Newt Gingrich will be announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination today on Facebook and Twitter.  I understand he’ll also be on Hannity tonight, and will be dropping into our show on Friday.

I’ve known Newt Gingrich for about 40 years now.  Some of you know that he was my first vacation fill-in host at the beginning of my talk radio career.  Here are some things I know about Newt:

• He has a comprehensive awareness of what our country was designed to be, what it has been, what it has become and where the future will take us unless we change leadership and direction.

• Newt knows what it is to be an American.  Throughout his entire upbringing he was infused with a sense of just how his exceptional it was to be born an American.  This has been his country since birth.  He is not an Indonesian-Hawaiian-American.

• Newt Gingrich would never say that Americas is “no more special than Greece … or any  other nation.”

• Newt did not have his political coming out party in the living room of a dedicated communist revolutionary who has committed terrorist acts against this country. 

• Newt Gingrich knows how Washington operates better than any other front-running candidate for the Republican nomination. 

• Newt Gingrich is far, far more qualified to be president of the United States than Obama was three years ago … but then again, who isn’t?

• Gingrich is quite probably the smartest man in the race right now, and I think that he could absolutely destroy Obama in any fact-based debate on the issues important to this country.

Negatives?  Oh yes .. negatives there are.  There’s the issues of infidelities and multiple marriages and, of course, the ObamaMedia will certainly bring up the old stories, largely fictional, about the way he ended his relationship with a former wife suffering from cancer.  Do these issues rise to the level of the Democrat icon Bill Clinton being serviced by an intern in the Oval Office?  Whatever Newt Gingrich has done, nothing can approach Clinton’s “alleged” rape of Juanita Broaddrick in 1978.  It seemed that no matter what type of debauchery Clinton engaged in the press still loved him.  Gingrich will be given no such quarter.

There’s the issue of the FairTax.  Gingrich cannot be counted as a supporter, but I don’t consider this to be disqualifying.  In a recent discussion with me Gingrich promised that if elected he would set up a national commission and promote commissions in all of the 50 states to study the FairTax and design an implementation plan at the federal and state levels.  That is a helluva lot better than we’re getting from any other candidate with the exception of Herman Cain.

At any rate … stand by after Gingrich’s announcement today and just watch the viciousness with which the ObamaMedia attacks him.  There is something to be said for the argument that the candidate that brings forth the most visceral reaction in the media is the one the GOP should nominate.