The Madness of King Newt

Fresh from his win in South Carolina, pompous, erratic, undisciplined, angry, racist, arrogant, anti-intellectual, grandiose, authoritarian, bi-polar, half-man/half-pig mutant hybrid zoophilic microcephalic psychopath and sneering, preening, opportunistic, divisive, self-aggrandizing, all pie-in-the-sky and no follow-through, manic-depressive, ethically-challenged, spendthrift, open-marriage advocate, perennially unfaithful serial husband, all-around überhypocrite, fuck-wad of the first order, freshly-minted self-styled anti-Castro zealot, staggeringly unstable and natural-born liar Newt Gingrich has goosed the race in Florida to what appears to be a dead heat with his arch-rival, Mitt Romney, an outcome beyond all the expectations of the opinion mongers, who thought that Newt would be well on his way down the toilet by now.

Whew.

Before we continue, we feel that we simply must address the burgeoning adjective crisis that we have been struggling with in recent weeks when discussing Newt Gingrich. It all started out innocently enough. Back in 2010, we first broached the idea that Gingrich was a pig. Not figuratively, mind you, as one might expect from mainstream political analysis, but the genuine article. We offered what we felt was conclusive proof that Newt Gingrich actually has porcine DNA pumping through his body and from that point forward, for us, it simply became immutable fact.

In subsequent columns, we started referring to him as “half-man/half pig candidate Newt Gingrich”, a description which served us for quite some time. As his presidential quest began to gain momentum, however, we started embellishing this with other adjectives which, we felt, more fully and more accurately described this man. It also gave us something of a shorthand that we could use. By simply taking on more adjectives, we felt that we could present an efficient encapsulation of the man. A convenient way of both introducing him into whatever topic we happened to be writing about that particular day, as well as providing our readers with a succinct synopsis — a curriculum vitae, if you will — of Newt so that we wouldn’t have to re-hash all of the column inches we have already devoted to him, for those readers who may have missed our previous installments. As we have been picking up new readers recently, we found this in particular to be of no small importance.

Because of his being such a complex character, though, we found out in short order that additional information was required to paint a more accurate picture of Newt for our readers. As more and more of Newt’s personality quirks, disturbed behaviors, and psychic anomalies revealed themselves on the campaign trail, we found that we had to add more and more adjectives to properly flesh out the characterization that we were attempting to convey. Every time we sat down to write another column in which he figured, even in passing, it became apparent that something new had to be added in order to keep up with this silver-haired dynamo, who, with each passing day, each campaign appearance, each debate performance, seemed to reveal some new and appalling characteristic of his psyche, some terrible, dreadful, and hitherto unnoticed sign of his deeply depraved nature, some fresh indication of the loosening of his hold on reality, which we felt duty-bound to include in our ever-expanding thumbnail sketch of him.

But at some point a thumbnail sketch becomes a mural, and that is the dilemma we are facing now with Newt. We feel that now our efforts at efficiency have morphed into the exact opposite of our original intentions — a large, clumsy, unwieldy semi-paragraph which takes so long to slog through that by the time we have arrived at the man’s name, we have lost track of the thread of our thought. So we can only imagine what you, the reader, must be going through.

We will attempt to remedy this in the coming days, but until such time as we find a suitable alternative, we will continue using the current construct. One suggestion that came up at our weekly staff meeting yesterday was to simply drop the long list of adjectives altogether, and treat Newt in the same manner as we would any other Republican candidate, by using his name only, and with perhaps one or two simple adjectives. Like “Mormon milquetoast Mitt Romney”, for example. This was shouted down immediately, of course, but the matter is by no means closed. It is probably the most important editorial issue we are grappling with here at OMT at this time. We hope to have a resolution in the coming days and weeks.

But, we digress.

Now that it looks like he could actually win in Florida, Newt may have collared what George H. W. Bush used to like to call “big mo”, which may propel him through the rest of the primaries, giving him enough victories to clinch the nomination. We don’t think he will, of course, but we’ve been wrong about these kinds of things before, and so we think that it’s worth considering.

