GOP FRONTRUNNERS; AN ETHICALLY COMPROMISED BUNCH

Well well well, the GOP is casting around for another candidate "who can win" (like George Bush??). Polls indicate that Guiliani is their guy, for now. This post is just a reminder to everyone before any of the front runners actually run, just how blemished these guys are. First, consider Giuliani's horrible public divorce including injured kids

Giuliani informed his second wife, Donna Hanover, of his intention to seek a separation in a 2000 press conference. The announcement was precipitated by a tabloid frenzy after Giuliani marched with his then-mistress, Judith Nathan, in New York's St. Patrick's Day parade, an acknowledgment of infidelity so audacious that Daily News columnist Jim Dwyer compared it with "groping in the window at Macy's." In the acrid divorce proceedings that followed, Hanover accused Giuliani of serial adultery, alleging that Nathan was just the latest in a string of mistresses, following an affair the mayor had had with his former communications director.

Then we have the ever popular Newt Gingrich, probably the most personally challenged of the lot. His insufferably crude treatment of his cancer ridden wife while he acquired a newer model behind her back (click on the link and get ready to puke), his failure to pay child support, and his "worse than Clinton behavior" while running for Congress in '78;---his' 74 run for office was characterized thusly by Dot Crews, his campaign scheduler at the time:

"We would have won in 1974 if we could have kept him out of the office, screwing her [a young volunteer] on the desk."

He ran for Congress in '78 on the slogan, "Let Our Family Represent Your Family." (He was reportedly cheating on his first wife at the time). In 1995, an alleged mistress from that period, Anne Manning, told Vanity Fair's Gail Sheehy: "We had oral sex. He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, 'I never slept with her.'" Gingrich obtained his first divorce in 1981, after forcing his wife, who had helped put him through graduate school, to haggle over the terms while in the hospital, as she recovered from uterine cancer surgery. In 1999, he was disgraced again, having been caught in an affair with a 33-year-old congressional aide while spearheading the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton.

Yeah, he's got the Evangelical vote sewed up.

GOP's actual favorite 2008 nominee: Sen. John McCain (affair, divorce), the still simmering S&L scandal, and the unpopular Campaign Finance Reform Law makes him a candidate only because of his war record.

So here's the GOP lineup as they prepare for the Big Game: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (affair, divorce, affair, divorce), and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (divorce, affair, nasty divorce), and McCain. Together, they form the most maritally challenged crop of presidential hopefuls in American political history. Add to the McCain downside is that he will be 72 years old when he enters the White House and 76 after his first term; will anybody swallow another very old man in the White House?

Last, we come to Mitt Romney, whose only negative is that he's a really good guy as well as once being a really good governor of a Blue state; being a Mormon causes hate to run rampant among the Left. He gets nearly no support. He is a flip flopper, which is worse than cheating on your wife, draft dodging, stiffing your own kid's child support payments, or stiffing his wife while she is in the hospital dying of cancer.

What a choice.