Quite a remake it was. We'll never see the likes of Everett Dirksen, Tom Dewey, or Margaret Chase Smith with an (R) after their names.

Somebody is going to beat Obama.

Next week, they'll air an interview of the wife he served divorce papers while she was lying in a hospital bed.

.. a skilled legislator who can get things done.

What are the top three items on Gingrich's git er done list?

Yeah, I don't think he's electable.

You really are old school.

Just because he cheated on his wife? With a woman? Who was of legal age? Who wasn't a hooker? Who wasn't a lobbyist or a Russian spy?

You really are old school.

One clear trait that does not matter to me, but it does to others, is that he’s a horn dog. At 68, I doubt he remains one, but he was a horn dog most of his life. At age 19, right out of high school, he married his geometry teacher, age 26.

That marriage lasted 18 years, and there is a myth connected to it. It is widely believed that Newt visited that wife while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery, and he dropped the divorce bomb on her.

Newt has long denied the story, and their daughter Jackie revealed this year that it was her mother who sought the divorce, that the issue came up before her hospitalization, and her surgery was not for cancer, but a benign tumor.

Gingrich had had an affair and married the new object of his affection in 1981. But you can’t restrain a horn dog for long, and in the mid-1990s he had an affair with a flashy blonde named Callista, a congressional staffer 23 years his junior.

They wed in 2000, and I imagine he’ll stick with her. She’s quite an eyeful, if you like that sort of thing.

Newt is a walking encyclopedia, clearly the brightest on the political stage on both sides of the aisle. He has a Ph.D. in modern European history from Tulane. Yes, he is Dr. Gingrich. Interestingly, he’s a top book reviewer on Amazon.

And he is very effective in setting and meeting conservative goals. Plus, he is learning to smile. I saw him on the telly a few days ago, and clearly his handlers had stressed the value of happy faces.

Libya dictator Muammar Gaddafi has apparently written a letter addressed to Congressional leadership and the White House, a week after the House of Representatives passed a resolution demanding the Obama administration explain the legal justifications for committing U.S. armed forces to enforce a no-fly zone there.

Gingrich can run on being a devoted spouse in the current event category.

One of our locals, a former newspaperman who lives 50 miles from here, writes:

“He can say that we had been talking about [a divorce] for 10 years, but the truth is that it came as a complete surprise,” says Jackie Gingrich, in a telephone interview from Carrollton. “He’s a great wordsmith … He walked out in the spring of 1980 and I returned to Georgia. By September, I went into the hospital for my third surgery. The two girls came to see me, and said Daddy is downstairs and could he come up? When he got there, he wanted to discuss the terms of the divorce while I was recovering from the surgery … To say I gave up a lot for the marriage is the understatement of the year.”

A devoted spouse with a good credit limit.

In last Wednesday's Republican presidential debate, Gingrich sought to explain his role at Freddie Mac as that of a "historian" sounding dire warnings about the company's future. He said company officials told him "we are now making loans to people that have no credit history and have no record of paying back anything, but that's what the government wants us to do." He said his advice was to tell them, "this is insane."

In last Wednesday's Republican presidential debate, Gingrich sought to explain his role at Freddie Mac as that of a "historian" sounding dire warnings about the company's future. He said company officials told him "we are now making loans to people that have no credit history and have no record of paying back anything, but that's what the government wants us to do." He said his advice was to tell them, "this is insane."