Newt Gingrich tried on Wednesday to brush off the glaring gaffe he made this week on "The Daily Show" when he insisted that the Bush administration was right to read shoe bomber Richard Reid his Miranda rights because he was an American citizen. 
 
 But in doing so, the former GOP House Speaker only dug his hole deeper. 
 
 In a post on his Twitter page, Gingrich explained that when he made the Reid comment to the "Daily Show"'s Jon Stewart his reference was actually to Jose Padilla. Reid, after all, is a British citizen -- Padilla is American. 
 
 But Gingrich wasn't done there. In a dig at the Obama White House, he added to the tail end of his tweet: "Treating terrorists like criminals wrong no matter who is Pres." 
 
 That's a standard GOP talking point, and yet when President Bush moved the Padilla case from a military setting to the criminal system, it was Gingrich who came to his defense despite conservative howls of protest, a Democratic source points out. 
 
 Appearing on Fox News in November 2005, the former speaker said the following when asked whether it was "a loss" for the Bush White House to have tried Padilla in civilian courts after holding him for three-and-a-half years as an enemy combatant: 
 
 "Well, I think if they believe they have enough evidence to convict him, going through the process of convicting him and holding him, I suspect, maybe for the rest of his life without parole would not be -- would hardly be seen as a loss," Gingrich said. 
 
 The former speaker went on to note that Bush was "wrestling with what are the real ground rules for dealing with people who are clearly outside of normal warfare" -- suggesting, implicitly, that a criminal setting was appropriate for Padilla because it was the most effective at the time. "[W]e don't have a good set of rules," he declared. 
 
 But that is a mirror of the Obama administration's current argument -- the one that Gingrich criticized on Twitter. ||||| « Rubio And Crist May Debate On Fox News | Main | Palin's Bigger Blunder » 
 
 Newt Gingrich has Tweeted that when he referred to the case of British citizen Richard Reid on the Daily Show last night, he meant to refer to Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who was captured by federal authorities and turned over to the military and held by the U.S. Navy for years. Padilla was captured and not Mirandized. He was subject to harsh interrogation techniques. That, ostensibly, was Gingrich's point. But -- and this is a very simple rejoinder -- Padilla DID NOT talk when he was held incommunicado. 
 
 
 
 Mirandizing him either would not have made a difference -- OR perhaps a more hospitable interrogation might have helped to loosen his lips early on. 
 
 
 
 So Gingrich's reference -- his proof that the Bush administration used a different practice and that it worked -- is so far removed from the point that he is trying to make that it is, to quote Wolfgang Pauli, not even wrong. ||||| Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich's comments comparing Muslims to Nazis at the GOP debate Monday night have sparked a firestorm in the blogosphere, where liberals, and even some conservatives, have pounced on the former House speaker for what they view as excessive fear mongering. 
 
 "Of course Newt is taking it too far. He is appealing to the basest instincts of a very small minority of folks," said Matthew Dowd, ABC News consultant who served as chief strategist on George W. Bush's 2004 re-election team. "Either he is doing this for political purposes to distract people from a campaign in disarray, which is bad, or he actually believes it, which is scary." 
 
 At the New Hampshire debate Monday night, Gingrich responded to questions about loyalty tests for administration officials, saying, "The Pakistani who emigrated to the U.S., became a citizen, built a car bomb which luckily failed to go off in Times Square, was asked by the federal judge, how could he have done that when he signed and when he swore an oath to the United States. And he looked at the judge and said, 'You're my enemy. I lied.'" 
 
 "Now, I just want to go out on a limb here. I'm in favor of saying to people, if you're not prepared to be loyal to the United States, you will not serve in my administration, period," Gingrich added to applause. 
 
 But Gingrich didn't stop there, despite an attempt by moderators to interject. He compared hiring Muslims to how Americans dealt with Nazis in the 1940s. 
 
 "We did this in dealing with the Nazis. We did this in dealing with the Communists. And it was controversial both times and both times we discovered after a while, you know, there are some genuinely bad people who would like to infiltrate our country. And we have got to have the guts to stand up and say, 'No,'" he concluded. 
 
 Many people have chastised Gingrich, whose senior aides resigned en masse last week, for invoking 1950s-era McCarthyism, a time during which free speech came under assault amid a heightened threat of Communism. 
 
 Muslim groups expressed outrage, saying Gingrich was merely exploiting Muslims for personal and political gain. 
 
 "It's really reprehensible when you have a mainstream presidential candidate equate Muslims with Nazis and communists," said Ibrahim Hooper, communications director at Council on American-Islamic Relations. "It is what we've come to expect from the right wing of the political faction." 
 
 CAIR also assailed GOP candidates Herman Cain and Rick Santorum for their comments on the question of sharia law taking over the U.S. court system. 
 
 Cain, the former chief executive of Godfather's Pizza, raised eyebrows earlier this year when he said he wouldn't allow Muslims in his cabinet. Cain clarified the remark Monday, saying he might want to ask a Muslim person certain questions during a job interview about their loyalty to the country, a comment that Gingrich defended. 
 
 Although he might have created a firestorm, this isn't the first time Gingrich has made such a comparison and, to many, his most recent comments are anything but surprising. 
 
 Gingrich spoke fervently in August against the proposed mosque and community center to be built near Ground Zero, saying that Muslims shouldn't be allowed to do so just as "Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington," or "we would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor." 
 
 Gingrich brought up the same example of the attempted Times Square bomber's loyalty at a debate in February, saying he "lied [about his loyalty to America] to get American citizenship." 
 
 "Your generation is going to face a long struggle I believe at least as long as the Cold War," Gingrich warned students during a debate with Howard Dean at George Washington University. "It is going to be extraordinarily dangerous and I think if our opponents get either a biological or nuclear weapon we are in real trouble and we are not today having the national dialogue that we should be having about how dangerous this is and how bad it could get." 
 
 Although his comments from Monday have come under fire, observers say they are unlikely to significantly affect his already-fledgling campaign. 
 
 The comments Monday night are "not surprising coming [from] Newt in that he seems to have been born with a limited filter between his brain and his mouth," consultant Dowd said. But "it's hard to say it will really hurt his campaign when it was already taking on water and listing in the waves." 
 
 In a sign that the campaign was taking a turn for the worst, a number of Gingrich's top aides resigned last week, citing conflicting opinions about the direction of the campaign and what they perceive as a lack of motivation on the part of Gingrich and his wife, Callista, to do heavy, time-consuming fundraising and campaigning.
– Maybe Newt Gingrich just ought to hold his tongue on terrorists and US law. Earlier this week the former House Speaker said shoe-bomber Richard Reid was American, and therefore was properly read his Miranda rights by the Bush administration—but Reid is British, and now Gingrich says he meant would-be domestic terrorist Jose Padilla. So, we’re good now, right? Well, not quite. Because Gingrich added on Twitter: “Treating terrorists like criminals wrong no matter who is Pres”—in line with current Republican talking points but exactly the opposite of what he said in 2005 about the Bush administration moving Padilla’s case from military to civilian court. Then, Gingrich agreed with the Bush line that there’s no set-in-stone, perfect way to try terrorists—the very stance, Sam Stein points out, he’s now criticizing from President Obama. Marc Ambinder sees another angle—Gingrich praising Bush for originally holding Padilla in a military brig and subjecting him to harsh interrogation. But, Ambinder notes for the Atlantic, Padilla didn’t talk before his eventual transfer to civilian court. “So Gingrich's reference—his proof that the Bush administration used a different practice and that it worked—is so far removed from the point that he is trying to make that it is, to quote Wolfgang Pauli, not even wrong.”