NEWT, C'EST UN HYPOCRITE

Mitt Romney had dinner with Donald Trump (and chief of staff-designate Reince Priebus) at a fancy French restaurant last night. Matt Shuham at Talking Points Memo tells us that Newt Gingrich was not impressed:

“You have never, ever in your career seen a wealthy adult who is independent, has been a presidential candidate, suck up at the rate that Mitt Romney is sucking up,” Gingrich told conservative radio host Laura Ingra[ha]m on Wednesday.

“I am confident that he thinks now that he and Donald Trump are the best of friends, they have so many things in common. That they're both such wise, brilliant people,” Gingrich continued. “And I'm sure last night at an elegant three-star restaurant, he was happy to share his version of populism, which involve a little foi[e] gras, a certain amount of superb cooking, but put that in a populist happy manner.”

Shuham adds:

But a man of the people, Gingrich himself is not: A 2011 Washington Post report cited Gingrich’s longtime attorney Randy Evans, who said the former House speaker’s various private enterprises after leaving office had generated close to $100 million in the previous decade.

Gingrich also mocked Romney's fluency in a foreign language:

“Luckily for them, Mitt speaks French fluently. So he could help them with the menu. He could say: 'Ahh, Mr. President-elect. This would be the perfect meal for you,’” Gingrich said.

This isn't the first time Gingrich has attacked Romney for speaking French. He did so in an ad that ran during the 2012 Republican primaries:

Newt Gingrich this week released a web ad called "The French Connection" that features a narrator saying, "just like John Kerry, [Mitt Romney] speaks French too." It then shows Romney saying "bonjour, je m'appelle Mitt Romney."

The footage comes from a video of Romney, who lived in France for two years as a Mormon missionary, speaking French while promoting the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics....

Here's the ad. The mockery of Romney's French comes at the end.



So ... Gingrich is proudly monolingual, right? Um, no:

Yet as Foreign Policy noted today, Gingrich appears to also be proficient in the language of love. As a teenager, Gingrich lived in France while his father was posted there as a soldier, Agence France-Presse last month quoted the author of a book on the former Speaker saying that Gingrich at the time "had enough French to survive." And as Foreign Policy points out, Gingrich's doctoral thesis cites French language original sources, which he could only read if he knew the language.

In fact, as Evangeline Morphos wrote in a Politico piece in 2012:

Gingrich ... spent several years in New Orleans getting his Ph.D. in history (we are constantly reminded) from Tulane University in 1971. The university’s requirements for this include at least one, often two, foreign languages. So we know that Gingrich is at least “bi” -- if not trilingual.

My father was a French literature professor at Tulane and had been chairman of the Romance Languages Department. I can assure you this department would not have certified Gingrich unless he could actually speak French.

Gingrich’s dissertation surely demanded knowledge of French. His topic was “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo: 1945-1960.” Like any graduate student, he must have immersed himself in his subject -- a French-speaking country. He cites more than 100 French-language sources in footnotes.

It's no secret, Newwt. Fess up, you hypocrite.