Milbank: Heaven help Calista Gingrich as Vatican ambassador
Let us consider the qualifications of President Trump’s nominee to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Holy See: one Callista Gingrich of Virginia.
She is a former clerk on the House Agriculture Committee.
She is the author of children’s books about an elephant named Ellis.
She sings in the choir at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.
She plays French horn in City of Fairfax Band.
And, she testified Tuesday, she has “looked at some of” Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change.
But really, Gingrich was receiving a confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee because of one qualification: She is married to Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and a major backer of President Trump.
And now, for his support of Trump, he is getting the ultimate patronage: the chance to live in Rome on the taxpayer’s dime while his wife, the president of Gingrich Productions, enjoys a plum posting. Newt, who converted to Catholicism several years ago, set his wife up nicely for the job by co-hosting two videos with her about Pope John Paul II, produced with a Gingrich political ally.
But if it is good news for the Gingriches, it is an(other) insult to Francis from Trump, who has sparred with the pope over immigration and climate change. Newt carried on a six-year extramarital affair with Callista in the 1990s when she, 23 years his junior, was a House staffer and he, as speaker, led the impeachment of Bill Clinton over his extramarital affair with an intern. National Catholic Reporter’s Michael Sean Winters called it “astonishing that a party that celebrates family values at every turn has a president who is on his third wife and who has bragged about his extramarital affairs and who is appointing an ambassador to the Vatican who had a six-year affair with her future husband while he was still married to his second wife.”
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Fucking scary!
Then, there's the bubble helmet hair!
And I expect many others in the Holy See also. All lifetime career people you know, who probably tend to take at least somewhat longer views than most of us. Very self important also, probably a a waste of emotion to be more insulted for them than they could ever be.
