Disgraced GOP serial adulterer Newt Gingrich is carrying the party’s water on the latest GOP Manufactured Outrage Event (TM):

The right wing has responded with outrage to Obama’s meeting with [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chavez, claiming face-to-face talks with a dictator show that Obama is projecting weakness. On NBC this morning, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Obama “bows to the Saudi King and is friends with Venezuela” and claimed the President showed “shallowness” in talking with Chavez. Gingrich then claimed that U.S. presidents do not “smile and greet” with Russian leaders:

Q: But do you think he should not be trying to mend relationships with other world leaders?

GINGRICH: How do you mend relationships with somebody who hates your country, who actively calls for the destruction of your country and who wants to undermine you?

Q: But we certainly have mended relationships with countries that have hated us in the past. Russia comes to mind, China comes to mind.

GINGRICH: But we didn’t rush over, smile, and greet Russian dictators. We understood who they were.

Hmm, no smiling and greeting Russian dictators, eh? Then who are these guys?
Has anyone come across a single substantive GOP critique in the last two months? All it seems like we’ve been treated to is fear-mongering, lies, red-baiting, race-bating and secession talk…

Update: Just a little taste of how wise and upstanding this fellow named Newt Gingrich is:

Somehow or other the conservative movement has gotten so intellectually bankrupt that the lunatics running the asylum think that Newt Gingrich is an intelligent and canny man. Consequently, he’s snagged himself a situation where he’s in the news constantly offering aperçus like “The Democratic Party has been the active instrument of breaking down traditional marriage.”

Far be it from me to say that Newt Gingrich’s 1981 decision to ask his first wife for a divorce while she was in the hospital recuperating from cancer should bar him from commenting on the value of traditional marriage. But six months after the divorce was finalized, he married a new woman, Marianne Ginther, which suggests there was some infidelity involved. Then in 2000 he divorced Ginther and married a third woman with whom it turns out he’d been having an affair. That, I think, is a bit much. Then after that, he became a Catholic!

Update 2: Mike Finnigan has a great roundup of other Presidents’ forays into weakness and appeasement:

I don’t recall any eruptions of right-wing outrage when a beaming Richard Nixon shook hands with a man responsible for the deaths of untold millions. Or rending of garments and gnashing of teeth when he greeted this sworn enemy of freedom. There were no reports of wingnut tantrums when St. Ronnie was palling around with this dictator. Of course, a mere handshake can’t compare to the love and support lavished on this butcher by every Republican president – and this GOP candidate – from Nixon to GWB. Hell, any semi-literate citizen could fill the page with similar examples for the history-challenged, but excitable denizens of Wingnuttia. Obama shaking hands with other leaders does not endanger America, but cynical, calculated hypocrisy surely does.