Newt wishes he could erase his Libya flip-flop too (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

According to Twitter, Gingrich has written more than 2,300 tweets, but just a small portion of the sum total are currently available on his feed. Additionally, permalinks to many earlier tweets are broken. It also does not appear to be a normal Twitter thing: tweets from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IO) and Meghan McCain (“R”-Daily Beast), for instance, are still around from two years ago.

Vanity Fair reports that all tweets from Newt Gingrich through July, 2010 have gone missing:

This caught my attention because last week I noticed that a couple of infamous tweets from Newt (one boasting about "having shabu shabu at tachibana in mclean virginia" and the other calling Sonia Sotomayor a "Latina woman racist") had both gone missing despite still showing up in Google's cache.

I went through his Twitter stream and found that everything before October 2009 had been deleted. It was pretty clear that they were scrubbed; there's no systematic reason why everything from before October 2009 should have been missing other than that they were purged. And now, a week later, another eight or nine months worth of Newt's musings on Twitter have disappeared.

It's easy enough to understand why he'd want to delete his "Shabu, Shabu" tweet (arugala, anyone?) or why he'd want to get rid of his closed-minded attack on Justice Sotomayor, but it doesn't explain why he sent those tweets in the first place—or what else he's hoping to erase by purging his Twitter archives.