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Naked Rampage:

Thank you for a gracious response. Many here ignore criticisms of their opinions and will not look for documentation. You did not ignore and you did your research. Good for you. I did call you a Newbie but you look like a promising Newbie even when we disagree. Good for you and welcome.

It WAS Barr who paid for his paramour's abortion. I think she was a staffer and not his wife but I may be wrong about her status. If she was his wife, he is even more despicable in degree but not in kind.

Newt is often reported as having had wife #1 served with divorce papers when she was hospitalized on her deathbed with cancer. Their daughter, Jackie, who gets along with both of them, has (this year in the American Spectator) refuted this tale (which originated in a 1984 article in the quite radical Mother Jones magazine) has recently refuted this apocryphal tale in numerous ways. First, Newt's wife had a tumor removed back then but is still quite alive and simply non-political. Second, it was the first Mrs. Gingrich who requested the divorce BEFORE she was hospitalized. She and Newt sat the children down at home to explain what was about to happen. Third, as you may not know, the first Mrs. Gingrich was Newt's cradle-robbing high school math teacher. Personally, I hate divorce but I can also make room for the possibility that Newt married wife #1 under undue influence of her seniority and status. I don't know but I also don't doubt that Newt was having an affair with wife #2 while still married to wife #1.

That wife #2 and he were carrying on while he was still married, undermines any claim by her of being abandoned for wife #3 since wife #3 and Newt were simply doing to her what she and Newt had done to wife #1. All of this is verrrry ugly nonetheless and our society would be a lot better off if such misbehavior were far rarer than it apparently has become.

You and I are probably separated in age by many years since I am almost as old as Newt and your homepage indicates that you are a college student.

In the movie Dr. Zhivago which I strongly recommend to you and to anyone despite its being the product of Boris Pasternak (a Marxist) and spirited to publication in the west by Gramscian communists in Italy, there is a relevant scene.

Boy revolutionary Pavel Antipov is seeking the approval of the utterly corrupt Komarovsky to marry the compellingly delicious 17-year-old Lara (Komarovsky's lover who is determined to be done with him and with adultery). Her father is dead and Komarovsky is also Lara's mother's lover (he is a busy guy). Pavel Antipov is painfully naive (having no idea of Lara's submissions to Komarovsky) but utterly dedicated as a Bolshevik and ohhh sooooo earnest. Lara urgently asks Komarovsky in Antipov's presence at a working class cafe what he thinks. Komarovsky says cynically: I think he is very young. Antipov: If people do not bring youth to their marriage, what can they bring. Komarovsky (contemptuously): A certain measure of experience! ..... Komarovsky again: The young are intolerant! Antipov (standing up suddenly in offended dignity): The young are intolerant because we have so much less to tolerate in ourselves!!! There is more to the scene but you get the drift. Antipov's response beats the hell out of Rhett Butler's: Frankly, Scarlett, I don't give a damn, as the greatest line in cinematic history.

I saw that scene when I was eighteen and imagined that Dr. Zhivago was an anti-communist movie. I soooo admired Antipov for standing up to Komarovsky. It was a damn right moment. Now I am aging and aged and I also appreciate Komarovsky in a different light. He is not admirable but revolutionary WWI era Moscow does not make principle a comfortable guide to life. He has been making compromises for a very long time (as have many of us who have reached senior status). He describes himself as "an ignoble Caliban." We compromised seniors are not unreservedly admirable in that respect either.

Nor is Newt. OTOH, we have to elect somebody as POTUS in 2012. I have never compromised so far as to find the likes of Romney supportable. Bob Barr is also not acceptable for the stated reasons. I would prefer that he refrain from public life altogether although he is more conservative than Romney. We obviously cannot voluntarily re-elect Obozo.

We are stuck with a POTUS candidate field in which Sarah Palin might have been a star but apparently was reluctant to catch any more slime from the Demonrat slime machine. Michelle Bachmann looked like she might be a star but she has faltered repeatedly on a bigger stage than a couple of terms in the Minnesota State Senate and a couple of terms in Congress qualified her. The Slime Merchants could not touch her with scandal so they claimed that her long-time husband is a lavender queen. No one believed them and they shut up.

Rick Perry, Texas's longest serving governor in its long history, could not make the transition to the national media context. The Demonrats were offering money for anyone willing to come forward as a potential bimbo eruption against Perry, straight or particularly lavender. Surprisingly, no one apparently tried to get the money. I had fully expected that some lavender queen with a yen for cash would have been happy to slime Perry while dialing for dollars. Of course, Perry would have been innocent but that does not seem to matter to the media or the Demonrats any more.

