There is very, very, very little chance that Newton Leroy Gingrich will be the GOP’s presidential candidate in 2012… and even less chance that he could succeed in a campaign against President Obama. If every other current or potential GOP candidate were to be run over by a bus, found dead in a cheap motel room, or announce that they have fallen in love with a member of their own sex and will be dropping out of the race in order to campaign against DOMA in the states of the resurgent Confederacy, Gingrich would somehow manage to disqualify himself within a week (three days, if the Tampa convention is less than six weeks away). I believe that even Newt Gingrich has finally admitted to himself that this year’s Campaign of Great Fail is simply an extended publicity tour designed to buttress his brand’s valuable shelf-space in the GOP’s ideological Walmart (motto: Sure, it’s badly-made knock-off crap that will probably kill you, but where else can you buy a ten-gallon jug of toxic dominionism and a 24-pack of nativism at such a low price?)…
Under these circumstances, of course, Gingrich is the perfect candidate for the Media Village courtiers now that the more viable Not-Romney choices have effectively self-destructed, two months before the first primaries and the boring inevitability of Willard. Howie Kurtz, always a trendsetter for the Village idiots, was peddling Gingrich’s “resurrection” weeks ago. Now Rupert Murdoch’s paid shills have received their talking points, which means ripe pickings for the Snarkerati, starting with Mr. Charles P. Pierce:
If you assume, as I do, that everybody in the Republican presidential field except Mitt Romney and Rick Perry are running for book sales, speaking fees, and Greta Van Susteren’s time slot on the Fox News Channel — she is so history in December of 2012 — then, sooner or later, Newt Gingrich was bound to bounce to the top of the second tier, or the bottom of the first tier, or wherever it is that Herman Cain is currently sprawled with a blanket over his head. Newt’s a more established brand than the rest of them. His megalomania… er… self-confidence is utterly boundless, and his attachment to actual reality and to the truth is just tenuous enough to keep him in touch with the propeller-on-the-beanie crowd in his party’s base….
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And he loves — L-O-V-E-S — to cause trouble just for the sake of causing trouble and, if these numbers hold, and Herman Cain finally does flame out in a spectacular blaze of old writs, there will be lots of trouble for Newt to make because Newt has the brain of a vandal, the instincts of an arsonist, and the heart of a born saboteur. This is exactly the kind of thing that engages Mitt Romney’s inner corporate dickhead. He doesn’t like pranks from the lesser orders. He would prefer that those people know and keep their place…
Dave Weigel (Gary Johnson supporter, IIRC) is cranky about his fellow journalamists:
Let’s run a controlled experiment with the sidebar to the Cain drama, the other story of the week: the phantom, fantastical “Gingrich surge.” You see, Newt Gingrich is about to surge. Paul Gigot says so. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page editor moderated a News Corp./College Board rap session about education last week, and Gingrich managed, somehow, to outshine and out-wonk a lineup that included Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain. It got Gigot, one of the more influential conservative editorialists, thinking hard about Gingrich’s I-can-win-this-thing spin.
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“Voters are worried enough about the condition and direction of the country that they are willing to consider someone with proposals that are bolder than the political norm,” writes Gigot. “In a year when GOP voters are still searching for someone who can go head-to-head with President Obama, don’t be surprised if Mr. Gingrich gets another turn in the spotlight.”
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We have read/endured some version of this story since Aug. 29, when Paul Bedard saw the first stirrings of a Newt comeback. (“In Missouri and Louisiana, for example, he is fourth behind Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, and Rep. Michele Bachmann.”) The polls showed Gingrich creeping slowly up from high single digits to low double digits. Prefab Newtmania reached its dizzy heights on Monday night, when Monica Crowley got a chance to interview the man on Fox News.
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“So, I am looking at these polls,” said Crowley, “and you are enjoying something of a surge. To what do you attribute that uptick?”
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Tough question. “I think part of it is just substance and real solutions,” explained Gingrich.
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“You are such a serious conservative intellectual,” challenged Crowley.
Speaking of simple amphibious life forms with big dreams, there are worse humiliations than getting fluffed by Faux-newsers. Newt may console himself with schadenfreude over another flavor-of-the-afternoon media hustler, as reported by Gawker:
Richard Heene — father of the infamous Balloon Boy — has apparently abandoned his internet wares and is now hawking the Heene Duty, which he describes as a “pick-up truck robot,” at the Speciality Equipment Manufacturers Association (SEMA) show in Las Vegas. That’s where one Jalopnik reader happened to bump into him and his sad display…
If only we could be sure that the helicopters weren’t laughing.
Bill E Pilgrim
You mean other Republicans, right?
Oh wait sex, okay I see.
