Fired House Historian Calls Politics in Washington a ‘Wicked’ Game
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WASHINGTON — Christina Jeffrey, the House historian fired by Speaker Newt Gingrich, assailed Democrats Wednesday for not trying to find out the truth about her record before they denounced her, saying politics in Washington is an “evil” and “wicked” game that should be condemned.
The 47-year-old associate professor of political science from Georgia blamed the savagery of politics rather than Gingrich for the firing.
“There is a kind of evil here in this city, with people trying to find the first vulnerable appointee and force them out of town,” Jeffrey said. “This has become a wicked, shameful, game.”
Jeffrey came under criticism for a critique she had written as a consultant to the Education Department on a Holocaust class. She recommended against the class, saying it did not include the viewpoints of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. But she also wrote that she had “grave” reservations about whether the course’s central themes were suitable for junior high school students.
Jeffrey said Wednesday that her remarks about the Nazi and klan viewpoints were “pure sarcasm” because the question of whether there could be a balanced curriculum about something as horrible as the Holocaust is “absurd.”
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