Say Anything Blog

Newt Gingrich was on the Dianne Rehm show this morning. I listened while I was on the road from Utica to Syracuse. I thought the interview was going well up until I lost the station. I didn’t get back until the show was almost over. I caught the tail end of Dianne Rehm saying how upset she was that Gingrich had cut short the interview and a rather nasty comment from a caller about Gingrich leaving his first wife on her death bed for another woman. My first thought was, who the heck is screening their calls and why did they let something like that through? My second thought was, what happened to make them/him cut the interview short?

Turns out that after all his years in Washington Mr. Gingrich and his crew don’t seem to know that Dianne Rehm’s show format is two one hour interviews, A Possible First: Newt Gingrich Zinged for Not Talking Enough. This isn’t the first time that I’ve heard someone bail in the middle of one of her interviews but the show didn’t take the kind of nose dive that it did this time around. You can listen to the audio here. Things get kind of ugly at around 33:33 (to the point where I only skimmed through the remainder of the interview). Dianne Rehm is usually a bit more fair handed with her interviewees and some of the wilder claims that her callers may make.

I’d suggest that Mr. Gingrich do the full hour with Dianne Rehm sometime soon.

One more thing, because I can’t let that polar bear comment pass without my own comment. Polar bears know how to swim. When there’s no ice for them to hang around on they hang out on land. Usually around human settlements where they make a big nuisance of themselves raiding the town dumps, walking down main street like they own the place, and menacing the human population of the arctic.