Newt Gingrich or Woody Allen: Who's More Honest About Cheating?

David Corn
Politics Daily

Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker and not-quite-official 2012 Republican presidential aspirant, has been spouting dumb comments and tossing rhetorical stink bombs for decades. He recently suggested that President Barack Obama is "so outside our comprehension" that his behavior can only be explained by his supposed "Kenyan, anti-colonial" mindset.

During the 1990s, his political action committee, GOPAC, disseminated a memo to Republican candidates with a list of suggested words they should use when describing Democratic opponents. That list included "sick," "pathetic," "betray," "bizarre," "cheat," and "traitors."

In 1994, Gingrich jumped his own shark, claiming that Democrats were responsible for turning the United States into a depraved society and pointing to Susan Smith, a South Carolina woman who had killed her own two children, as evidence of this. "I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things," he said. "The only way you get change is to vote Republican." (Smith, though, had come from a Republican family.)

But one of Gingrich's most ill-considered remarks came this week when he appeared on CBN and insisted that his past two extramarital affairs were caused by an overabundance of patriotic devotion. Asked about his infidelities, he said:

(More here.)