Newt was once an important political figure. He was the main mover in the Republican revolution of the 1990s and Speaker of the House of Representatives.
In 2010, Newt has shown himself to be a fringe politician. As Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote this week, Newt went batty in his recent criticism of President Obama, explaining the president's actions as "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior."
This sort of baloney is typical anti-Obama rhetoric on the Right, but it's also hyperbolic nonsense, as Robinson makes clear. It assumes, Robinson notes, that "Obama somehow absorbed a fully elaborated, frozen-in-time anti-colonial worldview from his Kenyan father. Who left the family when the future president was 2."
Robinson notes that this sort of reasoning is not new to Gingrich, who jumped on Sonia Sotomayor as a racist and compared supporters of the Lower Manhattan mosque as Nazis.
Robinson concludes by pointing out—correctly—Newt's real problem:
Gingrich seems to believe that our culture and values are also threatened from within—by black and brown people who demand that they, too, be given a voice in defining that culture and those values. But, hey, it's a free country. If he wants, Gingrich can imagine himself a retired British colonel in 1963, harrumphing in his armchair about who lost Kenya. A diverse and multicultural America has long since moved on.
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Eye-opening 1995 portrait of man-child Newt in Vanity Fair
Friends and family: "Newtie is still a kid," admits Kit. Marcella McPherson agrees: "Newtie wants things Newtie's way...If he wants something, he wants it now. Newtie was always for Newtie."
"Newt Gingrich is playing out a personal agenda in a public forum, and it threatens the safety, health, and security of our most vulnerable people," says Mary Kahn. "And that's what frightens me about him. Someday he might be president."
...One of those women, Anne Manning, became romantically involved with Gingrich during his '76 campaign. The curly-haired young Englishwoman, then married to another professor at West Georgia, Tim Chowns, was an avid volunteer in Newt's Carrollton office. "I did have a relationship with him," she discloses for the first time, "but when it suited him, he would totally blow you off."
In the spring of 1977, she was in Washington to attend a census-bureaus workshop when Gingrich took her to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. He met her back at her modest hotel room. "We had oral sex," she says. "He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, "I never slept with her." Indeed, before Gingrich left that evening, she says, he threatened her: "If you ever tell anybody about this, I'll say you're lying."
She tells me this, she says, because she fears that Newt might become president someday. "I don't claim to be an angel," she says, but she is repelled by Newt's stance as Mr. Family Values. "He's morally dishonest. He has gone too far believing that 'I'm beyond the law.' He should be stopped before it's too late."
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