Gingrich Is a Twit, Uses Twitter

It will come as no surprise to either of his ex-wives that Newt Gingrich is a liar-liar whose pants are habitually on fire. Nor will Egg readers be surprised by that oft-cited datum. Still, the man is so creative about his prevarication that we can't help but note the new iterations as they appear.

Consider the claim, made by several sites lately (Gawker, PeekYou, some academics, and summarized here by Cnet) that Newt may have created an army of followers on Twitter -- not recruited, mind you, but created, as in ex nihilo. PeekYou's analysis proposes that more than 90% of his followers are bogus.

Now, we're not well-informed about this social networking business. Frankly, we don't use Twitter ourselves, haven't checked in on Facebook for two weeks, and don't know what Google+ actually is. But we expect that, if Newt has indeed been cooking the numbers, he has some obvious motive -- perhaps followers are like mass, and large numbers of them create their own gravity, attracting still larger numbers. It would not surprise us if Gingrich, an egomaniac even by DC standards, hoped to end his career as a metaphorical black hole, the center of all human attention on the planet earth.