Whether or not Gingrich is running for anything, he's never had trouble staying in the mix. During the congressional deliberations in September on the Wall Street bailout, he easily became an interloper. NBC News reported that he had privately egged on House Republicans to vote against it. He disavowed that, maintaining that he had been "trying to help it get through." But in public statements, Gingrich sent mixed signals, calling for Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to resign. He also railed against the Bush administration, huffing that it had "provided three case studies in arrogance, isolation, and destructiveness: Michael Brown during Hurricane Katrina, Ambassador Bremer in Baghdad, and Secretary Paulson at Treasury...No conservative and no Republican should doubt how much it has hurt our cause and our party."
In the wake of the Obama victory, Gingrich has surfed the postpartisan wave. When the Republican National Committee released an ad attempting to link Obama to Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, Gingrich pummeled it for engaging "in the sort of negative attack politics that the voters rejected in the 2006 and 2008 election cycles." Shortly after that, when a candidate for the party's chairmanship distributed a parody song called "Barack the Magic Negro," Gingrich declared it was "racist" and "so inappropriate that it should disqualify any Republican National Committee candidate who would use it.
"Has the man whose political action committee once circulated a memo urging Republicans to call Democrats "sick," "pathetic," "corrupt," "selfish," "bizarre," and "traitors" who "lie" and "betray" truly found another way? Not exactly. Commenting on protests against California's anti-gay-marriage amendment Proposition 8, he told Bill O'Reilly, "There is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us." And he and his third wife (the woman with whom he had an extramarital affair during the Clinton impeachment) recently produced a movie aiming to expose the "relentless effort" of the "secular Left" to "drive God out of America's public square." Read it all
Mr. Newt wasn't very nice at the CPAC show:
