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This is why Newt can never be a serious candidate for the Republican Party and if he was as smart as he keeps telling us he is, he'd know it. There is no way that conservatives will be able to get past all the sordid aspects of Newt's personal failings. It's not the hypocrisy of prosecuting Clinton while having an affair, it's that he dumped his first wife (whom he dated secretly while she was his high school geometry teacher and married to get out of going to Vietnam) while she was recovering from cancer surgery. It's about her suing him to get him to pay child support, while he was taking money from special interests. It's about all the messy details his scorned second wife told the media after he told her he wanted to annul their 18 year marriage so that his third marriage would be recognized in his fiancee's church. And then openly carried on with the now third Mrs. Gingrich for years (Vanity Fair referred to her by the classy euphemism of "Gingrich's frequent breakfast companion"). How can social conservatives possibly bring themselves to vote for someone when it's open knowledge that he prefers oral sex from his women friends so that he has the plausible deniability that he didn't "sleep" with that person?

Newt has had to find ways to deal with this and sadly, this pathetic approach is the best he's got: "Yeah, I've been a bad boy, but look at me now!" It's pretty big leap Newt is asking his supporters to take to believe that all those horndog tendencies were youthful indiscretion, especially since he was in his mid-50s when he hooked up with his latest wife. And like the husband caught with lipstick on his collar, promising that it won't happen ever again, it's foolish to believe that Newt's fundamental selfishness will change.