Newt Was For It Before He Was Against It... - UPDATED

...and it was only a matter of days before Gingrich decided to switch policy positions for the sole purpose of criticizing President Obama on Libya... whatever the stance happened to be at the time, consistency be damned.

Gingrich on Van Susteren's show, March 7th:

VAN SUSTEREN: What would you do about Libya?

GINGRICH: Exercise a no-fly zone this evening. … It’s also an ideological problem. The United States doesn’t need anybody’s permission. We don’t need to have NATO, who frankly, won’t bring much to the fight. We don’t need to have the United Nations. All we have to say is that we think that slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable and that we’re intervening. And we don’t have to send troops. All we have to do is suppress his air force, which we could do in minutes.

March 20th from Politico:

“It is impossible to make sense of the standard for intervention in Libya except opportunism and news media publicity,” Gingrich said in a statement to POLITICO, his first public comments since President Barack Obama gave the go-ahead order on Saturday.

March 23rd on The Today Show:

GINGRICH: The standard [Obama] has fallen back to, of humanitarian intervention could apply to Sudan, to North Korea, to Zimbabwe, to Syria this week, to Yemen, to Bahrain. This isn't a serious standard, this is a public relations conversation. The Arab League wanted us to do something. The minute we did something, the Arab League began criticizing us doing it. I think that two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a lot. I think that the problems we have in Pakistan, Egypt — go around the region. We could get engaged by this standard in all sorts of places. I would not have intervened. I think there were a lot of other ways to affect Qaddafi. I think there are a lot of other allies in the region we could have worked with. I would not have used American and European forces.

Does your neck hurt from the whiplash yet? Within a matter of 13 days, Gingrich went from "exercise a no-fly zone now" to "intervention makes no sense"; from "intervene because slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable" to "I would not have intervened."

In less than two weeks, Gingrich went from "The United States doesn't need anybody's permission" to "I would not have used American and European forces." Apparently Matt Lauer didn't challenge him on his previous statement supporting a no-fly zone led by the U.S. Good job, Matt. Do your homework next time.

And this lying, hypocritical rat bastard wants to run for president. This fickle fuck wants to be the leader of the free world. But what else can you expect from a jackass who used hard work and patriotism as an excuse to reason away philandering on two of his three wives? I'd watch my back if I were you, Callista.

(H/T Think Progress)

UPDATE (3:30pm): Pathetic backtracking begins.

This is such a sorry attempt to redefine his stance, but the timeline still doesn't add up. If Newt thought allies should have been used and not American forces, why did he initially say that we didn't need permission from the UN and didn't need NATO "who frankly wouldn't bring much to the fight"? If not NATO, what allies is he talking about? The French? The British?

And trying to blame is flip-flopping mind on Obama's statement of March 3rd doesn't make sense when Newt made his statement on March 7th. Of course, since every right wing nut has to oppose everything Obama says and does, we know the real reason he flip-flopped was because Obama actually did commit to a no-fly zone, something Newt was on board with... until Obama agreed. He can never be seen concurring with the President, so just say the opposite. No one will notice, right?

UPDATE II (3/24/11, 11:15am): Newt goes the Sarah Palin route. Enough with the lamestream gotcha media, I'll just post on Facebook!