Newt Gingrich: Socialist???

In the last week or so, several high profile conservative figures have taken to calling Newt Gingrich, the Republican Presidential non-Mitt Romney co-frontrunner of the month, a socialist or worse:

Michelle Bachmann, in response to a question from Glenn Beck, "Did you just say that Newt Gingrich is a socialist?":
MB: "I'm saying a frugal socialist, yes. Because you’re looking at proposals and programs that are in effect redistribution of wealth and socialism based. And are we going to have real change in the country or are we going to have frugal socialists?

George Will, in his December 2 Washington Post column: "Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how".

I suspect that Gingrich won't accept the description, having recently called the Congressional Budget Office a "reactionary socialist institution", and criticized President Obama for being a "natural secular European socialist".So let me throw this out to Anchor Rising's comments section, where folks were unafraid to call George W. Bush a socialist ("Evangelical Socialist" was the most interesting term that was used) before it became cool to do so during the few months when we were being told that capitalism was dead in the wake of the orignal TARP program: Is the charge that Newt Gingrich is a socialist a debateable point, or does it stretch the term beyond meaning?