I tend to think of them as their own gender, sort of a combination of “neuter” and “all of the above”. The former as sort of a rhetorical gender, the latter more what happens in practice.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
You missed Krauthammer:
It didn’t have to be this way. Our friends did not have to be left out in the cold to seek Iranian protection. Three years and a won war had given Obama the opportunity to establish a lasting strategic alliance with the Arab world’s second most important power.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): Charles Krauthammer, staunch advocate of invading and occupying your “friends”. His neighborhood association must be very fond of him.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Bill E Pilgrim: Yea, I probably shouldn’t have brought it up.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): Oh, why? Assuming it was in the spirit of mockery and ridicule, all of which seemed perfectly appropriate once I skimmed the piece.
gocart mozart
Ahem madam. I said ahem. My coinage of the word “Newtmentum” beat you by several hours. You owe me a free internet or you will be hearing from my lawyers.
gocart mozart said,
November 4, 2011 at 6:14
Feel the Newtmentum!
“If Cain’s candidacy does implode in the coming weeks our numbers suggest the candidate poised to benefit the most is Newt Gingrich. In North Carolina he’s the second choice of 29% of Cain voters, compared t0 16% for Romney, 15% for Perry, and 10% for Bachmann. In Maine he’s the second choice of 26% of Cain voters to 17% for Romney and 15% for Perry.”
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2011/11/cain-was-still-going-strong.html
http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/35824.html#comment-1238468
Amir Khalid
Newt Gingrich’s campaign was the first to blow itself up this cycle. What more is there to be said about his chances? This is the one man who’s been turned into a Newt that won’t get better.
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
It seems utterly lost on The Cabbagehammer that Iraq wasn’t America’s to lose; that Iran is a neighbor Iraq needs to get along with; or that Iran just wants to protect itself (and has every right to do so) from nasty people with hostile intentions against it, like America’s Most Important Ally Israel.
soonergrunt
God, but Craphammer is one of the dumbest motherfuckers to be paid to sit in front of a keyboard.
That’s the only possible thought one could have if they believe for even a second that he’s not stupid but just completely full of shit.
George W. Bush lost Iraq. On March 20, 2003.
gocart mozart
Also,
Regardless of who the ultimate winner of the Republican primaries is, coming in last, at the bottom, sticking to the end, will always be santorum.
JGabriel
Charles Pierce via Anne Laurie @ Top:
I’m pretty sure Perry is running for book sales at this point, too.
.
harlana
The thing that pisses me off about Newt is, unlike the other boobs in the race, he tries to present himself as an intellectual, and then all he does is recycle and spout bullshit talking points about the President. OH HE’STH STHO STHMART!!
That and, as I have bemoaned before, I had to live through this clown in the 90’s, he was totally discredited, and now I’m having to look at his tired old ass and listen to his tired old bullshit, 15 fucking years later (or whatever the fuck it was, I try to forget), it’s not going down well.
harlana
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): what kind of shit is he smoking? is that what makes his face look all melted?
JGabriel
Dave Weigel via Anne Laurie @ Top:
Damn, out-wonking Bachmann and Cain, that’s a high bar to walk over. If that bar were any higher, it would be a sidewalk crack.
Don’t break your momma’s back, Newt.
.
Bill E Pilgrim
I say let them have their “Newt Gincriches” , their “Herman Cains”, their “Tar-Tar sauce”, and even their paranoid fantasies about what’s really behind the total lack of unelectability of any of the above, as long as it gives them baubles to occupy their shiny minds, rather than recognizing the true void they face and coming up with an actual electable candidate to challenge Romney. Slim chance but still.
gocart mozart
@gocart mozart:
In other words, I stole from Charles Pierce before you did..
WereBear
Romney is actually the best they got right now.
Man!
Bill E Pilgrim
@erratum: Er, their total lack of electability. Or, their unelectability. Spell checker objected that neither are words and I got caught up playing with it and ended up merging the two.
arguingwithsignposts
@JGabriel:
I snortled. Never heard that phrase before. Now I have, and it’s mine. forever. Thank you oh great tnternetz (and JGabriel)
joeshabadoo
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): Pretty terrible. Iraq apparently can’t have diplomatic relations with its most powerful neighbor (it was the leader of the kurds in Iraq who visited, the ethnic group in Iran which apparently is rebelling and is hiding on the Iraqi border according to his own article).
I particularly like “Everyone involved, Iraqi and American, knew that the 2008 SOFA calling for full U.S. withdrawal was meant to be renegotiated. ”
Yeah. That was just bullshit we put in there to keep the U.S. and Iraqi peasants in line. It was never supposed to be an actual agreement. Everyone who wanted it to be can screw off.
At the end of the day this is just trying to paint what the general public sees as an excellent thing (leaving Iraq) as a failure on the part of Obama.
