If Gingrich continues to slide, and given his weak performance in the most recent “debate”, we suspect that he will, Mitt Romney will emerge from Florida with some genuine chops to go with all of the hollow, presumptive “front runner” status he’s been coasting on for the bulk of this campaign.

And it’s about time, if you ask us. Apart from Jon Huntsman, Mitt Romney has been the only candidate in this entire process who isn’t some kind of wigged-out, extremist, nut-job more suited for a talk radio studio than for the Oval Office. Indeed, it’s the very kind of unhinged, right-wing propaganda machine exemplified by talk radio and Fox (ahem) News that has created the climate in which a national political party can be hijacked by the kinds of forces that have so thoroughly infected the Republican Party, and which has diminished, if not outright obliterated, its legitimacy as a serious political entity.

For now, at least, they seem to be getting beaten back, as Romney finally appears to be getting some traction. And not a moment too soon.

But what a long, strange process it’s been. We’ve witnessed some things from these presidential aspirants in this campaign that make it virtually impossible to imagine that any one of them, including Romney, has the temperament or the intellect to competently act as the leader of what Fidel Castro calls “this globalized and expansive empire”. And while we would have preferred that President Obama face Gingrich in the general election, if for no other reason than we enjoy a good horror movie as much as the next person, we’ll be just as happy with Mitt, since we feel that the president will have no trouble beating his ass like a drum.

We’re just tired of a process that has been going on for over a year now whose ultimate outcome appears to be exactly the one that virtually anyone — inside or outside of politics, inside or outside of the beltway — could have predicted at the outset. And while the media has labored mightily to provide us with a bit of drama here and there to make us think that the eventual outcome might not be as clear as we thought — by anointing front-runner after front-runner, only to have them fall away like those poor saps in the Charge of the Light Brigade, and under similar circumstances — throughout it all, Romney stood his ground, never really falling back to less than second place, standing there, Rasputin-like, while everyone in the media and in his own party tired to roll him up in a carpet and toss him into the river.

If Mitt’s last-minute rise in the Florida polls translates into a decisive victory for him on Tuesday, then we think that his trajectory will be pretty well set. After all, we’re not the only ones who are getting tired of this entire process. We’re getting the sense that everyone just wants to get this damn thing over with so that we can focus on the general election, which really won’t get started until after Labor Day. That’s one of the problems of this continuous election cycle that the media has decided we need to have in order to preserve democracy. Eventually, people start to suffer from third-degree political burn-out.

And they end up going with their original instincts.

Which, in this case, for the Republicans, is Mitt Romney.

Not that there was ever any doubt in our mind.

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.

Since his retirement from day-to-day dictating a few years back, Castro has had a lot of time on his hands. He’s been using some of that spare time to put down his thoughts in an occasional long-winded opinion piece that Cuba’s official media is obliged to publish under the Cuban government’s “free press” statutes, among whose clauses, apparently, include one about Castro being the only person on the island free to have his views published without the taint of censorship.

It’s the kind of constitutional clause that certain individuals among those currently running for the Republican presidential nomination would love to emulate in our Constitution. Which is ironic, considering how each of the candidates falls over backwards trying to portray themselves as the most anti-Castro zealot in the bunch, now that the freak show has moved to the Sunshine State.

Republicans, as is well known, will say anything to any group which they perceive to have a special interest, even if what they are saying today is in direct conflict with something they said to another crowd, with another special interest, earlier in the day. And so it is only natural that when in Florida — which as anyone will tell you is just “90 miles from communism”, and fairly brimming with Cuban exiles — the Republican candidates would gleefully drag the old Cuban Missile Crisis skeleton out of the closet, rattling those dusty old bones in front of the only crowd left in the United States that can still be counted on to go into an involuntary anti-Castro trance-dance, moaning, wailing, foaming at the mouth, and speaking in tongues. It’s the holy rollers of Iowa all over again, except in Spanish. It’s a kind of shameless pandering with is echt Republican, which is why we were treated to all of the anti-Castro sniping between the candidates in the first debate to take place on Florida soil this week.

Naturally, this caught the attention of the Eric Sevareid of Havana, in his most recent column. Castro knew from experience that Cuba would be taking some knocks from the Republican candidates once they reached Florida — both parties have been doing it for years — but this year, even he is appalled by the sheer stupidity of the candidates, especially the part in which Mitt Romney and 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, and freshly-minted self-styled anti-Castro zealot Newt Gingrich debated the point of whether Castro would end up in heaven or hell once he eventually merges with the infinite.

Castro writes, “The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.”

Jesus.

First Castro slams hydraulic fracking because of its wanton destruction of the environment. Now he issues in one succinct sentence the most clear-eyed assessment of the Republican presidential race that we have read in this entire campaign.

Are we as a nation embarrassed yet?

