Newts are slithery and disgusting, but that's neither here nor there

It's been an interesting couple of weeks for those of us who regularly read newspapers and news magazines back in the mid-90s. As Newt Gingrich emerged as the latest favorite GOP candidate who's not Mitt Romney, I found myself wondering just how long it would take the people who apparently were telling pollsters that Newt was their top choice to remember what he was actually like the last time he held public office.

Washington, 1994-98. I was a teenager with my own subscription to Newsweek. He was the Georgia Representative who rode the 1994 GOP midterm gains all the way to Speaker of the House, where he proceeded to cave to President Clinton over the 1995 federal government shutdown. This was just the first act, though. Speaker Gingrich later distinguished himself by railroading an impeachment inquiry of President Clinton through Congress, even as he himself was cheating on Wife #2 with decades-younger aide and eventual Wife #3. And then, after the midterm voters in 1998 reminded the GOP that they were sent to Congress to pass legislation, not hold hearings on the president's sex life, Gingrich resigned as Speaker.

To recap: Gingrich rode to power on the strength of the "Contract with America," a multi-point pledge to reduce the size and role of federal government. In 2000, Edward H. Crane of the Cato Institute wrote in Forbes that "Over the past three years the Republican-controlled Congress has approved discretionary spending that exceeded Bill Clinton's requests by more than $30 billion. The party that in 1994 would abolish the Department of Education now brags in response to Clinton's 2000 State of the Union Address that it is outspending the White House when it comes to education. My colleagues Stephen Moore and Stephen Slivinski found that the combined budgets of the 95 major programs that the Contract with America promised to eliminate have increased by 13%."

In other words, Gingrich as the leader of the majority in Congress failed to do, by at least one estimate, most of what he promised he'd do.

I guess he was too busy policing the morality of the twice-elected executive, who - it's true - fooled around with an aide and lied about it. The problem is that the guy wasting millions of taxpayer dollars investigating whether the president had schtupped an aide was himself sleeping with an aide. AT THE SAME TIME.

I understand the people who will never be able to admire Clinton because of what he did and lying to the American people about it. But I do feel the need to remind those people that Gingrich did the same thing, only more than once. If you're asking yourself what kind of man can lie to voters with a straight face about Clinton, then you have to ask it about Gingrich, too.

Oh, and it gets better. Guess what else Gingrich lied about?