11 posted on Thursday, January 19, 2012 9:58:41 AM by KansasGirl: “Hey MSM, we don’t care! Why are you bringing this up now?!”
Some of us care a great deal. Personal lives and private character tell a great deal about how someone will act in public life. It's not everything we need to know, but it's important.
Yes, we've had Republicans in public life for many years who have been divorced, but not serial adulterers like Gingrich. Also, we didn't hear stories like this from Ronald Reagan's first wife or Bob Dole's first wife. Dole, for example, went out of his way to always make sure his ex-wife and her new husband were placed at the lead table whenever he went to their county for Republican Party political events. It's one thing to get divorced; it's a very different thing to commit adultery.
Just because Newt Gingrich's ex-wife said these things doesn't mean they're true. And yes, the timing is problematic.
But ask yourself, if you were the ex-wife and had stayed quiet over all these years because your ex-husband was effectively banished from public life after losing the Speakership, is it not quite realistic that you would wait until there was a realistic chance of your ex-husband returning to public life before going public with this stuff?
Newt Gingrich is known for hardball politics. My guess is he has lots of “stuff” on his ex-wife as well. We'll probably be seeing a lot of that.
As I've said many times before, I am extremely unhappy with our entire list of Republican candidates. We've got the best chance in a very long time to take a decisive blow against the Democrats, and we're throwing it away. This stuff should not even have had the chance to come out. Republicans have worked for more than thirty years to make ourselves known as the party of moral values, and now we run the risk of throwing it all away because of sex scandals that are as bad if not worse than what Bill Clinton was doing.
This stuff should have been vetted and dealt with long ago, not two days before South Carolina votes.
Gingrich’s ex-wife (Marianne, #2) called him on his birthday to tell him she was getting a divorce; he came home to find the house empty, all the furnishings gone. They actually ended up getting a separation, and it was during this time that Gingrich met Calista. BTW, the separation papers contained a clause permitting both parties to date other people. This is not unusual for a separation and is not an “open marriage.”
A few years later, they reconciled, I suspect because Marianne is a very needy person and Gingrich seems to have a track record of being perhaps overly responsible in making up for his errors (he married his first wife, who was his highschool teacher who seduced him when he was 16, after she had gotten pregnant; he was 19 when he married her over his father’s objections).
This reconciliation did not last very long, and they separated again and then were divorced not too much later.