Gingrich goes Bob Dole one better

Lore has it (who knows, maybe the polling data doesn't back it) that Bob Dole disqualified himself for the presidential nomination in 1988 with a testy challenge to George H. W. Bush: stop lying about my record. That was in response to a Bush ad accusing Dole of "straddling" on taxes.

Newt Gingrich, who knows he's going nowhere and counts himself destroyed by Romney's hands-off SuperPac ads, has defined intraparty decency down down down. On CBS this morning, he told Mitt Romney to stop lying about...everything.  Recap below starts with a question by Norah O'Donnell:

"You scolded Mitt Romney, his friends who are running this Super PAC that has funded that, and you said of Mitt Romney, 'Someone who will lie to you to get to be president will lie to you when they are president. I have to ask you, are you calling Mitt Romney a liar?"

"Yes," Gingrich replied.

"You're calling Mitt Romney a liar?"

"Well, you seem shocked by it!" said Gingrich. "This is a man whose staff created the PAC, his millionaire friends fund the PAC, he pretends he has nothing to do with the PAC - it's baloney. He's not telling the American people the truth.

"It's just like this pretense that he's a conservative. Here's a Massachusetts moderate who has tax-paid abortions in 'Romneycare,' puts Planned Parenthood in 'Romneycare,' raises hundreds of millions of dollars of taxes on businesses, appoints liberal judges to appease Democrats, and wants the rest of us to believe somehow he's magically a conservative.

"I just think he ought to be honest with the American people and try to win as the real Mitt Romney, not try to invent a poll-driven, consultant-guided version that goes around with talking points, and I think he ought to be candid.

Wow, oh wow, oh wow.  Can we please have several months of this?  The Obama campaign won't have to add a word; they can just run the tape.

The irony, which is too weak a word, is that we've got the greatest liar in politics truthfully calling the presumptive nominee a liar, after a week he spent whining about the politics of personal destruction, which he practically invented.  Gingrich is of course violating Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment, thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican.  Just one more norm the old gutter snipe has blown through.