Herman Cain has impressive business credentials (much better for political purposes than Romney) but has been the target of classic Axelrod autoslime. He will probably withdraw by 12/5/11, and we will lose the first math major to run for POTUS. I don't care for 9-9-9 but Cain deserved a better fate. He is too old for a 2016 re-run (as is Newt) but tough talking Secretary of Commerce sounds right as does Axelrod apologizing on national TV to Mrs. Cain.

Rick Santorum would have made a good candidate in many ways. I regard him as one of the best senators of this era. I am prejudiced as a Catholic but I also think he is one of the best Catholics in public life. He lost his Senate seat by supporting pro-abort Arlen Spector in a GOP primary in about 2004 against the previously pro-abort ex-Congressman Tuomey who changed his mind on abortion as easily as Mittwit did and, it seemed, for the same reason of improving electability. Spector, we now know paid for that endorsement by promising and delivering on his promise to support Dubya's pro-life nominations to SCOTUS and other courts as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Many in Pennsylvania and elsewhere so hated Spector that they have treated Santorum as a pariah. That is unfortunate but it is what it is and Santorum is getting no traction.

Opposing Huntsman needs little explanation since he apparently supports gay everything, apparently voted for Obozo, served him as envoy to Red China, has yet to become a blip on the radar screen and is probably Mother Jones's favorite "Republican." Nice looking daughters are not enough of an excuse. Else, I might run which I won't.

Gary Johnson must have been smoking his favorite herb to think he had any business in this race. Buddy Roemer was a lying opportunistic governor of Louisiana (in the Jurassic era and never heard from since) who changed from Demonrat to Republican as a "pro-lifer," got elected and then governed as a pro-abort and was rightfully thrown out after that one term. He made Edwin (Laissez bon temps roullez) Edwards look like a moral and honest man.

Finally, we have Dr. Ron Paul. Personally, I will shock you by saying (in an extreme minority around here) that I do not get moved by bordermania. I know a lot of Mexicans here in Northern Illinois, some entered legally and others did not. I am happy that they are all here and I look forward to them voting their generally conservative principles (socially, militarily, economically, etc.). They are natural born Republicans and conservatives. Give them some time to settle in and the less they are threatened with deportation the sooner they will be our voters (like early Italian-American immigrants in my native New England).

That issue aside, Ron Paul is a two-faced liar who CLAIMS to be pro-life, pro-family, pro-marriage, fiscally conservative, pro-gun rights. He may well be pro-gun rights. That is important but not enough. Only the Mittwit would evade declaring on guns and probably would be bad on the subject. Ron Paul's exotic love affair with the otherwise ignored 10th Amendment leads him to be operatively a pro-abort, and an enemy of marriage as being for one man and one woman only. He claims Christianity while resisting its two most important issues. He packs every budget with pork for Galveston while posing for holy pictures at press conferences as a "fiscal conservative," votes against each budget bill but rests assured that his corrupt liberal colleagues will vote his pork into law anyways. He consorts with the likes of David Duke and the proprietors of neo-Nazi Stormfront though he is no neo-nazi but he IS a collector of embarrassingly exotic voters. Having had three kids, I am no longer favorable to any "right" to use recreational drugs. Paul's "foreign policy" and "military policy" is an embarrassment to rational humanity. When Israel (or parts of the USA) is/are incinerated by Iranian nukes, Ron Paul will be blaming America first along with Alex Jones, Infowars and his fellow 9/11 Troofers.

You like none of the GOP candidates. That is understandable and certainly your right. I suspect that you are also no fan of Obozo. This nation does have an election in November, 2012. Someone will be elected. Newt has many sins but seems better than this inadequate field either by an admittedly flawed governing philosophy or electability or both. He will not make my generation forget Ronaldus Maximus (for whom I worked on staff at the 1968 GOP convention and for whom I was a state chairman in 1976 when he challenged feckless Ford).

If someone has a rational path to nominating Michelle Bachmann or Rick Santorum or Sarah Palin (in spite of her determination to the contrary), they can count on me but right now it looks like its Mittwit or Newt and I'll take Newt and urge others to do so. If I and others like me get him elected, it will be up to your generation to hold his feet mercilessly to the fire on all the issues that count.

I disagree with your assessment that Newt is somehow more liberal than the Mittwit but that is a somewhat separate issue. The length and tone of this post mean that I respect you nonetheless and express to you every good wish for success in your future as a conservative. I would swap ages with you gladly to get the chance to do it all over again. God bless you and yours.