Do we feel even a twinge of shame that the most long-standing dictator on this planet sees the American political process for what it really is? A media-driven entertainment extravaganza of Jovian proportions, so far removed from the concept of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” that it has become an international joke, and a lousy one at that?

Of all of the problems that are facing America today — problems that this Republican crowd gives short shrift as they debate such issues as whether or not the current president is a socialist, a Muslim, or both, or whether or not convicted felons should be allowed to vote, or whether or not gay marriage will lead to “man-on-dog sex”, or quién es mas conservativo — we can now add to that list that the rest of the world no longer takes seriously our system of government. A system of government which was once a model for the world.

The rest of the world is laughing at us. That is, those who aren’t being kept awake at night by the specter of the country with the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world devolving into a nation of hateful, blathering idiots, with itchy trigger fingers, ready to deliver the entire planet to the armageddon which more and more Americans seem to just want to get over with so that they can have a front row seat for the carnage of Jesus coming back and smiting all of the damn sodomites and liberals and Muslims, and, hell, anyone who isn’t white, rich, and/or stupid like them.

Or maybe the rest of the world isn’t laughing at all of us. Maybe they know who the clowns really are. After America’s international prestige fell to its lowest level in history during the George W. Bush administration, one of President Obama’s great accomplishments (among many, not that you’re hearing the media telling anyone about them) has been the restoration of America’s place in the world as a well-regarded beacon of freedom and justice (Guantanamo and pissing on corpses notwithstanding). It could well be that the rest of the world is laughing at the one political party in this country that is worthy of laughter, primarily because as political parties go, it is nothing but a joke.

So great a joke that even someone as seemingly humorless as Fidel Castro is laughing.

But then, he’s been laughing for a long time now.

And good luck with that, Mr. President.

For all of the forward-thinking proposals the president made last night, the party in opposition has not even the slightest bit of interest in seeing any of them carried through. That’s because the Republicans have long since abandoned any pretense of love of country in favor of ousting this president. They don’t even talk about how great America is anymore, so important is the job of unseating this so-called socialist, Islamic, anti-business and therefore anti-job creator in the White House. If America gets a black eye in the process, the Republicans couldn’t give a good God damn.

Speaking of black eyes, John Kerry looked like he’d seen better days last night. His face was mangled, and he had two shiners. As bad as he looked last night, it has been three weeks since he got that way, which should give some indication as to how bad he looked when it first happened. Kerry, who at 68 is still a regular hockey player (OMT’s buddy Skippy is a hockey player, and so we know full well the dedication and commitment these guys have for their sport), was involved in an on-ice mash-up in a hockey game around New Years, in which he broke his nose, resulting in that raccoon face, as well as some stitches. He ended up at the bottom of a pile-up on the ice. Kerry is apparently still a good hockey player, and regularly takes on guys decades his junior. Still, that kind of bravado is not without its risks, as Kerry proved to the nation last night.

Kerry’s two black eyes almost made up for the three missing black robes last night. For the second year in a row, Justices Scalia, Alito and Thomas refused to appear with the rest of the Supremes at the president’s State of the Union address, in a fit of pique at a passing remark the president made at his 2010 speech to which the three activist justices took umbrage.

Here at OMT, we think that this kind of temper-tantrum is beneath the dignity of the United States Supreme Court. Although as far as dignity goes, these three particular justices are responsible for the greatest assault on the dignity of the high court as any justice since Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, and for many of the same reasons, since these three stooges seem to be cut from the same mold as that ignorant bastard. This is particularly ironic in the case of Clarence Thomas, whom Taney would no doubt recognize as only 3/5 of a justice — a figure which pretty accurately gauges the quality of the justice that Thomas has issued in his tenure on the court. Scalia and Alito don’t even rate that high. Since the three of them are acting like children, we would recommend that they be spanked and sent to bed, except that sort of thing fits perfectly within Thomas’ sexual proclivities, and would thus be no punishment at all.

This business of releasing the president’s speech to the media ahead of time has had the unfortunate consequence of allowing the directors of the live coverage to focus the camera upon people just seconds before the president mentions them in his speech, something which gives the entire proceeding a canned, rehearsed quality that undermines its spontaneity, if you ask us. Like when the camera showed the North Carolina woman with the diamond stud in her nose sitting right beside Michelle Obama just before the president talked about how she’d been unemployed but got training and is now in a new job. Or when the camera landed on Steve Jobs’ widow seconds before the president mentioned his name. Of course, what he didn’t mention are all of those Apple iProducts that are manufactured in China. But he did say that he wanted give tax breaks to companies that brought jobs and products back to the United States, which is something Jobs’ successors are going to have to consider very seriously, given their track record of outsourcing and third world manufacturing. Not to mention all of those iGizmos that are assembled by children overseas, which fits more squarely into Newt Gingrich’s proposed child labor overhaul than it does with President Obama’s vision for the future.