Most importantly, we think, is that if Newt’s run turns out to bear fruit, it will be the first time since 1964 that a major political party in this country has nominated a certifiably insane person to head up the ticket in a presidential election. That year it was Barry Goldwater, the granddaddy of all latter-day whack-job Republicans, who got deservedly trounced by Lyndon Johnson in the general election.

The same thing is likely to happen this year if Newt goes head-to-head with President Obama, of course. But there is always that ugly possibility that in a world in which a borderline psychotic like Newt Gingrich can convince enough people that he is fit for the presidency, that all bets are off, and that an Obama victory is not so foregone. In this nightmare scenario, America could wake up to an actual madman in the White House for the first time in our history.

While some historians have argued that Andrew Jackson was a first class wingnut, this is probably an exaggeration. And that crowd of moron Republicans between Grant and McKinley may make George W. Bush look positively statesmanlike, but nobody’s arguing that they were actually nuts. Well, maybe Rutherford B. Hayes, a real get-down-on-his-knees-and-pray teetotaling son of a bitch, who would be right at home running for the Republican nomination today, if he’d lose the beard.

As for George W. Bush himself, he may have been a dim-witted, classless frat boy, but it would be a stretch to call him “insane”. Ronald Reagan wasn’t all there, to be sure, but in his case it was early-onset Alzheimer’s, which is pretty scary considering his access to the nuclear codes. But it’s not the same thing as having someone creeping around the corridors of the White House who is actually functionally mad.

Nixon had his moments, of course. Like when he used to have those little chats with the portraits of previous presidents, or when he and Kissinger used to fall to their knees and pray. That stuff was all towards the end, though, when the wolves were scratching at Nixon’s door. We remember being in the Air Force during Watergate, in those days of early August 1974 leading up to Nixon’s resignation, when a special order came down the twix from the Pentagon to all military units worldwide, to the effect that any military order issued by Richard Nixon was to be approved first by Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger. It was, we’re pretty sure, unprecedented in US history that the orders of the commander-in-chief needed to be approved by one of his underlings before being carried out. And it had us all wondering whether or not Nixon had gone off the deep end. He was on a plane to exile in San Clemente, though, before that order had to be put to the test.

But Nixon’s madness came from his fall from a historic victory in November of 1972 to being driven from office 21 months later after a nationally televised crash and burn of epic proportions. He had been a carrier of madness all along, but it didn’t become acute until right before the end, and after a tremendous battering around by the press, the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Office of the Special Prosecutor, and the American people. All of which was richly deserved, mind you. But, still …

Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, is whacko right out of the box. He hasn’t experienced any of the normal pressures of the office of the presidency yet, let alone the extraordinary ones that are sure to come his way should he be elected. And even absent those stresses, he’s been exhibiting numerous clear and unmistakable signs that he’s nuts. According to his ex-wife, he’s already had a serious mental breakdown when he was convicted of ethics violations and fined $300,000 that he didn’t have, and lost the speakership of the House. What’s going to happen when he’s president and the Iranians block the Strait of Hormuz? Or if North Korean troops storm across the demilitarized zone and into the south? Or when he is inevitably impeached by Congress for the high crimes and misdemeanors he’s sure to commit as president?

Or when he has an affair with a White House intern and lies about it, telling the Washington Press Corps, “I did not have sex with that woman, and I’m appalled that you would ask me that, and besides, Callista doesn’t care, so what’s the problem?”

With his well-known instability and erratic behavior, not to mention the unpredictable impact that porcine DNA likely has on his brain’s ability to rationally process emotions, how can any reasonable person consider Newt Gingrich to be fit for the awesome responsibilities of the office of President of the United States?

The man’s a pig. And an insane pig, at that.

Well, actually an insane half-pig.

Newt Gingrich — Fully insane. Half-pig.

Great bumper sticker, no?

But it’s an even better warning.

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