Sorry I'm Late, But In My Defense I Don't Watch Fox Sunday, For The Same Reason I Don't Schedule A Weekly Showing Of Titicut Follies.

If you enjoyed Titicut Follies, the Internet Movie Database

recommends Don't Look In The Basement! and Body Double.

SO, President Gingrich would have taken out that North Korean missile on the launching pad for fear that the wily Oriental devils might use three nuclear weapons to de-electrify the US back to the Stone Age. Which includes your car! says Newt, mindful that, thanks to his party, by the time the North Koreans have three nuclear weapons most Americans will be living in theirs. Gingrich added that the Obama policy, presumably including the continuation of the Six Party Talks, diplomatic efforts at the United Nations (demanded by the understandably honked-off Japanese), or, frankly, doing anything whatsoever that includes talking rather than unleashing lasers, robots, or or robots with lasers, a fantasy foreign policy.

It struck me, watching the vid, that Newt Gingrich talking to Chris Wallace is precisely one gamete away from being two guys taking big in order to impress their waitress at Denny's.

And that gamete is Wallace's; Newt's already sitting in a booth, imagining her naked, as witness his "If I was the fuckin' President, I'd show those North Korean fucks what a fuckin' bomb is, I tell ya. Say, darlin', what time they let you leave here?" I mean, you'd like to think that the average Denny's customer has more sense than that. Excepting, of course, that they are eating at Denny's. The real question here is, Which is the most delusional? Newt Gingrich thinking he could stop a North Korean missile on the launch pad, Newt Gingrich conducting an interview in Klingon, or Newt Gingrich thinking he could be President? Okay, the latter.

You'd think that if nothing else had rid us of this maroon in the last twenty-five years gravity would have done the trick. Really, how many bad ideas, demonstrations of professional incompetence, and revelations of personal repugnance can you carry around before you sink directly into the Earth's core? The man is a two-bit huckster. I realize that this is perhaps a little easier to see for those of us who do not automatically assume that anyone granted acceptance into the undergraduate program at Tulane must be some sort of unimaginable Super Brainiac or Something, but, c'mon. I know he's just fleecing Republicans, and I know they've been fleeced by stupider and more venal men, and, lately, women, but for how long?

Look: you got nothin', okay. You've been hoist by your own massive antique petard collection. You've reverted to Clenis™ syndrome, though I don't think "reverted" is quite the right word. Your national political figures are the product of decades of inbreeding, and they keep grabbing at the tiller of a ship that's already sunk while trying to avoid the wrath of a corpulent, racist, drug-addled pervert straight outta A Face in the Crowd. Maybe, just maybe, when you have to go outside the current party structure to try to find someone with enough brains cells for a mathematical possibility of their firing in sequence, you could look for someone who isn't desperately diving for the bottom in his attempt to lose a second-straight Republican nomination without ever managing to enter the race. I know Gingrich is a pathetic excuse for an historian, but he'd have to be suffering severe blackouts as well to have forgotten the administration of George W. Bush this quickly, however many reasons he and his party have to wish to. The OK Corral President wound up negotiating with North Korea from a position of weakness, five years after he threw out diplomacy as insufficiently testicle-exposing. And yet, somehow--somehow!--here we are again. Could someone at least attempt to explain why it didn't work last time?

Gingrich is certainly capable of actually believing this stuff. He's also proven capable of lying about it for whatever temporary political gain he imagines he'll reap, and which generally amounts to "none". As I've said before about the last guy who talked tough about North Korea while asking Americans to wet their pants over the issue: you'd think the party of Bronze Age Superstition would be the first to toss these guys overboard when every omen came up Bad. I know, I know an accurate assessment of the non-threat of North Korean ICBMs is out of the question; these are the people, after all, who marched us off to a couple trillion dollars worth of war-y goodness on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to push an imaginary button, despite the fact that it would have meant he had six seconds, roughly, before being converted, for a microsecond, into a fine red mist. These are the people who screamed for us to do something about the Russian invasion of Georgia, fer chrissakes. Even those who might be capable of rational thought understand it can't be spoken of. But that doesn't mean you have to go Full Freaking Nuts every time there's a new issue of the New York Times.

Nah, really, all I'd like is if just once one of these chickenhawk warriors would act as if his Deep and Abiding Love of Country wasn't permitted to hibernate whenever there was a Democrat in the White House. Sanity's too much to ask.