Puzzling support for Newt
I'm seeing that Newt has taken the lead in South Carolina and, frankly, I just saw a statistic I found most shocking.
First, in the interest of full disclosure, I admit I have had a hard time stomaching Newt since he attacked Bain and Romney with classic Occupy Wall Street and Obama class warfare rhetoric unbecoming a conservative.
Second, the stat is that evangelicals prefer Newt by a wide margin: 37 to 21 percent.
Now, all issues relating to Newt's ex-wife's comments and the timing and media sleaze factor aside, I am having a tough time wrapping my arms around this.
I'm not an evangelical Christian but I have a much harder time with Newt's serial philandering and the bodies he's cast aside as a result, than Mitt's flip flop on abortion.
I mean, his first wife Jackie was apparently his High School teacher. They had two kids and he had a long affair with Marianne, whom he married after he divorced Jackie. opening up the position of mistress for someone else. While married to Marianne he had an affair with a congressional aide (Callista) during the Lewinsky scandal for years.
Now claims of open marriage aside because we can't prove that, this shows to me a serious character flaw, the kind that makes one wonder: if a man would cheat and lie on his wife, what will he do to the country?
If this was a problem for Clinton, why not Newt? We conservatives have standards about this. I'm not interested in peering into someone's bedroom but this kind of history matters.