Come on, Newt. You’ve got to be kidding us with this.
Failed presidential candidate Newt Gingrich released a humdinger of a video on Friday through his company’s YouTube channel. Gingrich is concerned with what to call these newfangled walkie-talkies that play moving pictures and point you to the local McDonald’s. “Cellular telephone” doesn’t cut it, says Gingrich in his self-assured professorial tone, and we’ve got to come up with a new name for these new smart telephones.
As Gawker pointed out on Saturday, the smart phone already has a name. We call them “smartphones.” Apparently no one in Gingrich’s office had the nerve to point out to him that they’re called smartphones and have been for years, 16 of them according to Wikipedia (showing how easy it is to track down information). That’s a whole three years before Gingrich divorced his second wife to marry his mistress/third wife, a lot of years for a mover and shaker not to notice the generic name of a product he’s obviously used. Gingrich is getting up there in age, but he’s holding a smartphone surrounded by people who use smartphones and none of them knew that they were called smartphones? And even if none of them knew that, did none of Newt Gingrich’s associates, employees, or hangers-on think to look it up on, you know, their smartphones?
(By the way, I take issue with Gingrich’s logic about whether a cell phone that takes pictures can be called a cellphone. My car has a radio in it, but we still call it a car.)
Honestly, it makes me wonder if Newt is just trolling for attention with this video. According to a recent interview with Time magazine, Gingrich is trying to make a comeback with a new super political action committee (PAC). This new PAC collects money to benefit both his other PAC and what’s left of his long-ended 2012 presidential campaign, which is a whopping $4.6 million in debt.
If there’s one thing politicians do well it’s shameless self-promotion, so maybe this is an example of an out-of-season politician with a mountain of debt doing everything he can to climb back on the top of the world, self-respect be damned. Or, to be generous for a moment, maybe Gingrich and his associates truly don’t know what to call a smartphone and he thinks that nobody in the decades-old international multi-billion-dollar wireless communications industry has thought to give a name to their quintessential product, so in his egomaniacal mind, it’s up to Newt Leroy Gingrich.
Trolling for name recognition or extreme narcissism, those are our options. Neither choice exactly inspires confidence in Mr. Gingrich.
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