Southern Beale
Michael Gerson makes lamest argument yet regarding income inequality: it’s just that there aren’t enough married couples!
Oh, thanks! Now let’s all run along and get married so statistically our household income doubles. Easy peasy! Pay no attention to the wage stagnation and all that …
Snarki, child of Loki
@Southern Beale: “Now let’s all run along and get married so statistically our household income doubles.”
After which, income stagnates. Let’s see, how could one get income to TRIPLE? QUADRUPLE?
The Mittster has the answer to all of those difficult questions, if only he would take off the straightjacket of his Magic Underwear and share it with his GOP Baselings.
Geysergazers
Also, too, don’t forget about their Real Great White Hope, Huntsman. It is his name self-identifying reasonable Rightists (I know, contradiction in terms) are whispering to one another. Polls evidently show he could beat Obama (I ‘spose ’cause he doesn’t come across as Daft-though, of course, he is). While he does have the distinction of being the one would-be who doesn’t Deny Science he is also a radical drill-baby-drill freak. Oh, and, a Corporate Statist.
sherparick
First, as Krugman displayed graphically yesterday on his blog, the accelerating inequality of the last 30 years has been the result of almost all economic growth and income increases going to the upper 1% (and really to the upper .1%, since that group has received more than half the income growth). Absent the upper 1% the top 1/5th of U.S. income earners has barely increased since 1979, and that is where marriage is most stable.
What Gerson sees as “causation” (lack of marriage leads to lower incomes) is actually “correlation.” As was true in the 19th as well as the 20th, when the material circumstances that support a family life collapse, the families often collapse and break-up, with the man moving on). Read the great 19th century English, French, and American novels, and you will see glimpses this connection between financial failure and family break-up (to name just two examples, Huck Finn’s situation in both “Tom Sawyer” and “Hucklebery Finn” and Thomas Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge.”).
kay
I can’t stand Newt Gingrich’s voice. I can’t stand how he drops his chin and deliberately lowers his voice and uses dramatic pauses to sound authoritative. It’s practiced and coached and calibrated. He loves how he sounds. I can see him listening to himself, and he’s pleased. I don’t think the words matter, it’s the sound that he’s after. The total effect: “strength” or “intelligence” or (the worst) “humor”.
Every time I hear him I think of the word “plummy”.
Cheryl from Maryland
Wow. The WaPo comments, usually a cesspool of right wing illiteracy, are mostly coherent diatribes picking apart Krauthamer and Gerson. Something is changing.
Joseph Nobles
I’m holding out for Mo-Newt-um to catch on.
Ben Cisco
Jonathan Capeheart sums up what I’ve had on my mind for a while now.
Chris
@Amir Khalid:
Yeah. It’s the same arrogance that leads them to whine that Truman “lost” China or that Carter “lost” Iran, the same arrogance that leads them to say Reagan took down the USSR all by his lonesome, the same arrogance that led them to spend most of the Arab Spring on their heads-we-blame-Obama, tails-we-credit-Bush thing. The idea that the people in these countries might have had more to do with those events just doesn’t come into play.
Mark S.
Cain camp considering legal action against Politico
Good luck with that.
handsmile
@gocart mozart: (#6)
Surely you can’t imagine that intellectual property rights are recognized hereabouts?
Unabashed, equal-opportunity plundering of phrases, sentences, whole paragraphs and posts, would seem to be the modus operandi among this den of thieves.
MattF
An old friend of mine was a senior Dem staffer in the House during Newt’s rise and fall. She’s surprisingly conservative about a lot of things, and takes partisan differences as just part of the game– but not about Newt. There’s something bad there she takes personally, and I believe that a lot of the old-boys-and-girls network in DC feels the same way. IMO, it’s not just coincidence that Newt always flames out, and I’d bet the house and the yard that he’ll never rise above “shithead flogging his book.”
harlana
@Southern Beale:
Has this guy been living under a rock? This “rewarding skills” business went out of fashion in business a long time ago. And a college education certainly does not ensure employment for a living wage these days. Really, these days, the big reward, the big pay-off, is just hanging onto your job, if you are lucky enough to have one. Jeez, these people are just living on another planet, they have absolutely no clue.
Also, many people are staying in deeply troubled marriages for economic reasons as well, but I guess that’s the whole point. You have to trade emotional peace and security for economic survival. What, you really think you deserve to make a living wage AND happiness at the same time?? Who do you think you are, a Kardashian? The whole point is to grind out a meager existence until you expire.
Can these people possibly despise the working classes more than they do?
Mark S.
@Mark S.:
From the comments to that article (I don’t know how to link them):
Republican men are so important they can’t remember trivial things like how many houses they own or being accused of sexual harassment on multiple occasions.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
You set a really high bar for the rest of your fellow front pagers.
