Nuked Gingrich, Part 11

What makes Maureen Dowd so frustrating is that she's capable of completely sussing out what makes someone like Newt Gingrich tick, but is completely unable to find the time to figure out say, President Obama.

His mind is a jumble, an amateurish mess lacking impulse control. He plays air guitar with ideas, producing air ideas. He ejaculates concepts, notions and theories that are as inconsistent as his behavior.

He didn’t get whiplash being a serial adulterer while impeaching another serial adulterer, a lobbyist for Freddie Mac while attacking Freddie Mac, a self-professed fiscal conservative with a whopping Tiffany’s credit line, and an anti-Communist Army brat who supported the Vietnam War but dodged it.


“Part of the question I had to ask myself,” he said in a 1985 Wall Street Journal piece about war wimps, “was what difference I would have made.”

Newt swims easily in a sea of duality and byzantine ideas that don’t add up. As The Washington Post reported on Friday, an America under President Gingrich would have two Social Security systems — “one old, one new, running side by side” — two tax systems and two versions of Medicare.

Of course, Newt's not that hard to figure out. The only reason he's now being considered an "ideas guy" for the GOP is that his intellectual competition is Michele Bachmann.  Newt's single largest contribution to the American political process was breeding absolute contempt for the American political process itself.

Mr. Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it. When he became speaker in 1995, Mr. Gingrich moved quickly to slash the budgets and staff of the House committees, which employed thousands of professionals with long and deep institutional memories.

Of course, when party control in Congress changes, many of those employed by the previous majority party expect to lose their jobs. But the Democratic committee staff members that Mr. Gingrich fired in 1995 weren’t replaced by Republicans. In essence, the positions were simply abolished, permanently crippling the committee system and depriving members of Congress of competent and informed advice on issues that they are responsible for overseeing.

What makes this man such an odious little pile is the fact he gave the GOP the best and most effective weapon they've ever known:  how to make a government that can't work.  Now, 17 years later, we have a political party running on a platform that government has never worked and that a vast majority of it needs to be abolished in order to directly give power to "the people", which in this case means the super-wealthy.

All that has proceeded to such a marvelous extent that Gingrich is considered a viable candidate again in the "era of no government", so much so that he's now leading in Iowa and gaining significantly in New Hampshire with a month to go.

So yes, please nominate this little troll.  I'd love an Obama second term.