“I realize the red light doesn’t mean anything to you because you are the front-runner — but could we drop a little bit of the pious baloney?

“The fact is you ran in ’94 and lost, and that’s why you were not serving with Rick Santorum. The fact is you had a bad re-election rating. You dropped office. You had been out of state for something like 200 days and preparing to run for president. You didn’t have this interlude of citizenship while you thought about what to do. You were running for president while you were governor. You were going all over the country, and you were out of state consistently. You then promptly re-entered politics and you happened to lose to [John] McCain as you lost to [Ted] Kennedy. Now, you’re back running. You have been running consistently for years and years and years, and the idea that then suddenly citizenship showed up in your mind, and just level with the American people. You have been running since the 1990s.”

– Newt Gingrich, to Mitt Romney at Saturday night’s GOP debate.