Our overall impression of the president’s speech last night was that if the Republicans think that this president is going to be an electoral push-over this fall, they’re more out of touch with reality than we’ve ever given them credit for, and regular readers of OMT will know that we’ve given them plenty of credit for being out of touch with reality. The president last night aimed his speech directly at the 99% of Americans that are feeling left out of the American Dream. And we think that once this race settles down into a face off between the president and whichever whack-job the Republicans put forward (please, please let it be 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 and all-around überhypocrite and fuck-wad of the first order Newt Gingrich) the American people will stand up for what is fair and just for all. For all of their sneering, posturing, and engaging in lies and innuendo, all the Republicans can do is to make Americans feel better without actually making them better.

The Republicans offer only the politics of intoxication. And while spewing invective may make Americans feel better for a while, eventually they wake up the next morning and find not only that they are no better off, but they’ve got such a hangover that they can’t function. The Republicans have won a lot of elections that way, but this year they just might have burned through whatever good will they have left, except among the junkies of hate who are hooked on their message. Americans by and large are no longer interested in drowning out their sorrows in Republican hooch. They’re still reeling from the hangover in 2010, and now they’ve got temperance on their mind. The time has come to put the bottle away and get back to the business of getting this country back on its feet.

It’s no accident that the most famous clinic for substance abuse rehabilitation is named after the wife of a Republican president.

If Jerry Ford was enough to make Betty take to pills and the bottle, this latest crop of Republican presidential wannabees is enough to make even the most stalwart among us reach for the gas pipe.

And certainly not 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 and all-around überhypocrite Newt Gingrich — because, like all of the bad judgments you make after you’ve had that one drink too many, tomorrow morning waits patiently for you to properly regret them. Which, after a convention in which Gingrich emerges triumphant, many if not most Republicans will awaken on Labor Day and say, “Mother of babbling Jesus, we nominated who?” This will be followed by the nightmare of watching the entire party get sucked down the drain by Newt’s widely-expected public implosion in the waning days of the campaign — something which, now that the details of his advanced mental illness are widely known, we will be greatly anticipating.

So, unless this whole, ugly, interminable primary process fails to produce a clear favorite — and the convention, after multiple ballots, throws the nomination wide open, and someone like Jeb Bush, say, steps up as the anybody-but-Romney-Gingrich-Santorum-Paul candidate — whichever of the four current contenders winds up with the brass ring will be facing as much opposition from his fellow Republicans as from Democrats and independents.

This is no small problem for the Republicans, not just because they won’t have the juice to unseat President Obama this fall, which is the only real plank in the Republican Party platform this year, but also because of something that has gotten short shrift in all of the discussions in which the TV talking heads engage — the coattail effect.

A weak or divisive candidate at the top of the ticket can have repercussions all the way down to local offices, something of which both parties have traditionally been well aware, but which the Republicans seem to have forgotten about this year in their drive to fire up their whack-job base. The Republican majority in the Congress is not so great that it’s beyond the danger of being turned around this fall, and we can’t think of any of the current crop of Republican presidential candidates who have the coattail chops to drag that majority along behind them.

Nancy Pelosi knows this. In her dream to recapture the House speakership, Pelosi has mounted what she’s calling her “Drive for 25″, to win the 25 seats that the Democrats need in order to recapture the majority. And while Pelosi has been going so far as to say that the Democrats might gain as many as 35 seats — something most analysts view as a pipe dream — there’s reason to believe that her efforts to become speaker again just might bear fruit.

Although as it stands right now, the Democrats are poised to gain anywhere from 5 to 12 seats this fall — quite a bit less than what the Democrats need for a majority — there’s some reason for optimism. Redistricting in some large states, like California (Pelosi’s home state), New York, Illinois, and Florida, have given Democrats an edge (the recent setback at the hands of the Supreme Court in the case of Texas notwithstanding), and a number of Republican Congressmen have announced their retirements. In California alone, three Republicans are retiring, and, thanks to redistricting, several others are facing much tougher reelection battles, as their new districts reflect much more on the blue scale of the spectrum than they did before.

Most analysts agree that the Democrats will make inroads against the Republicans in Congress this fall, but absent the kind of support President Obama was able to generate in 2008, they consider it unlikely that the Democrats will recapture the House.

On the other hand, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that what the Democrats can’t achieve because of the top of their ticket, the Republicans can hand to them with the top of theirs. For all of the reasons we stated above, the four candidates remaining in the race for the nomination present only the following options to Republicans in the way of a nominee: bad, dreadful, unfortunate and catastrophic. That would be Romney, Santorum, Paul, and Gingrich, respectively.

So if the Democrats are starting out with 5 to 12, and pick up, say, another 10 or so nationwide because of retirements and redistricting, that puts them at around 15 to 22 new seats, anywhere from 10 to 3 shy of what they need to push them over the top. Romney at the top of the ticket just might make up the difference. Santorum would be good for another dozen new Democratic seats, at least, which definitely puts them over the top. Paul would definitely bring in those 35 seats that Pelosi is dreaming about.

