If Mitt Romney digs himself out of his current hole and somehow wins the GOP nomination, maybe he should pick Ashley Madison as his running mate.
Never heard of Ashley Madison? Me neither, but according to my email in box, AshleyMadison.com (Link? Are you serious?) is, ahem, "the world's premier extra-marital dating site with over 12 million members in 17 countries." And here you were bemoaning the lack of entrepreneurship in America. Anyway, the other claim to fame at Ashleymadison.com is that they're big fans of current Republican 2012 frontrunner Newt Gingrich.
How big? They've erected (where are Beavis and Butthead when you need them?) a giant billboard monment to fhe former house speaker which is located, for reasons known only to them, on Route 1 in Bucks County in what their e-mail release calls the "sleepy town" (Blogger's note: Ouch!) of Morrisville, just across the Delaware River from Trenton.
If you can't read the signage above, it says "Faithful Republican...Unfaithful Husband."
Says the news release from a company CEO that I don't feel like naming: "Gingrich proves that marital fidelity has no bearing on someone's ability to do a job. Rather than judge him, Americans have finally embraced the reality that affairs are commonplace, and perhaps paradoxically, might be an indication of great leadership to come. He is not the first nor last politician who will step outside of their marriage.”
Of course, this billboard is going to be subjected to the Cialis effect: Call your lawyer immediately if it stays up longer than four hours. And when the inevitable attorney for the Gingrich campaign makes the inevitable phone call and the billboard comes down, the good-or-whatever people at Ashleymadison.com will benefit from another round of news coverage. What a cheap publicity stunt! What kind of journalistic sap might fall for this?
Oops, as Rick Perry is fond of saying.
Well, OK, there is actually a broader point here. On the same day this billboard appeared, the venerable conservative publication National Review put out an editorial begging Republicans NOT to rally around Gingrich, and it hammered him hard for his three marriages and two known affairs. When the National Review and an online cheating site are going in the same direction, that's what we nowadays call a meme. Gingrich had been getting a fairly easy ride -- just two months ago the mild joke on "SNL" was that Newt didn't really want to be running for the White House -- but that's officially over as of today. From here on out, it's "Hardball."
OK, maybe that wasn't the best choice of words, either.