@Southern Beale: That particular turd has been rolling around the intertubes for a while now. Often it is being pushed by the same arseholes who a) Believe equal marriage will destroy America and b) Lament the fact that women dare to enter the work place. Glad to see it is gaining traction in (snort) respectable outlets. Soon we’ll hear GOP Candidates pushing some sort of fucked up marriage incentive (Gays and Lesbians need not apply).
Christ, did this asshole hide behind the door when God handed out brains or what?
Altogether class: Name ONE major difference between the U.S. and countries like Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Norway*?
And yet he would be shocked and repulsed if you suggested the U.S. up taxes to get social support programs anywhere NEAR what is offered in those countries. Jesus.
*And possibly Finland, depending on who you ask.
harlana
@kay: just makes you wanna stab your eardrums with an ice pick, don’t it?
Southern Beale
The counter-protest that wasn’t: Vanderbilt College Republicans met with handshakes, cookies & shouts of “we love you!” at Occupy Nashville.
harlana
@Southern Beale: Stinking hippies. Who do they think they are, overcoming the right’s scorn and derision with love and acceptance? Some nerve.
pk
I can’t stand his face, his voice, his plastic wife, his mistress or mistresses, his books, his hypocritical piousness and every single thing about him. I would hate his dog too (if he has one).
Jay C
@joeshabadoo:
A couple of things to remember about Charles Krauthammer:
First, he is an unreconstructed PNAC/neocon Israel-First warmonger, whose punditry shtick has always been that he has never analyzed any Middle East problem whose solution hasn’t been to use US military force to bomb or shoot large numbers of Muslims.
Secondly, as a PNAC true-believer, “leaving Iraq” IS a tremendous “failure”, since to Krauthammer and the neocons, Iraq was meant to be but the first stage of a massive neo-imperial project to exert and maintain American “influence” (i.e. control via the threat of force) over the whole Persian Gulf region and its vital oil resources. Which of course, would entail a significant troop presence ad infinitum. Oh, and also make Israel more “secure”, though the means of achieving that goal have always been somewhat vague. Except for the shoot-and-bomb parts, of course.
Krauthammer’s feverish fantasies are built on the foundations of Grand Master Plans and World-changing Reality-Making: what the “general public” (American, that is, still less any of the other petty peoples of the world) thinks is of supreme irrelevance…
SRW1
Newt’s on the up?
Them TPers really, really don’t want to bite into that Mittster shit snadwhich, do they. Even the threat of four more years of The Kenyan doesn’t seem enough to overcome their gag reflex.
Ain’t gonna be anything else for dinner, buddies.
SRW1
Journalamists.
Hah, I’m so going to add that to my vocabulary.
AliceBlue
@harlana:
This.
And may I add that I love Charles Pierce. It’s like reading Molly Ivins.
Suffern ACE
I tried to read the Krauthammer article. I did. But I looked that the headline and could not go any further.
I am awaiting the Congressional hearings on the Iraq Hands by the newly reformed House Unamerican Activities Committee next year.
Rome Again
Anne Laurie, for all the times I’ve given you grief, I want to say you’ve definitely made up for it with this one. Thanks!
Someone on another thread stated yesterday that Newt is “tried and true” (opposed to Cain selling his book) wherein I had to link to the products on sale page of Newt’s website. Some people think he’s not selling books OR videos, and they consider him the real deal. UGH!
Rome Again
@Suffern ACE:
Fix’t that for ya. I don’t think they’re reformed at all.
xian
@kay: And listen for his verbal tell: he precedes his most egregious whoppers with the pseudo-sincere “Frankly, ….”
xian
@pk: I do enjoy watching the slow fail of his bariatric surgery (“stomach stapling), though
[/sadtrombone]
xian
@Jay C: it could be worse. Krauthammer could be abusing his medical degree and diagnosing Obama’s mental disorders for us on the teevee.
RalfW
@gocart mozart:
That. Is. Genius.
And really gross.
Perfect Tommy
More insight into the 27 percent crowd:
Another finding from the survey showed that 27 percent of the respondents had arrived late or early somewhere because they didn’t change their clocks at the start or end of DST.
More Than 10% Turn Clocks Wrong Way
Paul in KY
@Snarki, child of Loki: See, if we had sharia law you could triple & quardruple (on paper) your income easy-peasy. Damn those Republicans, keeping us from economic & matrimonial bliss!!
Bubblegum Tate
Does quoting this wingnut blog comment count as nutpicking?
genghisjon
@kay: We all know deep down in Newts heart he truly believes in himself.http://youtu.be/MiHbwijzJdI Oh yea that ended real well too.