As for Gingrich, well, we may be going out on a limb here, but once the national electorate has taken their full measure of this man (actually, only half-man), we think that the Democrats could gain as many as 100 to 150 seats in Congress, 12 Senate seats, 10 governorships, and 20 to 25 state legislatures. And if Newt has his October mental breakdown, as we predict he will, those numbers could easily double.

Seriously, though, there’s no question that Nancy Pelosi’s “Drive for 25″ will at least be helped by the fact that none of the Republican candidates have thus far shown an ability to unite the party in a way that will trickle down to a wider electoral victory for Republicans.

This is one of the reasons why next week’s Florida primary is so important. Unlike Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina — small, homogeneous principalities whose electorates reflect a narrow, almost myopic worldview at wide variance with the nation as a whole — Florida is large, diverse, and the closest we have seen in this race thus far to something that approaches a reflection of national attitudes. A decisive win here by one of these candidates might just change the calculus in a big way. But again, that all depends upon which candidate it is. If Gingrich wins big in Florida, for example, the fate of the Republican Party will be sealed, and it will be something along the lines of a Quentin Tarantino film.

Here at OMT, we wish Nancy luck in her quest, of course. But what we give with our right hand, we take away with our left. Because we feel very strongly that should the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives, and retain or even extend their control of the Senate, the time is long overdue for new leadership in the Democratic Party. And that means that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid must go. The Democratic Party needs strong leadership that is an equal match to the Republicans, who are capable of thwarting Republican intransigence and beating them over the head with it before shoving it up their ass. Who can play the game by the rules that the Republicans have been playing by, and that means not coming to a gun fight with a knife.

Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have been monuments of the deeply-ingrained weakness that Americans have come to loathe about the Democratic Party, and which is the primary reason for the failure of the Democrats to get their message out to the very people who would most benefit by the Democratic vision of America’s future.

It’s time for fresh faces in the Democratic caucus, people who not only share the vision of opportunity for all, which has long been the hallmark of the Democratic Party, but who also have the strength, the guile, the focus, and the singularity of purpose to achieve that vision, and to send forth the word that this is a party that is committed to ensuring that everyone has an equal shot at a new American Dream.

President Obama can’t do it alone, as we have seen. If he should have the great good fortune of a second term with his own party back in control of the Congress, then let that Congress give us new leadership that is up to the task of bringing America back from the abyss.

Still, for the moment at least, things are looking up in much of the Arab world, which is more than can be said about some established democracies around the world. Hungary, for example, in defiance of the European Union, of which it is a member in good standing, is on a slow slide back into the authoritarianism that gripped it throughout the cold war. Prime Minister Viktor Orban, backed by his party’s supermajority in the parliament, has forced a new, restrictive constitution down the throats of the Hungarian people, and has been threatening to curtail the independence of the media, the central bank, and the judiciary. And this in a country that was one of the models of reform after the collapse of communism in eastern Europe. Vladimir Putin is trying out some very undemocratic moves in Russia, but has been stunned by a serious and unexpected backlash from the Russian people which appear to have put his plans on temporary hold — but has by no means altered his long-term trajectory.

While many people view the world as a much safer place today than it was 40 years ago, when communism reached deep into Europe, and authoritarian dictatorships were the rule rather than the exception throughout the world, particularly in Latin America, all this movement toward democracy and liberalization around the planet is not necessarily the end of the political evolutionary process, by any means. Even Plato believed that democracy was the penultimate step, one which must, eventually, devolve into tyranny.

Which brings us to America today.

The founders of this republic seemed to go out of their way to put into place the kinds of institutions that would guarantee that democracy would thrive and be self-sustaining. We are a federation of states stitched together by a central government with three co-equal branches — a distinct executive branch, a bicameral legislature, and an independent judiciary, each with effective checks and balances on the powers of the others — an amendable Constitution, and a strong set of long-established traditions including majority rule, a loyal opposition, and political compromise. These traditions have been strained at various times, and have even broken once — resulting in this country being torn in two during the Civil War — but by and large they have sustained us through some of the toughest times in our history. Indeed, even in the midst of civil war, the union still conducted its presidential election in 1864 when most countries would have postponed it, or even skipped it entirely, because of the national emergency.

Sometimes we here in America forget just how special these institutions are. We forget that some countries operate just fine without many of the things we take for granted. Britain, for example, conducts its affairs quite effectively without a written constitution. This serves as an object lesson as to the relative importance of written documents versus civil conduct, most notably that of majority rule, loyal opposition and compromise between opposing parties. Absent these fundamental institutions, the documents aren’t worth the parchment they are written on, as the constitution of Russia aptly illustrates.

