Just how disgusting is Newt Gingrich's behavior?

Well, of course, he was disgusting enough to divorce not one, but two wives for younger models, serving his first wife with divorce papers while she was in the hospital for cancer and being a repellent enough creep to have an affair behind the back of wife #2 while sanctimoniously inveighing against Bill Clinton for being the repellent creep he is. However, confessions take away such sins so we will cut him some slack there.

Likewise, though it is hard to say whether he has expressed any contrition about it, let's just pretend his recent explanation for all this repellent creepitude--the one about how the reason he ditched two wives was because he just loved America so darn much that it, er, somehow caused him to commit adultery twice,--was such a stench-filled, rotten-egg-smelling piece of mental flatulence badly disguised as suckupery to the Christian crowd that the gales of laughter he received taught even a leading "public intellectual" like him not to repeat it. So let's take his humiliated refusal to repeat that load of bovine excrement as something dimly like "repentance" and "humility" for the Great Man. Let's, in fact, just focus on his public life and ignore his long-ago rhetoric against Clinton to the effect that "character matters" (remember that mantra?).

Y'see, that's the hard part. I don't have to live with this odious man under his roof, but I would have to abide him as President if I voted for him. And here, after the above grotesqueries, is what America's newest politicized (and politicizing) Catholic offers us as his political rhetoric: a big fat turd of ignorant jingoism to rattle Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel and his fellow xenophobes down at the bar with incoherent rubbish designed to stampede them into voting for the cynical manipulative old bombthrower:

"I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9," Gingrich said at Cornerstone Church here. "I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American."

Yes! Fear those secular atheist worshippers of Allah! FEAR THEM! And coo over my grandkids (from children from one of my other marriages, I forget which). I understand what it means to be American! Something something Jesus! Vote for me! I can save your kids from Radical Atheist Muslims who seek to secularize America for Allah! Have I mentioned I'm born again and Catholic? With adorable grandkids?

I'm gonna hurl.

On the other hand, the Onion captures well the inspiration so many of us feel over a Newt candidacy.

But Mark! He's a Catholic! Yes. So was Madonna. Baptism is grace, not magic. Becoming Catholic does not mean that a skanky politician is above reproach if he returns to old habits like a dog to his vomit. If Newt wants me to take him seriously, then it would be good if he treated the sacraments as means of grace and not as stepping stones to power. We don't need a Catholic whose attitude to the faith is "How can I use God talk and manipulative jingo fearmongering to stampede the suckers in Paducah?" When he behaves seriously, I'll take him seriously. Till then, I will respond to his cynical attempts at manipulation as what they are: cynical (and spectacularly crappy) attempts at manipulation. God grant him the grace to undo a lifetime of bad habits. His sins, like mine and all the rest of the human race's, do not name him and are not his essence. His true face is Christ's. But the mask of sanctimony he is trying to put on the mask of sin is not his true face. He must take both masks off, and that will require a lot of grace and effort. God have mercy on him. The last thing in the world such a man needs is more power.