Newt Gingrich Was Lying About ABC's Interview With His Ex-Wife, Of Course

Comedy chuckwagon Newt Gingrich got a ton of mileage out of his cranky and peevish take-down of CNN's John King, and by extension the whole of the liberal media empire. (And for Gingrich's gross vehicle weight rating, tons of mileage don't come cheap!) You will recall that ABC was scheduled to air an interview with one of Newt's former wives almost immediately following last Thursday's debate in South Carolina and that King decided to open the debate with a question about ex-wife Marianne Gingrich's allegations that Newt had pressed her for an open marriage. Graduate-level reprobate Newt naturally and easily lobbed this softball out of the park in part with an angry claim that his campaign provided family friends who could testify the story was false but that ABC had rebuked the offers. This claim, it seems, was just a fall-back to one of Newt's most trusted rhetorical techniques:  Flat-Out Lying. 

The Guardian captured Gingrich's irritated reply in its live blog of that fateful night :

Let me be quite clear. Let me be quite clear. The story is false. Every personal friend I have who knew us in that period said the story was false. We offered several of them to ABC to prove it was false. They weren't interested because they would like to attack any Republican.

WAS THAT QUITE CLEAR? Yes, it was quite clearly a lie which the Gingrich campaign, having exploited the episode to win South Carolina and something called "momentum," is now not even bothering to try to defend in any way, shape, or form:  

"Tonight, after persistent questioning by our staff, the Gingrich campaign concedes now Speaker Gingrich was wrong — both in his debate answer, and in our interview yesterday," King said on [last night's] edition of John King USA. "Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond says the only people the Gingrich campaign offered to ABC were his two daughters from his first marriage."

This revelation will hopefully wash away any whiff of integrity that may have accidentally attached itself to Gingrich's person/name/farce of a political career. [ Politico / The Guardian ]