Quote of the Day

"You can't put a gun rack in a Volt."

-- Newt Gingrich, opining on Chevrolet's new Volt electric car in front of an audience in Georgia

I swear, these people couldn't be more of a punchline if they were actually wearing clown costumes. By all means, keep tossing out that red meat -- it's working brilliantly.

Sand Trap

One of the main reasons I've stayed relatively quite about politics lately -- aside from the fact that I've been incredibly busy -- has a lot to do with a pervading feeling of powerlessness. I realize this may sound like a cop out, but there are times when I've wondered whether I should just give up discussing politics altogether, choosing to keep my head down and live my life rather than letting the chaotic, perpetual drone of left-vs-right turn a good portion of my day into the figurative beating of my head against a computer keyboard. But really, let's be honest: It has less to do with not wanting to add to the noise than it does with that unshakable belief that there's nothing I can say that'll change a goddamned thing -- not in a political climate that allows one party to get away with operating completely divorced from empirical reality.

Seriously, how do you even begin to call out a movement which has made itself nearly bulletproof by virtue of its unwillingness to subscribe to facts -- facts that anybody not currently tied to a bed at Bellevue accepts as a jumping off point for his or her opinions? It's no secret that conservatism as a political ideal is a shadow of its former, somewhat respectable self, having long ago been hijacked from within by its most lunatic fringe. All that remains now is that fringe and those who cater to it, and to extend the metaphor, you just can't argue with a crazy person -- nor with the person who will do or say anything to inexplicably appeal to that person. The American political right, at this point in our history, is so thoroughly shameless and hypocritical -- and so detached from the world that everyone else on the planet inhabits -- that attempting to refute its nonsense with logic and reason is a fool's errand. And while I've been a hell of a lot of questionable things throughout my lifetime, I hope a fool was never one of them.

So I've just kept my mouth shut around here, choosing instead to outsource the outrage to people apparently far more able -- and infinitely more tolerant -- than I am.

But at some point you have to get off your ass and get back into the fight, I suppose. And for me, that time is now. Yeah, I've still got quite a bit on my plate at the moment, particularly when it comes to work. But this site matters to me and I can't deny that it's been neglected of late. So I'm gonna try my damndest to get things back on track around here -- and that means talking not just politics but hopefully anything else that comes to mind, all while attempting to balance my business and personal life.

With that in mind, though, I wanted to give you an example of what I'm talking about when it comes to both the insanity on the right and the entirely calculated and opportunistic pandering to that insanity that's become a staple of conservatism's standard bearers. Listen to this little diatribe from Bill Maher because he's right on the money: the Republicans purport to love America but they really seem to hate Americans, at least a vast swath of them anyway.

Seriously, how do you argue with this kind of horseshit thinking from a smug, morally bankrupt little asshole like Gingrich?

The Master Debater

I really do feel bad outsourcing commentary right now, but I can't stress enough how, well, stressed I am during the day as a deadline on a project I'm working on is fast approaching.

With that in mind, here's Jon Stewart last night rightly losing his mind over not just Newt Gingrich's almost sociopathic hypocrisy and utter lack of shame but the testicularly challenged John King's unwillingness to call him out on it.

The Daily Show
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Quote of the Day, Jr.

"She is certainly one of the people you would look at. I am a great admirer of hers, and she was a remarkable reform governor of Alaska. She's somebody who I think brings a great deal to the possibility of helping in government and that would be one of the possibilities. There are also some very important cabinet positions that she could fill very, very well. I can't imagine anybody that would do a better job of driving us to an energy solution than Gov. Palin, for example. Tell her that she would certainly be on the list of one of the people we would consider."

-- Newt Gingrich on the possibility of naming Sarah Palin as a running-mate or to a cabinet position

I'm really not sure there's a way for these people to become any more of a joke.

Quote of the Day

"You know and I know that she's not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a president."

-- Newt Gingrich on his first wife, Jackie, according to former friend and campaign official Kip Carter

Is it hearsay? You bet. But just tell me you can't hear Newt -- puffy, self-satisfied asshole that he is -- actually saying something like that. Especially when you consider how thoroughly the facts smack down the revisionist fairy tale he's now telling about his infamous first divorce.

"Hairy Chests Destroy Our Power"

"NEWT GINGRICH" — a Bad Lip Reading Soundbite - watch more funny videos

Paul Buried Newt

There's nothing in the world that could make me want to see Ron Paul become President of the United States. That said, his people get massive credit for taking apart the cynical and ego-driven campaign of Newt Gingrich better than anybody this election season. This just about nails it -- and does so ferociously.

Assistant Quote of the Day

"I will ask John Bolton to be secretary of state."

