Shame on you, Mr. Speaker

Newt Gingrich led the impeachment of a president, based on oral sex.

Newt Gingrich made the platform of the 1998 mid-term elections oral sex.

Newt Gingrich had to resign as Speaker of the House because of that act of oral sex.

Yet somehow, in 2012, Newt Gingrich is running for president of the United States as the “morally conservative” candidate.  To me, that would be like Jim Leyland claiming he’s been a champion of sabremetrics and baseball’s statistical revolution.

 By now, most everybody knows the story of Gingrich’s second ex-wife (yes, the “moral” candidate has been married three times), Marianne Gingrich saying that the former House Speaker asked her to live in anopen marriage, then eventually divorced her after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.  That’s not the issue here, true or not, morally reprehensible or not.


The issue is the hissy fit that Gingrich threw at the CNN “Southern Republican Presidential Debate” in Charleston, S.C., after the debate's moderator, John King, asked Gingrich about the allegations, which were first reported by The Washington Post and ABC News.

Watch the clip below.

 Sorry, but King is well within his right and in-fact it was his duty as journalist and the debate’s moderator to address the situation.  The Gingrich-open marriage story was dominating the news cycle to the point where it was being discussed on sports talk radio here in Detroit.  By the time the debate started a story which Gingrich probably thought would carry the news cycle into the debate that Texas Gov. Rick Perry was ending his presidential campaign and endorsing Gingrich was old news.  It If King had ignored it, the situation would have become the elephant in the room and it would have damaged the credibility of the entire debate.

I would be impressed with the way Gingrich quickly dodged the question and gave a venom filled response aided by an “APPLAUSE SIGN” in the crowd where he bashed on the “elite media” that is “protecting Barack Obama,” if it weren’t so insulting to any person with a brain.

Perry, in his endorsement of Gingrich said of the former House Speaker, “I have no question that Newt Gingrich has the heart of a conservative reformer, the ability to rally and captivate the conservative movement.”

 If you talk that talk as a candidate, you best better be able to do the walk and Gingrich simply cannot.  You cannot be the candidate of morals, conservatism and protecting “the sanctity of marriage” when you’ve been divorced twice and then marry your mistresses.  You also cannot claim this when you divorce one with who had just been diagnosed with cancer and divorce the other one after she has been diagnosed with MS.

And if you do any of this, you certainly cannot be president.  Just ask John Edwards.

This isn’t a piece on Gingrich to support a specific candidate other than Gingrich or even to say would make a bad president or is a bad person.  But when a public figure climbs the tallest soapbox he can find and looks down the nose at a respected journalist that is just doing his job, in a vile filled rant with no ethical foundations, he needs to be called on that.

Shame on John King? Shame on CNN? No, shame on you, Mr. Speaker.