Newt, the new Un-Romney for this week

How many Un-Romneys of the Week have we been through before they flamed out?

Now they're scraping the bottom of the barrel and look who surfaced this week: NEWT ! ! !

Suddenly, his apparent sanity in the debates (if you don't think about what he's saying but only listen to his tone of self-confidence and omniscience) makes him a stand-out in this crowd. So up he goes in the polls. Actually in a tie with Romney for first place. He's picked up much of the Tea Party vote lost by Cain.

The next step, of course, is to sharpen the knives and bring him down. In Newt's case, it's easy. There's way more stuff than needed already out there to sink his little yellow duckie boat. People just temporarily forgot why they dislike him.

(1) Serial philanderer, thrice married, who wants to put his former mistress -- "the other woman" in his last divorce -- in the White House as First Lady. (2) He was forced to resign as Speaker of the House by his own party for ethical violations. (3) He pretends to be a Washington outsider but was in fact a Washington insider until they kicked him out, and since then he's become a multi-millionaire peddling his influence, his books and videos and getting big speaking engagements -- all trading on his time in Washington, which makes it a bit of a stretch for him to present himself as a D. C. outsider. (4) Arrogant and condescending, with cosmic narcissism; seems to believe his own ideas, which last only until the opposite is politically expedient. (5) In truth, he doesn't seem to believe anything except his own delusions of superiority. When wife #2 asked him how he could give speeches about family values while he was carrying on an affair, he said: 'It doesn't matter what I do. My message is so important, people need to hear it; what I live has nothing to do with it.'

And then there's the million dollar revolving charge accounts at Tiffany's, so he can keep buying Callista off with expensive baubles. Rumor has it that the cruise in the Greek Islands a week after announcing his presidential bid was pay-off to Callista for letting him run. Now, of course, being Newt, he's inventing the rationale that listening to the Greeks on that trip helped him understand their financial crisis. Nice try, Newt, but you are so obviously a big fake to any thinking person. You don't help yourself with such patent lies.

The bottom line on Newt has always been:

The more people get to know him, the less they like him.

What's flapping about today is his raking in $1.6 million from Freddie Mac. Newt says he was not a lobbyist but only gave "strategic advice as a historian." Come on, Newt. They don't pay that kind of money for history lessons. You want to buy a bridge in Brooklyn, cheap?

An official for Freddie Mac told Bloomberg News that they also asked him to "build bridges to Republicans in Congress." So it seems that Newt was in fact a lobbyist; he just wasn't honest enough to register as one.

But it gets worse. He was a high paid adviser to Freddie Mac for years. Then shortly after that ended, he was singing a different tune, denouncing the Democrats over their support of Freddie Mac and calling for a Congressional investigation of lawmakers who do just what he did. He also proclaimed that Obama should return campaign contributions from the Freddies. As far as I know, Newt didn't offer to return his salary from the same outfit. So now he's in a bit of awkwardness, being caught dissembling at best, lying at worst, about his relationship and work for Freddie Mac.

He claims he warned them that what they were doing with the risky mortgages was insane and that they were getting into a bubble. They say he said nothing of the sort. All this fits with Wife #2's telling Esquire Magazine a couple of years ago that Newt has no integrity.

Like they say: the more you know him, the less you like him.

Ralph