Finally, a bit of good old-fashioned news of the sort we'd have gotten back in the pre-Trump Republican era, back in the days when Newt Gingrich was fretting about morals between adultery sessions and evangelical leaders were warning people that the cartoon characters were turning their children gay. And what's that? Newt Gingrich is responsible for this one too? It's like the 1990s all over again!
Three weeks before the National Park Service denied an activist group’s request to erect a giant statue of a nude woman on the National Mall, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke received an email from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). [...]
The sculpture, which debuted at the Burning Man festival in 2015, was slated to go up in front of the Washington Monument, facing the White House and the Capitol. The artist, Marco Cochrane, has said the piece is aimed at de-objectifying women and raising awareness about violence against women.
But Newt and wife, Callista Gingrich, got wind of this and were quite alarmed. Callista is now the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, so being alarmed about nudity in art is now something she can pursue as her actual day job, thanks to the affair-with-a-porn-star admitted-serial-sexual-assaulter Trump. Newt wrote to scandal magnet Ryan Zinke and somewhere in the next few weeks the request to put the sculpture up got nixed because it would, you know, damage the grass and aesthetics and whatnot. Whether Newt’s protest played a part in that or not is, alas, unknown.
Finally, a bit of Republican news that almost passes as normal. Just a disgraced adultery-having ex-speaker of the House complaining to the government about possibly having to see an artistic depiction of an unclothed womenfolk while being shuttled between television appearances. Nothing about affairs with porn stars or secret Moscow tapes of God-knows-what, no secret cones of silence installed in office closets, no accidentally forgetting secret meetings between topmost staff members of a presidential campaign and agents of a hostile foreign power held after those agents offered their government’s help in boosting Republican campaign chances in exchange for favors to be delivered at a later date: just a man and his wife deeply and professionally upset at artwork. That's almost refreshing.