Stability in a democracy depends in large part on everyone understanding that we are all playing by the same rules. That everybody can place their trust in the fact that the restrictions that are keeping us from ramming through our ideas unimpeded are also impeding the opposition from running roughshod over us. While not explicitly written into the Constitution, political compromise is the grease that keeps the engine of representative democracy running smoothly and without overheating. And as any mechanic will tell you, withhold the lubricant, and you run the risk of damaging the engine beyond repair.

In America today, we have one party that is bent on denying lubricant to our democratic engine, convinced that the only way to save the engine is to destroy it. Last summer, during the fractious debate on whether or not to raise the debt ceiling — with the Republicans, led by Republican Leader Eric Cantor, digging in their heels, refusing to compromise, turning a routine congressional vote into a major fiscal crisis — we witnessed far reaching tremors in global financial markets, shaken by the fact that the government of the world’s largest and most powerful economy was mired in partisan gridlock. The Republicans were doing nothing less that holding this country’s creditworthiness hostage to their stated desire to stand as a roadblock to President Obama in every way possible so that his presidency would be a failure. That our credit rating was downgraded by Standard and Poor’s, resulting in the loss of trillions in investor equity, was a small price to pay in order to destroy a presidency.

We next saw Cantor and the Republicans politicizing the plight of the victims of Hurricane Irene, tying monies for relief aid to corresponding cuts in a litany of programs that the Republicans in Congress have had a long-standing hatred for — thereby putting political concerns before the needs of hurricane victims.

As we mentioned, the Congress is a bicameral institution, and so not all of the intransigence is on the House side. For their part, Republicans in the Senate, although technically in the minority, are doing their damnedest to keep pace with their House brethren in the “no compromise” sweepstakes. They have brought the process of confirming President Obama’s choices to everything from government agencies to judicial appointments to a complete standstill, even when those nominees are extremely well-qualified for their positions. A requirement that the previous president completely ignored (“Heckuva job Brownie”) and yet still managed to get Democratic approval. As outgoing Congressman Barney Frank observed, the Republicans in both houses of Congress are “blatantly distorting the Constitution, substituting a refusal to allow the constitutionally mandated nomination process for the legislative process in which they simply do not have the votes to accomplish what they want.”

The hypocrisy here is that while the Republicans are standing like a monolith for deficit reduction, these very same Republicans had no trouble approving President Bush’s tax cuts and our involvement in two wars whose impact on the budget dwarfed the TARP bailout. But now that a Democrat is in the White House, they want to tie his hands and keep from him the tools that he needs to fix this Republican-generated mess. All so that they can point their fingers and say, “see, things are getting worse”, and “how’s that ‘hope-and-change’ thing workin’ for ya?”

The complete absence of compromise, coupled by this irrational need to destroy the opposition rather than to work with them, is not unlike the way business is conducted in tinhorn banana republics, in which political opponents are undermined so that your political faction can gain the upper hand. The needs of the people don’t even figure into the equation. It’s all about getting your hands on the switches of power so that you can dictate your will on the country.

The Republican party, like the Nazis before them, are adept in using the institutions that democracy provides in order to undermine those very institutions, and put into place something that is quite different from kind of government those institutions were designed to sustain. By hijacking our Congress and the Judiciary, the Republicans are now in a position in which they are free to hurt America at will in order to achieve their political objectives. They want to destroy our economy, and they have come some distance along that road, from taking Bill Clinton’s surplus and turning it into a deficit of unimaginable proportions and then hamstringing President Obama in his attempts to get it under control, to the wanton destruction of the middle class, once the backbone of the American economy, now slipping further and further into poverty every day. They want to destroy our political institutions, subverting them from every angle, rendering even a numerical majority for the Democrats in the Senate utterly meaningless by forcing virtually everything that comes before them to pass with a “supermajority”. They even want to destroy our military, once the Republicans’ pride and joy, by cutting funding at the expense of soldiers in the field (while at the same time allowing expensive military projects that benefit their states or districts), turning over essential military operations to contractors, and denying veterans, who have given the full measure of patriotism for their country, medical and other benefits to help them with their transition back to civilian life.

All the while chanting their “support the troops” mantra, without so much as a trace of irony.

In short, the Republican objective is to weaken and destroy America so that they can wrest power from our democratic institutions and replace it with their self-styled authoritarian dictatorship. A post-democratic tyranny that Plato would have been proud of.

If we value our democratic traditions, and our democratic principles, not to mention our very way of life, we have to see the Republican Party for what is — the single most dangerous terrorist threat our nation has ever faced.

Our very future as a representative democracy is in the balance.

They will win in the end only if we let them.

They must not be allowed to prevail.

There is little surprise in these results. South Carolina’s Republican Party is made up virtually exclusively of white antebellum racists for whom the issues that sparked the Civil War — a war whose tyranny began in South Carolina, and didn’t end until Sherman ripped the state in two — are still unsettled. And of all of the candidates before this ugly, bigoted crowd yesterday, only Gingrich can speak with both the eloquence and the coded language of racism and authoritarianism that causes these folks — who were lynching black people on a regular basis just two generations ago — to swoon.

