Posted 3:35 PM by Scoobie Davis

Newt and Callista

I find it amusing that Newt Gingrich finally admitted his affair with Callista Bisek (the woman who would become Wife Number 3 after he dumped Wife Number 2 several months after she was diagnosed with MS). I've received a bunch of hits for my conversation with Sean Hannity in which I confronted Slanthead about Republican sexual hypocrisy (this archived page is ranked high for a Google search of "Callista Bisek"). I think that's great because throughout the Clinton presidency, at the same time that the hard right was portraying Clinton as a philanderer, it was an open secret among these same people that the most powerful Republican during the Clinton years, Newt Gingrich, was boning Bisek.

When it finally came out in 1999 that Gingrich was dumping Wife Number 2 and marrying Bisek, I remember the exact words used by Rush Limbaugh--who had spend countless hours mocking Clinton for being a womanizer--on his radio show: "That's the first I heard about it." then he went onto another topic--never, to the best of my knowledge--bringing up the subject until yesterday. Similarly, the Bookie of Virtue, William Bennett, implausibly claimed in 1999 that he didn't know anything about the affair until then.