OK, now I get why Bill O’Reilly wants to be a historian.

Newt Gingrich’s rise in the polls hit a bump when Bloomberg revealed that Newt had accepted $1.6 million to act as a lobbyist for Freddie Mac, the hybrid public/private institution created in the 70s to support the housing market. Neither Freddie Mac nor lobbyists are popular right now, so this is a black mark for Newt.

According to Freddie Mac, Newt helped shape the agency’s message to congressmen, a good euphemism for a lobbyist. According to Newt, he was a historian:

I offered advice. My advice as an historian when they walked in and said we are now making loans to people that have no credit history and have no record of paying back anything but that’s what the government wants us to do. I said at the time, this is a bubble. This is insane. This is impossible. It turned out unfortunately I was right and the people who were doing exactly what Congresswoman Bachmann talked about were wrong.

Mother Jones calls Newt The World’s Most Expensive Historian. Let me point out that this is only mostly insane. Historians are sometimes hired to do historical research for institutions, particularly legal research. But why they’d hire a lukewarm historian to tell them about the current state of the housing market is beyond me.

But if Newt was hired to do research, he obviously failed miserably. Otherwise he would have known that Freddie Mac does not make loans, they buy loans from lending organizations. It’s also interesting that he was hired in 2006, when Freddie Mac was facing pressure from HUD to stop gaming the system and actually support loans for lower income buyers. Hardly a time when Freddie Mac would be wasting money on overpriced historians.

If there are any organizations out there willing to pay a historian $1.6 million to do research for them, I’m available and I promise that I can do a better job than Gingrich.

(via Joe.My.God.)