If any state in the union is representative of current Republican Party thinking, it is South Carolina. Openly defiant, rigidly uncompromising, and focused on only one objective: to get that n-word out of the White House. This is actually the litmus test that the voters were applying to the candidates in the run-up to the voting yesterday — which of these men could defeat President Obama in the general election.

Not which one of these men can turn back the tide of unemployment. Or can get the economy back on its feet. Or can thoughtfully deal with potential nightmare scenarios in Iran and North Korea. Or can help repair the educational system. Or can provide quality health care for all. Or can help reverse the cycle of poverty in our inner cities. Or has ideas to repair a system of government so paralyzed by partisan gridlock and special interest lobbyists that it no longer serves the needs of the people.

The voters of South Carolina were simply not interested in voting for a candidate who might be able to address any of those issues, not that they had the opportunity to actually choose someone who might be able to, given the slate of candidates before them. No, all they cared about was defeating President Obama, an objective that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made clear was the primary objective, for the US Senate at least, and which has now apparently been fully embraced by the party faithful.

They’ve learned the lessons of 2008 very well. Many of these same people were as luke-warm to John McCain then as they are to Mitt Romney this time around. And while firebrand Sarah Palin may have made the ticket a bit more palatable to them, it still wasn’t enough to get them to come out en masse to ensure a McCain victory. And just look what happened. There’s a n-word in charge.

So there’ll be no repeat of last time. No milquetoast like Romney will do when there’s a fire-breathing, bone fide racist like Newt Gingrich, a man who can make moronic ideas sound truly inspired, who hates all of the things that they hate, and isn’t cowed by the tsunami of political correctness that has turned this country into a bunch of limp-wristed faggots. No sir, Newt is a man who has principles and who isn’t afraid to blame others when those principles shift, as they so often must when the press keeps hounding you with your own words that completely contradict, well, … your own words.

This is what Newt brings to the table. Newt has just enough eloquence to make completely insane ideas sound not only plausible, but desirable, especially to an audience that can’t read. He is fluent in that obscure and wonderfully coded language of racism that only its practitioners recognize and understand. He’s angry, just like they are, and while he may be morally flawed, that’s par for the course these days. And besides, all this “family values” stuff only applies to those people who are living their lives in defiance to God and Jesus, not those whose mission it is to do God’s work in smiting the bastards.

Newt understands this. And so Newt Gingrich has become the pied piper of all of the ignorant racists in America who are now waking up every morning to that n-word in the White House, and who are looking for someone — anyone — even someone as clinically insane as Newt Gingrich, to lead them out of the darkness and back into that black-and-white world of old, filled with crew cuts and bobby sox, and n-words had their own drinking fountains, and were well-behaved, and knew who’s boss — a world that existed before those damn Kennedys took over the country, and made everything about sex and drugs and loud music.

Mitt Romney enjoyed “front-runner” status only as long as the opposition was divided against him. At one time there were six candidates — Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, and Ron Paul — who effectively divided the anybody-but-Romney vote between them. A portion of potential voters that totaled around 60%, as we noted in a previous column. Now that three of them — Bachmann, Perry, and Cain — are out, Newt seems to have been the major beneficiary of their support. The campaigns of Ron Paul and Rick Santorum are only treading water at this point, and after Florida, at least one of them, if not both, will go belly-up. Based on the profile of the average Paul and Santorum voter, only Newt stands to gain. The anybody-but-Romney vote, the largest voting block in Republican circles, has found their anybody-but candidate.

The reasoned, logical argument that Mitt Romney stood the best chance of defeating President Obama this fall has been blown over by the sheer force of the wind at Newt’s back as more and more angry imbeciles have decided that the only way to win is to speak to peoples’ anger, hatred, bigotry — something of a specialty of Newt Gingrich.

But while hatred and bigotry are slow-burning embers, anger is an incendiary emotion. And like most incendiary things, it flares up brightly, only to die down very quickly to virtually nothing. It takes a lot of energy to sustain a bright flare, just as it does to sustain anger. And while the faithful may have enough fuel on hand to carry them through to election day, we doubt that Newt has. Newt’s fragile psyche will probably crack long before November 6, and maybe even before the convention. He’s got a history of mental breakdowns, with manic-depressive features, and this victory in South Carolina may end up doing him more harm than good. He’ll be on the news shows later today, probably making reckless statements in that grandiose style of his, painting a picture in colors way too psychedelic to be considered reflective of realism. And now that he’s the front-runner du jour, the press will begin their relentless hammering. And while Newt has some anti-press chops that have sustained him well in terms of gaining votes, now it’s the press’ turn. We don’t think they’ll be treating Newt too kindly.

