Kyle-Anne Shivers With Antici...pation

Francois de La Rochefoucauld observed that "Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue," and while that's a snappy one-liner that probably had them chortling in Madeleine de Souvré's literary salon and nudging each other under the table, at least until someone bumped the bloated foot of a gout sufferer, and the laughter was rent by screams, it's a little too Louis Quatorze for our modern age, when the Divine Right of Kings has given way to the testicle-crushing powers of Article II of the U.S. Constitution.   So nowadays, La Rochefoucauld's maxim would more aptly state, "Hypocrisy is the alarm lever behind the brittle pane marked 'In Case of Negro in White House, Break Glass.'"  And it's just this kind of exigency that has allowed Newt Gingrich to buy a papal indulgence from Professional Moralist (and "frequent contributor to American Thinker and PJ Media") Kyle-Anne Shiver.

Why I'm Giving Newt a Pass on the Scarlet-A Factor

Ah, so what I've been mistaking for a Republican Presidential primary campaign is actually a TV reality competition.  That explains the last debate when Moderator Joe Rogan forced the participants to drink donkey semen; I admit I was confused at the time, since in most Republican interactions with the press, the jizz traditionally flows the other way.  Particularly with David Gregory.

Newt Gingrich is an adulterer many times over, which is old news.

And Old News is No News.  Unless it's the Gospels, in which case it's Good News.

The second Mrs. Gingrich, scorned in favor of the third Mrs. Gingrich, is in the process of spilling the sordid divorce beans in her long-stated goal of stopping Newt's climb to the presidency.

I once traded a cow for some divorce beans.  Worst deal I ever made.

But I decided a couple of months ago to give Newt a pass on the Scarlet-A factor, and I seriously doubt there's a single thing an embittered ex-wife can say that will change my mind at this point.

For one thing, it would mean rearranging all the hobgoblins.

Yes, I empathize with the 2nd Mrs. Gingrich.

The 1st Mrs. Gingrich, however, can apparently suck it.

Yes, I believe that adultery is a very serious offense. Yes, I wish the man I am supporting for president had a perfect track record in all aspects of his life, both public and private.

 Ironically, the sign of a true Gingrich supporter in 2012 is they sound like a Clinton supporter in 1998.

I'm putting my country over the matron's sisterhood here, and a couple of my friends have already stared at me incredulously as I've explained my reasons.

Some of them have been so scandalized they've threatened to quit the matron sisterhood and return the traveling mom jeans.

How could I, outspoken defender of monogamy and premarital chastity, so compromise my own principles to vote for a man who has trashed his own wedding vows and, if he wins the presidency, would ensconce his former mistress as first lady?

Well, it's complicated.

You liked it as a Facebook Relationship Status, now you'll love it as a Presidential Campaign Slogan.

For one thing, I don't see red-blooded, healthy, high-testosterone men through a set of 1950s June-Cleaver glasses. 

At first I thought Kyle-Anne meant the mother from Leave It to Beaver,  but given the hyphen, I assume that "June-Cleaver glasses" are some sort of gruesome, but innocuous-looking instrument of murder, like the booby-trapped binoculars in Horrors of the Black Museum.

Newt's a Boomer, for crying out loud. He's a Boomer through and through, down to every one of his adulterous acts.

Just imagine how much richer our literary heritage would be if adultery had been invented before 1966.  Georges Feydeau might have written a farce about it.

We Boomers honestly did believe that sexual morality could be separated from all other spheres. 

Except the Music of the Spheres, because it didn't matter how cool your bachelor pad was, you weren't getting laid without a little lush cocktail jazz on the HiFi.

We heralded cohabitation as the commonsense precursor to healthy marriage. 

Worked for me.  Did Newt and the first Mrs. Gingrich shack up before tying the matrimonial slipknot?  Might have helped.

We pushed the bounds of every sexual prohibition to its furthermost limits and insisted on the right to exterminate our young in the womb to offset female disadvantage.

Male disadvantage, on the other hand, is primarily addressed by adjusting one's golf handicap.

We've embraced serial monogamy so enthusiastically that we've made it mainstream. Kids from our broken families are everywhere now

Clearly we need better womb exterminators.

...and bonded step-families are now as commonplace as they were rare in June Cleaver's America.

Bonded step-families are fine, I had one myself, but as I've matured, my tastes have become more sophisticated, and I find myself preferring cask-strength single-malt step-families.  It has a deeper and more robust flavor profile, which I attribute to all the extra hyphens.

In many ways, Newt Gingrich is us.

Great.  Now I've got to figure out how to shave without actually looking in the mirror.

He is us in ways Mitt Romney doesn't even seem to know exist in the real world.

I think Kyle-Anne is saying she'd rather spend a drunken, sexed-up weekend in Vegas with Newt Gingrich than Mitt Romney.  I say we pour some Canola oil in an inflatable kiddie pool and let her and Katherine Jean Lopez fight it out.

Not all Boomers bought into this now-quite-blemished idea of separating our sex lives from all the rest in terms of morality, but more of us did than didn't. And pretending that's not the case isn't going to put this Boomer-released genie back into its bottle. 

Even as a child, I blamed my parents divorce on Barbara Eden.

America will have to depend upon the new generations' learning from our mistakes to even come close to doing that. And I doubt seriously whether these young libertarians want to go back to straight-laced, Christian sexual morality enforced by law anyhow.

So tough titty, Santorum!  Newt's driving the Party Bus to Spring Break!

The point is this. Newt Gingrich, like Bill Clinton, is a Boomer in this sexually liberated regard. And right this very minute, there are as many women who identify with Callista Gingrich, the mistress who became a wife, as will identify with the formerly scorned ex. In my own circle of close female friends, two of them were former mistresses.

