What Does Nancy Know About Newt?

It was during an interview with CNN’s John King in which former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dropped the tease that has electrified political junkies. When King -- who verbally tousled with former House Speaker/current GOP presidential contender Newt Gingrich during a recent debate -- asked Pelosi her thoughts about the possibility of Gingrich becoming commander in chief, Pelosi responded, “That will never happen . . . He’s not going to be president of the United States.”

King pressed her. How could she be so sure that he'll never become president? “There’s something I know,” she said. "The Republicans, if they choose to nominate him, that’s their prerogative. I don’t even think that’s going to happen.”

This, as you might expect, has led to wild speculation about whether Pelosi has some juicy, scandalous information that she plans to unload if Gingrich gets the nomination. On Twitter, people have turned it into a #WhatNancyKnows parlor game.

We already do know quite a bit about Gingrich, or we’ve heard stories . . . the infidelities, the alleged request for the open marriage, the hypocrisy over lecturing about family values, the ethics scandal, the Tiffany's line of credit, yet this tantalizing nugget from Pelosi is driving everybody crazy. It has even compelled Mitt Romney’s campaign to create a new ad to scare Republican voters into not voting for Gingrich lest Pelosi sabotage the GOP by detonating Gingrich's campaign in the general election with some new dirt.

Even though Pelosi has tried to tamp down all the excitement her statement caused -- saying that she was simply referring to what’s already in the public record, specifically the House Ethics report on Gingrich from the 1990s -- I’m not buying it. That’s not what it seemed like she was saying to John King, at all.

Making things more interesting is the fact that in December Pelosi reportedly told a reporter for the Talking Points Memo: “One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich. I know a lot about him. I served on the investigative committee that investigated him, four of us locked in a room in an undisclosed location for a year. A thousand pages of his stuff.”

How bad could what she knows really be? Seriously, look at what’s happened over the past few years, zany tales that seem as though they were ripped off from a bad, improbable TV drama. Politicians, high profile ones at that, have made some really stupid decisions:

A no nonsense, tough New York governor  was shamed out of office when it was discovered he’d been messing around with a call girl. A South Carolina governor disappeared for days, said he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, then admitted he was in Argentina with his soul mate, a woman who was not his wife. A New York Congressman, who had a pregnant wife at home, sent nude photos of himself to strangers over Twitter. A California governor admitted that he cheated on his wife with the family’s housekeeper, fathered a child by her (a baby who was born a week apart from a child he had with his wife) and kept the mistress working at the home. A 2008 Democratic candidate for president fathered a child with a consultant to his campaign, tried to cover it up by having another campaign supporter say that he was the father, all the while, continuing to campaign for president while his wife was battling cancer for a second time. One of the 2012 GOP candidates for president dropped out of the race after multiple women claimed he’d sexually harassed them and another woman said she had an affair with the married businessman.

So, back to this campaign . . . what could Nancy Pelosi have been implying? Here are some outlandish guesses about what Pelosi knows the guy who walks around saying he thinks “grandiose” thoughts and, just this week, announced that he wants to colonize the moon (seriously). My guesses are as good as any of the other looney real life stories that have unfolded recently:  

• Mitt Romney isn’t the only Republican candidate who had a mishap with a vehicle and a family pet.
• Newt just recently had his 9-9-9 tatoo removed.
• Gingrich has a secret wall in his home office covered with photos of Snookie.
• Anthony Weiner is the one who taught Newt how to “tweet.”
• Newt’s preferred ringtone? Rod Stewart's “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?”
• Gingrich accidentally left behind an album full of Polaroids in the back of one of the desk drawers of the Speaker’s office. Suffice is to say, Newt knows what Victoria’s Secret is.
• The real story about how John Kerry got those black eyes and a broken nose . . . it involved Newt and two words: Fight. Club.

What do you think Pelosi has on Gingrich, if anything? Or is this all a bluff? What do you make of Pelosi trying to play down what she was obviously trying to gin up when she spoke with John King?

Suburban Mom's Political Fix: Obama's Congressional Address & the 'Day of Reckoning'

Don't worry everybody. Joe Biden's got it covered. Federal bailout money won't be wasted, President Barack Obama told us last night, because he's put the vice president in charge of a "tough, unprecedented oversight effort." And, as the president added, "Nobody messes with Joe." So we're all set.

But seriously folks, President Obama, invoking an upbeat and optimistic tone that called upon America's can-do spirit, told a joint session of Congress last night, "We will rebuild. We will recover." He hopes that the barrels of federal dollars contained in the various stimulus packages will truly jump-start the economy. He says now's the time to "act boldly" and to fix the health care system, double the production of green fuel, halve the federal deficit within four years, raise taxes only on a tiny fraction of Americas, give soldiers better pay and better benefits, pull troops out of Iraq, move some more into Afghanistan, improve the nation's schools and, oh yeah, beat cancer.

Now I'm an optimist who loves to see an ambitious agenda fueled by smart, innovative ideas, determination and the ability to see that people of all ideological stripes have something worthy to offer. But when I listened to President Obama last night, I kept wondering how in the world we could implement and achieve even half of what he put on the table last night. Is it even possible? To do everything he talked about? Simultaneously?

For the past few weeks, I've been voraciously consuming articles and editorials about Obama's economic proposals, including the ginormous bailout bills, and watched the now-infamous CNBC commentator Rick Santelli off-the-cuff speech where he scoffed at the notion of bailing out the ailing mortgages of people who bought more house than they could really afford. Across the board, there seems to be confusion, uncertainty and no clear path out of this thicket of daily reports about the Dow's latest drop, the jobless numbers spiking and the businesses shutting down. Just yesterday, news reports contained dire info about Target's steep decline in profits.

New York Times columnist David Brooks last week was critical of the bailout for homeowners who've defaulted or are behind on their mortgages, saying the federal plan rewards bad behavior, but asked what other choice do we really have if we're to stop the economic hemorrhaging. ". . . [T]he sad reality is that in these circumstances government has to spend money on precisely those sectors that have been swinging most wildly -- housing, finance, etc. It has to help stabilize people who have been idiots."

President Obama last night said we've arrived at a national "day of reckoning" and that it's time to pay the price for living a lifestyle beyond our means for so long. We need to grow up and settle the bill. After listening to his prescription to pull us out of what some commentators are frighteningly likening to a modern day Great Depression, I find myself agreeing with the New York Daily News' sentiment on today's front page, "Hope He's Right." Americans are giving President Obama high approval numbers because the majority of them are taking a leap of faith; we're praying that he's right.

But then articles like today's Maureen Dowd column about the gross misuse of federal stimulus money are published (a bank that got $1.5 billion in bailout money and fired 450 employees "flew hundreds of clients and employees to Los Angeles last week and treated them to four days of posh hotel rooms, salmon and filet mignon dinners, music concerts, a PGA golf tournament at the Riviera Country Club with Mercedes shuttle rides and Tiffany swag bags") and steam starts pouring out of my ears. Where's Joe Biden? He's got to get on the case, pronto! Want to restore Americans' confidence, then the Obama folks need to put an end to this kind of this abuse ASAP.




Image credit: New York Daily News.