-- Newt Gingrich

Not like you needed a reason to never in a million years vote for Gingrich, but in case you were looking for one that could be summed up in a single sentence -- there it is. If you don't even need a full sentence to convince you, there's always "War With Iran," which is the headline you'd be seeing in no time should John "Shit-House Rat Crazy" Bolton ever be put in charge of U.S. "diplomacy."

These guys really just don't have one new idea, do they?

Quote of the Day

"A Gingrich presidency, if such a thing can even be imagined, would be a chaotic catastrophe. A Gingrich nomination would yield an Obama landslide."

-- David Frum

This is a pretty succinct assessment of Newt Gingrich's entire ego-trip of a candidacy, to say nothing of that candidacy's laughable recent elevation by a Republican party desperate to vote for anybody but Mitt Romney. From the same source that linked to the above quote -- a post in the Daily Beast -- Andrew Sullivan points out the most important element to Newt's sudden rise in the polls, and it speaks volumes about what's truly important these days: timing.

"His timing is pretty good: better to be on the rise a month before the voting begins rather than two months before. And the hardcore base doesn't have many other places to seek refuge."

It's true that if the GOP had a singularly fantastic candidate to get behind, it'd be less likely to play the field as if it were one of the Sex and the City girls, eventually awakening to the cold light of day and being forced to take a Sisyphean walk of shame, over and over again. But there might be a bigger point to be made about Republican indecision and what it says about us as a media-shaped culture. I've mentioned this before, but we now live in a world where our attention spans are shrinking rapidly, largely due to the rapid-fire nature of our media. News cycles are dwindling down to hours instead of days. Zeitgeists come and go seemingly in an instant. You can go from nobody, to viral sensation, to the target of a harsh backlash in the span of a couple of days. We no longer have the will to stick with a message that's longer than 140-characters.

We're constantly looking for the next thing, particularly if we're not 100% satisfied with the thing we already have.

I think what this means for politics is that it's no longer important to be steadfast as a candidate or in message; the most vital thing is to be constantly evolving and staying one step ahead of media obsolescence, and that's much easier said than done. The reality is that everything -- everything -- becomes old news after a very short time these days and even the most media-savvy can trip up and lose momentum or find that no matter what they do, it's not enough to hold the interest of a public suffering, en masse, from ADD. The end result then becomes that politics is a game of musical chairs: whoever happens to be on top of the media cycle when the music stops wins.

How do we know our attention spans are shrinking, that vast swaths of our culture have turned into Lenny from Memento? Newt Gingrich -- a guy who just a few months ago was declared DOA because of a series of monumental screw-ups, a guy with a long history of personal and professional baggage that should doom any political aspirations he might have from the very start -- is now the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination.

Fighting Words

For a couple of weeks now on the podcast, Bob and I have discussed the fact that while everyone's busy pointing out Rick Perry's inability to speak without tripping over his own stupid tongue, no one's paying attention to how asinine and dangerous the things he's trying to say are. Like a couple of weeks ago, when he couldn't remember that he wanted to shutter the Department of Energy, which controls the country's nuclear weapons -- or this gem from Saturday, where he seems to be saying that he wants to end civilian control of our military:

"There is a time and a place for us to intervene, and intervene militarily. But when we intervene militarily, we best make the decision on how we are going to win and how we are going to win convincingly and quickly, send those young men and women with the equipment to win. Don’t let some congressman sitting in an air-conditioned office in Washington DC deciding what the rules of engagement are. … And for us to micromanage them, in a civilian way, without their commanders truly in charge, is absolutely irresponsible and as commander-in-chief of this country I will not let it happen."

I bring this up not because it's so outrageous, which it of course is, and not solely because it's indicative of how far a candidate like Perry has to go to get noticed at an event like the Christian Family Leader "values forum" when he's way down in the polls. No, I mention it because it's crap like this that makes it 100% clear how offensive it is when self-righteous clowns like Glenn Greenwald, Jane Hamsher, etc. make the claim that the Obama Administration is essentially the same thing as any given Republican presidency would be these days, and when they threaten, as Greenwald has, that allowing one of these Perry-esque far-right malignancies into the White House would be a necessary sacrifice if it meant that it would finally bring the country around to how destructive the current GOP model of thinking is.

Right. Because Obama, although by no means someone willing to give the left everything it wants, is the same as a guy who wants to take the reins completely off the U.S. military, who wants to kill the Department of Energy, who thinks the Occupy Wall Street protesters are dirty hippies who are just looking for a handout and who need to go take a shower and get a job (as Gingrich so cleverly intoned on Saturday), who thinks God told him or her to run for office (as half the GOP hopefuls have enthused), who thinks homosexuality is some kind of social disease (Bachmann and Santorum), and who believes that individual towns should be able to ban mosques if they choose (Herman "Toucan Stubs" Cain).

