Gingrich family values

Newt Gingrich gives sleazeballs a bad name. If there is any more hypocritical, narcissistic, arrogant, and completely un-self-aware individual on the public scene today, I don't want to know about him. Even Sarah Palin pales in comparison.

I've known this and I guess most of the sentient world has known it since at least the 1990s, but it has just been confirmed for us again by his second wife. You remember his second wife, don't you? She was the woman that he was having an affair with while his first wife suffered from cancer. He asked that first wife for a divorce while she was in a hospital bed being treated for the disease. This behavior was occurring during the time that Gingrich was excoriating President Clinton for his affair with an intern and leading the charge for his impeachment over that affair. He was on the television news every night talking about "family values" and how important it was for political leaders to uphold them and be a moral example to the country and the world.

Gingrich went on to divorce his first wife and to marry his mistress. But his extra-marital affairs didn't end there. Eventually, the second wife gave way to a third, but, if I were her, I would not rest easy with that status. A husband guilty of serial infidelity is not likely to change his stripes.

Now the second wife has decided to talk after all these years and some of the things that she is saying are very interesting. For instance, she recalls an occasion when Gingrich gave a speech in Erie, Pennsylvania that was all about compassion and family values. In a conversation afterward, she challenged him about the dichotomy between what he was espousing in his speeches and what he was actually living. His answer was that people needed to hear what he had to say and that he was the only one who could say it and that it really didn't matter what he did. Do as I say, not as I do.

I have no doubt that he actually believed and still believes that claptrap. People like him honestly think that they are special and that the rules do not apply to them. They can easily preach about other people's sins while committing the same sins themselves and never bat an eye. (This, of course, would be where a diligent and honest investigative journalist could perform valuable service to the country by pointing all of this out and exposing the lies and hypocrisy. If only such people existed.)

Meanwhile, Gingrich's third marriage survives, for the moment at least, and Bill Clinton continues in his first and only marriage.