In a letter this week to an Iowa anti-gay hate group, Republican frontrunner Newt Gingrich pledged that, “[as] President, I will vigorously enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, which was enacted under my leadership as speaker of the House, and ensure compliance with its provisions, especially in the military. I will also aggressively defend the constitutionality of DOMA in federal and state courts.” (Emphasis added.)

I had promised myself I was going to lay off Newt during the primaries because I don’t want anything to jinx his chances of winning the Republican nomination, which is the clearest path to reelection for Pres. Obama. But this is too rich to resist.

First of all, why would anyone believe anything an old philanderer like Newt would say about marriage? Secondly, what Newt doesn’t say, of course, is that at the same time he was pushing DOMA through Congress, he, was in the second year of an adulterous affair that was as risky to his party — Republicans were still posing as paragons of family values back then — as it was reckless and damaging to his family.

DOMA sailed through Congress in 1996. At the time, Gingrich was married to his second wife, Marianne (whom he’d started dating while married to his first wife, Jackie). But, according to the book, “Peepshow: Media and Politics in an Age of Scandal,” by Larry J. Sabato, Mark Stencel and S. Robert Lichter, which we also referenced here in January, the Newt-Callista affair began the year before Gingrich became DOMA’s champion:

The relationship with Callista Bisek only received widespread attention in the summer of 1999, seven months after Gingrich left office, when a supermarket tabloid [the Star] staked out the couple’s comings and goings in Washington and a Georgia judge ordered the Hill staffer deposed as part of the former speaker’s divorce proceedings. Rumors of the Gingrich-Bisek affair circulated before then. Bisek was identified in a 1995 profile of Gingrich as the speaker’s “favorite breakfast companion,” a reference that was repeated at the time in a London newspaper and by Time magazine columnist Margaret Carlson.

The political risks associated with the affair went beyond merely damaging the Republican brand. Despite rhetoric from its supporters about “protecting traditional marriage,” the Defense of Marriage Act was really just a Republican electoral ploy designed to cause havoc in the 1996 presidential campaign. It was written by thrice-married then-Rep. Bob Barr (who has since denounced it and now supports a bill to rescind it) to do two things. It was intended to be a wedge issue that would separate Pres. Clinton from his gay supporters after he signed it — and as a draw to attract Christianist voters to the polls in support of the not-so-evangelical Republican candidate, Bob Dole.

As a political cudgel, DOMA was a failure. Gays still voted for Clinton in 1996, and evangelicals remained lukewarm to Dole, and Clinton won reelection with a decisive margin.

During the current campaign, the establishment media has not hesitated from reporting the fact that Speaker Gingrich was schtupping a congressional staffer while he drove the impeachment of Pres. Clinton for lying under oath in a civil-suit deposition about his dalliances with a White House staffer, Monica Lewinsky. (Normally, the Villagers would recoil from a story like this, but by their unwritten rules, the impeachment hypocrisy story is “fair and balanced” because it involves adulteries by both a Republican and a Democrat.)

On the other hand, Big Media is apparently unaware that Newt was engaged in the same adulterous affair a couple of years earlier when pushed DOMA through the House.

Why do these highly paid professional journalists focus on Newt’s audacious cynicism and hypocrisy about the Clinton impeachment while ignoring his equally audacious hypocrisy and cynicism in pushing DOMA through Congress?

Draw your own conclusions, dear reader.

Newt Gingrich’s wrapping himself in the DOMA flag this week puts his talents as a world-class grifter on display.

Newt knows the no one in the Iowa hate group, which calls itself the FAIMLiY LEADER (the cutesy spelling is theirs), will ever know he was destroying his marriage at the time he was promoting the Defense of Marriage Act because 1) hate-group homophobes only watch Fox, which would deliberately ignore the connection, if they were aware of it and 2) the fake journalists at Fox are probably not aware of it because even “real” journalists don’t know or don’t care about it.

Finally, it should be noted that when Pres. Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, on Sept. 21, 1996, he was also engaged in his affair with Monica Lewinsky, which consisted of nine sexual encounters between November 1995 and March 1997.

That makes this another story that, according to the Beltway journalistic playbook, ought to be “fair and balanced” to report, or so it would seem.