These people are fucking crazy and dangerous. And refusing to accept that because you're all in a huff that the current president simply isn't liberal enough for you is just as crazy and just as dangerous.

Quote of the Day

"Go get a job after you take a bath."

-- Newt Gingrich to the Occupy Wall Street protesters, at last night's Christian Family Leader "values forum" which included most of the GOP candidates for president

Please -- can somebody please punch him in the fucking mouth?

That Newt Star Smell

What with Newt Gingrich's pre-picked raffle number finally coming up and it being his turn as the GOP Clown Car flavor of the week, it's time once again to engage in a beloved tradition this election season: immediately subjecting a Republican candidate to blistering criticism rather than simply writing him or her off as the comical non-starter he or she is.

Unlike a lot of the other boobs vying for the Republican nomination, Gingrich actually has a lengthy record of breathtaking fuck-ups to draw from, so immediately pointing out that he'll never be the GOP nominee, much less President of the United States, is even easier than it's been with past one-night-stands Republican voters have romanticized.

In case you forgot Gingrich's history of almost unimaginable douchebaggery, Joan Walsh runs it down for you in today's Salon.

Salon: Newt Gingrich: His Baggage Has Baggage/11.15.11

Picture of the Day ("Hello, Ladies" Edition)

No-chance-in-hell presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, enjoying a little time to himself away from all those pesky campaign staffers, in Mykonos.

Seconds later, he was attacked and dragged into the ocean by a killer whale that mistook him for a slow-moving sea lion.

Or actually, I like Josh Marshall at TPM's take on it on Twitter: "Gingrich pictured on deserted island staffers abandoned him on before they steered pirate ship back to the mainland."

Update: Here's a fine little twist to this story: Apparently, despite the uncanny resemblance and the fact that he was recently vacationing in Greece, Newt Gingrich says he's not the guy in this picture. TMZ has even taken the shot down, which is surprising considering the fact that while they may be a "tabloid" outfit, Harvey and Co. rarely get anything wrong.

Quote of the Day

"I'm not a Washington figure... I'm essentially an American whose ties are across the country and is interested in how you change Washington, not how you make Washington happy. I am the people's candidate, not the capital's candidate."

-- Newt Gingrich, who's spent pretty much the last three decades either in Congress or working for various DC think tanks

He's right, you know. It's obvious he's from Alderaan or some other planet where he's spent the last several years studying the ways of the force. That's really the only explanation for the staggering amount of horseshit he spews and expects to be believed.

Anywhere else it would be known as flat-out lying; where he's from it's just the Jedi Mind Trick.

Quote of the Day

"I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American."

-- Newt Gingrich speaking at Rev. John "Hitler Helped the Jews" Hagee's Cornerstone Mega-church in San Antonio

So, in case you slept through the course on audaciously ass-backward Republican anti-logic in college, let's see if we can clear this up: America will soon be secular atheist country. Dominated by radical members of the Muslim religion.

If it weren't for the fact that Gingrich doesn't stand a chance in hell of being elected to any office higher than maybe assistant comptroller of Purdy, Missouri, his complete lack of anything even approaching shame would be a real problem. The issue here, though, is that this brand of nonsensical, xenophobic fear-mongering is exactly what a good portion of the Republican party -- specifically the insurrectionists of the Tea Party -- wants to hear. And it'll be shocking if they don't figure out a way to elevate the candidates who pander to their sheer pants-peeing terror while ruining the chances of anyone who tries to lean toward measured and reasonable conservatism.

Difference of Opinion

I realize that by now blatant, shameless hypocrisy from the right should fail to even raise an eyebrow. Still, occasionally one of the usual suspects makes a statement that's so comically indefensible and almost unimaginably audacious -- when compared to what he said, oh say, two weeks ago -- that it's worth highlighting.

Here's Newt Gingrich on March 7th.



And here's Newt Gingrich, or perhaps an alien clone of him, just 16 days later -- this morning.



I swear -- you don't even have to try with these assholes. Although ThinkProgress, which pointed out this minor "discrepancy," notes that actually Gingrich's position is 100% consistent: Obama is wrong.

Quote of the Day

"There's no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate."

-- Newt Gingrich, drawing on almost incomprehensible depths of shamelessness during an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network aimed at getting him off the hook for a quarter-century of philandering, cruelty and hypocrisy

Yes, you heard that correctly.

He fucked around on his wife because he loved America so much.

And I don't even remember getting a nice dinner and a night in a swanky hotel room out of it.