Man oh man. I was wondering not long ago how long it would take for Newt Gingrich's campaign to go down in flames, but I didn't expect for it to be this soon. How bad is it when you're getting grilled in what should be friendly territory at Fox from the likes of Greta Van Susteren and you're getting hit from all sides from your own party for saying something negative about Paul Ryan's budget as he did on last weekend's Meet the Press?
Here he is on Greta's show, deciding that he's not going to comment if anyone decides to ask him -- as Greta did here -- about their Tiffany's bill:
GINGRICH: Now later on, I want you to watch this particular segment Greta.
VAN SUSTEREN: Okay.
GINGRICH: And notice I talked about jobs. I talked about the price of gasoline. I talked about all sorts of real problems for real Americans...
VAN SUSTEREN: And I brought this one up.
GINGRICH: ...that in a presidential campaign we could talk, we could bring up and I think it sort of fit in perfectly and my answer to you is I'm not commenting on stuff like that. I am perfectly happy to talk about what we need to do for America and what we need to do to help Americans, but I frankly don't want to play the gotcha' games in Washington and I'm just not going to participate. [...]
Part of running for president is that everything you ever did, every person you ever knew... name it... sooner or later somebody somewhere is going to run across it, you know and... it will show up. And I've just decided if it doesn't relate to a better future for America; if it doesn't relate to helping the American people; if it doesn't relate to solving our problems, from here on out, my answer's going to be I'm not commenting on it and then people can decide. If you want to play Trivial Pursuit, that's fine. But I'm not going to play Trivial Pursuit. I'm going to try to help this country get back on track.
I assume he'll use the same tactic when asked about those pesky little items like his adultery and divorces as well. Heaven forbid we can't have the media playing "Trivial Pursuit" with asking him if he's a huge flaming hypocrite when espousing "family values" and whether his supposed religious beliefs square with how he's lived his life. I'm sure he thinks that would be terribly unfair and has put those kind of "gotcha" questions off limits as well.