Conservative Bully Newt Gingrich Readies a Presidential Run

Remember this guy?  Republicans have announced that 67-year-old former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who has been campaigning around the country for months, is about to enter the 2012 presidential race.

He will be the first Republican to declare a run against Barack Obama, whose basketball skills Gingrich grudgingly admires.

Gingrich was the 1994 version of John Boehner, and the first Republican speaker of the House. After raising holy hell in Washington for two terms, he was driven out by his own rank-and-file supporters.

But he's never really gone away.

He's been traveling the country, trashing Democratic politics, raising campaign cash, and advising Republican office holders.

Since 2010, he has been working to build an alliance with the rabble-rousing Tea Party wing of the GOP, which delivered important wins to the party in last year's elections.

Gingrich calls the Tea Party conduit a "grassroots movement".

The twice-divorced Gingrich is also courting Christian fundamentalists, who provide key voter support to the GOP.

Gingrich epitomizes the kind of slash-and-burn Conservative politics now roiling the nation, as Republicans go hard in Washington, D.C., in Madison, Wisconsin and in other newly-Republican states.

As an example of Gingrich's brand of extreme politics, he wants to eliminate the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

While he was speaker of the House, the thuggish Gingrich shut down the U.S. government twice, once in 1995 and again in 1996, in order to gain the advantage in budget negotiations with Bill Clinton.

After his ruthless tactics began to lose the Republicans elections, however, Gingrich was deposed.

The article from the New York Post.

What Gingrich's ex-wife thinks about his presidential potential [Esquire.]