Although, a responsible press has been completely absent throughout this entire process, so we won’t be surprised of the guardians of our democracy take a powder on this one either (you see, there’s hatred for the press on both sides of the political spectrum).

So now the great death-watch begins. Newt is at the high end of his manic-depressive arc right about now. And the thing about these kinds of peaks is that they inevitably lead to troughs so deep that they make Death Valley look like Tibet. The dark, ugly side of Newt’s psyche, the mirror image of what we’re being treated to right now, is lurking in the shadows. There’ll be setbacks to come, and if they start to pile up, Newt’s fragile defenses will start to break down. It would be better for the party if this happens before the convention.

But for America, it’s best if he has his public meltdown after Labor Day. Because when Newt Gingrich is forced to suspend his campaign in October for medical reasons, it won’t just be the candidate who will be going down in flames. It will be a party, intoxicated by the poison of its own bigotry and hatred, that will take the biggest body blow.

After 2012, the Republican Party will have to decide whether it’s going to reform itself into a legitimate political party, or continue its descent into becoming a fully-fledged terrorist organization, bent on the subversion of our democracy into a pseudo-Christian, authoritarian dictatorship.

Newt Gingrich has visions of Mussolini dancing in his head.

We wish him Mussolini’s fate.

Since Monday, we’ve cranked out 7,279 words about the lead-up to the South Carolina primary. And today, in the middle of the first significant winter storm to hit Pittsburgh so far this season, we thought we’d just spend Saturday morning waiting for nature to get all of this snow and ice out of its system so that we can go outside and dig out — which, according to the latest radar loop, looks like it may be within the hour.

So, we’re going to take a much-deserved morning off, and ponder what we’ll be writing tomorrow, as the dust settles from the primary, and the message that South Carolina will send to the nation today begins to become clear.

Besides, we’re much more focused this morning on watching the snow that is gathering in the hemlocks outside our window as we sip our coffee, than on the tiresome goings-on in the Palmetto State.

Hell, even God took a day off.

Not that we believe in all that biblical nonsense, of course.

Yesterday, Rick Perry, Texas überdoofus deluxe, announced that he was throwing in the towel in the presidential race, and was urging his followers to support angry, racist, arrogant, anti-intellectual, half-man/half-pig mutant hybrid zoophilic microcephalic psychopath and sneering, preening, self-aggrandizing, perennially unfaithful serial husband Newt Gingrich for President of the United States.

“Romney Plummets“, “Gingrich Soars“, the headlines suddenly started screaming on Thursday afternoon, as Gingrich, now armed with Perry’s former supporters, appeared to be turning the race into a dead heat with widely-despised, yet somehow still unshakable front-runner Mitt Romney, in the last 36 hours before the voting in Saturday’s South Carolina primary commences.

So apparently now we have a real nail-biter on tap for tomorrow’s gathering of the voters whereas just yesterday morning, before Perry dropped out, we had a blow-out.

We wonder what will happen today.

Of course, just in the nick of time, we have one of Newt’s former wives coming forward to make sure that the voters know the “real Newt”, or at least the Newt that she knows. This promised to be less than flattering for Gingrich, and while the full interview has not yet aired at the time of this writing, what has already leaked out is potentially devastating for the Gingrich campaign, just when they got a boost from the Perry drop-out.

Marianne Gingrich is wife #2. She’s the one that Newt was having an affair with when his first wife was in the hospital battling cancer. In what would become a pattern of Newt trading in defective wives, he served his first wife with divorce papers in her hospital room so that he could marry Marianne, the wife who is coming forward now.

True to his pattern, Gingrich divorced Marianne when she revealed that she was suffering from multiple sclerosis, but not before he suggested that he and Marianne have an “open marriage”, so that he could carry on with one of his Congressional aides, a woman named Callista, who, it turns out, is the android that Gingrich is currently married to. “Callista’s fine with it”, Gingrich told Marianne, “so I don’t see what the problem is.”

The problem, as we see it, is that all of this was going on while at the same time Gingrich was leading the charge to impeach President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Now, this sounds like a textbook case of rickpocrisy, if you ask us.

All of this should concern Gingrich’s current wife, Callista, because as soon as Newt finds out that she suffers from severe trichakranosia*, an affliction in which one’s hair fuses into a helmet-like structure, he’ll be kicking her to the curb faster than you can say, “contract with America”.

Marianne also tells about how Gingrich spent much more money than he earned, and how they were broke all the time. She took over managing his finances, but he just kept spending and spending. When he was fined $300,000 for ethics violations while he was Speaker of the House in 1997, Marianne says that there was no money to pay the fine. Why he wasn’t hauled off to prison in chains where he could be subjected to nightly prostate exams from some guy named Jamal, as any one of us would be under similar circumstances, is unclear. Obviously, this was before Newt became a lobbyist, and could command $1.6 million dollars in “fees” from agencies like Freddie Mac.