And astonishingly, knowing these women personally has given you a fresh perspective on life and a dash of empathy that has actually encouraged a relaxation of your normally incoherent but inflexible moral outrage.  Brava, Kyle-Anne.  On the down side, if you accidentally make a gay or black friend, you're going to run out of material real fast.

As Boomers, we would have to do a whole lot of Scarlet-A shunning to keep the marriage vow-breakers out of our midst. Unfortunately, that would mean most of us Boomers would have fewer friends than we could count on one hand. Amongst the younger generations, the only place where one can beam solidly on the side of chastity is at church on Sunday.

It's been many years since I've been to church, so I can only assume they've added American Gladiator style spectacles to attract the young, or perhaps "beaming" is the part of the service where the fornicators and the adulterers remove the lumber from each others' eye.

At any rate, fair is fair, and since the 2nd Mrs. Gingrich is now nursing her divorce-grudge in public...

Well I don't blame her.  I was pretty pissed off when I threw those magic divorce beans I bought out the window, and they grew into a giant divorce-grudge overnight.  And I wasn't even married.

... the public needs to remember just how it was that Marianne came to be the second wife of Newt Gingrich. She had an affair with him while he was still married to wife #1. Exactly so, dear readers. The second wife, now running to the press crying foul over Newt's adultery, was his mistress (in an adulterous affair) before she became his wife.

Far from crying foul, I think Mrs. Gingrich 2.0 is actually gloating that Mrs. Gingrich 3.0 wasn't nearly as good a mistress as she was.  After all, Newt left his first wife for Marianne, but with Callista he wanted to maintain a full-time mistress, but still keep a wife on the side (you know, for Bridge parties, progressive dinners, or those nights when you just don't feel like getting a blowjob).

Let's not forget that Newt Gingrich is a Southerner. And Southern men have long, long, long, long been known for their randy ways, which a great many of us women find as attractive as we find it nettlesome when we are ourselves scorned for more verdant female pastures.

When I worked in Alabama, most of the people I met were very nice, but it was often embarrassing to accompany my male co-workers to the local Hooters, where they'd get liquored up and shout, "Look at the meadows on her!" and, "How'd ya like to graze on that herbage?"

Whether South Carolina women will give Newt a pass on his hound-dog history is up in the air, but knowing Southern women as well as I do, I will bet that they will.

I haven't seen breakdowns of the vote by sex, but this still marks the first time I have ever witnessed Kyle-Anne make an even remotely accurate prediction.  I can only hope this isn't the beginning of a trend, or I'm going to run out of material.

Many are thinking right this minute along the lines of Sarah Palin.

I realize not everyone can afford a mistress, let alone three, but it's sad to think of anyone being reduced to this when there's so much free porn on the Internet.

We've got bigger fish to fry at the moment, and when one's Country is on the line, it's no time to be indulging puritan fantasies about men. Many women are thinking that we've got a once-married, publicly chaste president in the White House now, and it's not working out so well for America.

While it's true that last time the U.S. enjoyed a vibrant, expanding economy, there was a blowjob enthusiast who also defined oral sex in a narrow, pettifogging, pubic-hairsplitting way in the White House, that might just be a coincidence.  However, if Kyle-Anne can prove causation, one of you ladies might have to take one for the team and seduce Obama in order to strengthen the labor market (I presume this is what John Boehner means when he starts breathing heavily about the importance of the "job creators").

Southern women are not idealists wearing rose-colored glasses, especially when it comes to men.

However, Southern men are advised to avoid donning the June-Cleaver glasses if their wives suspect they're screwing around.

Even the most religious among us tend to see men as they are and not as we would wish them to be. Even in the Antebellum South, women turned a willfully blind eye to a husband's sexual romps in favor of financial security and the social status of marriage.

Even in the Antebellum South, when women had so many legal and property rights and so much social autonomy?  Wow.  And that's to say nothing of the white women.

Then, Civil War and Reconstruction deprivations only reinforced this already-strong survival instinct among Southern women, who quite often will put up with a mistress on the side and only get vengeful when the husband takes that mistress for his new wife.

Ah, that explains it -- Marianne is suffered from Post-Reconstruction Era Stress Disorder, which has  been demonstrated to cause deviant behavior.  I understand that Nathan Bedford Forrest was driven to found the Ku Klux Klan when he learned that one of his closest associates -- a man who had served under him at the Fort Pillow Massacre -- was seeing another war criminal on the side.

Southern women tend to believe that it's as much a woman's duty to keep her man as it is a man's duty to remain in marital fealty. 

"I'm sorry, honey, it was your responsibility to keep me honest and faithful, but so far you've done a demonstrably unsatisfactory job.  As I see from your file, you received a written warning after that intern tossed my salad.  Yet, I also note that I've been banging a Congressional aide repeatedly in my office bathroom, and you have still failed to develop and execute an effective action plan to stop me.  So I'm afraid I've got no choice but to let you go.  Please clean out your nightstand and your half of the bathroom sink, and be out of the house by five."

So, I'm getting pretty darned fed up with men running around screaming that Newt will cause a gender gap so huge that it simply can't be ameliorated by other factors more important. I'm planning to vote for Newt myself. And I can guarantee you we women are a heck of a lot more complicated than this anyhow.

Actually, c-o-m-p-l-i-c-a-t-e-d doesn't even spell the half of it when it comes to women. 

Actually, it does. All you need is a "w" and an "n," and you're good to go -- although I still think it's kind of a crummy anagram.