraud, it’s not dangerous to democracy for Trump to watch for a fair election. It’s dangerous for him not to.