DeLay: Gringrich's adultery worse than mine

Party Unfaithful
The Republican implosion.
by Jeffrey Goldberg
The New Yorker

The West Wing of the White House tends to have a funereal stillness, even in the best of times, which these are not. The President’s aides walk the narrow corridors with pensive expressions and vigilantly modulated voices. By contrast, Karl Rove’s office has an almost party atmosphere. Rove, the President’s chief political adviser—the “architect,” Bush has called him, of his 2004 victory over John Kerry—has been a man of constant troubles: Valerie Plame troubles, U.S. Attorney-firing troubles, and, most of all, collapse-of-the-Republican Party troubles. Yet his voice is suffused with bonhomie, his jokes are bad and frequent, his enthusiasm is communicable; he resembles an oversized leprechaun, although one with unconcealed resentments and a receding hairline.
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In the book, DeLay criticizes Gingrich for, among other things, conducting an affair with a Capitol Hill employee during the 1998 impeachment trial of Bill Clinton. (The woman later became Gingrich’s third wife.) “Yes, I don’t think that Newt could set a high moral standard, a high moral tone, during that moment,” DeLay said. “You can’t do that if you’re keeping secrets about your own adulterous affairs.” He added that the impeachment trial was another of his “proudest moments.” The difference between his own adultery and Gingrich’s, he said, “is that I was no longer committing adultery by that time, the impeachment trial. There’s a big difference.” He added, “Also, I had returned to Christ and repented my sins by that time.”

(The entire article is here.)