But what’s most disturbing is what Marianne reveals about the complete mental breakdown that Newt suffered right around the time of the investigation into his ethics violations. Always the college professor, even as he was slipping into madness, Gingrich started writing a book in which he apologized for his “misdeeds”. The book was apparently a real page-turner, because when Marianne and Newt’s congressional staff got their hands on it, they destroyed it. Although we’d like to think that in this age of electronic documents, there’s a copy of it floating around somewhere, just waiting for the right moment to come out. It would make an ideal “October surprise”, should Gingrich actually win the Republican nomination.

We can only hope.

Gingrich’s behavior continued to become more erratic as his mental breakdown became more acute, until eventually he “stopped functioning” altogether, prompting Republican Congressional leaders to stage a formal intervention.

Now, over the course of the past few months, the staff and management here at OMT have said a lot of things about Newt Gingrich in our editorials — some truly terrible things … wild, some might say, irresponsible, perhaps borderline-libelous accusations, some of which have approached the hinterlands of the disgusting … all in good fun, of course — but what Marianne Gingrich is saying here about his mental breakdown is a real bombshell. Newt Gingrich is running for President of the United States. President of the United States. And his history includes an ugly little incident in which he went into a serious mental tailspin over the course of a year? A breakdown that was so severe that he was unable to function, unable to perform his congressional duties? And congressional leaders had to intervene?

While we’re on the subject, what exactly did this “intervention” entail? Did they sit him down and talk to him, and then everything was OK, or did they put him into a straightjacket and haul him off to some sanitarium in rural northern Virginia for treatment?

And we’re supposed to want someone like this in the Oval Office?

Legitimate questions all.

We’re old enough to remember the 1972 presidential race (hell, we’re old enough to remember the 1956 race, but don’t remind us), when Democrat George McGovern picked Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton to be his running mate for the fall campaign against Richard Nixon. Within days after the convention broke up, it was revealed that Eagleton had undergone electroshock therapy some years back, which was a pretty boilerplate treatment for depression at that time. Still, it caused a firestorm of controversy, fueling fears of a vice president who might come unhinged should, God forbid, the president become incapacitated. And within a fortnight, Eagleton was off the ticket, and Sargent Shriver was on.

With the Newt Gingrich situation, we’re talking about someone running for president who has a history of serious mental problems, whose ego is so completely out of control that he is fairly drooling to get his shit-hooks onto the nuclear switches.

It’s been obvious to us for years that Gingrich has serious mental health problems. We think he should be strapped down to a gurney in a remote psychiatric asylum somewhere out in the Nevada desert, say, where trained professionals can study him up close, perhaps removing tiny bits of his brain to slice into thin wafers suitable for displaying on a slide under a microscope, putting him on a 24-hour lithium drip, and, oh, let’s see … maybe inserting a cattle prod up his anus and setting it to pulsate at somewhere around five times a second for two hour stretches just to see whether or not it might jolt him into small stretches of lucidity in which the doctors can see whether or not it’s possible to determine an appropriate course of treatment, and if not, then just continue the pulses until he either stops trying to give the nurses history lessons, or passes out.

But that’s just us.

For his part, Gingrich lashed out at Thursday night’s debate, when the first question out of the box was to Gingrich about what his ex-wife said, giving Newt the opportunity to turn the discussion away from his actions and into an angry, spewing diatribe against the media.

As is his wont.

“I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.” This got a standing ovation from the studio audience.

Gingrich went on: “Every person in here knows personal pain. Every person in here has had someone close to them go through painful things. To take an ex-wife and make it two days before the primary, a significant question in a presidential campaign, is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine. My two daughters, my two daughters wrote the head of ABC and made the point that it was wrong, that they should pull it, and I am, frankly, astounded that CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate.”

In a final bleat that gives an indication just how flimsy his grasp of reality is, Gingrich concluded, “I’m tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.”

This, of course, got him another standing ovation form the studio audience.

Don Pardo, tell him what he’s won!

It could well be the South Carolina primary.

If Gingrich really does win on Saturday, and then goes on to clinch the nomination, we’re in for one spectacular implosion this fall, as Gingrich has an ugly public meltdown right around Halloween, just as everything starts closing in on him. It’s bound to make Richard Nixon’s “you won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore” crack-up look like Seasonal Affective Disorder.

As God is our witness, watching Newt Gingrich turn into a babbling heap on national television just might make all of this hideous two-year presidential freak show we’ve been enduring worth every last damn bit of it.

Although we won’t know for sure until we see him being hauled away in a straightjacket.

Stay tuned.

——————–
* – Greek for “hair helmet malady”.

Today, we’re adding a new word to the list, one that we’re really hoping will catch on: rickpocrisy.

The word’s definition should be self-evident, like the rights that Jefferson wrote about in the Declaration of Independence (you know … life, liberty, prosciutto). But if you’re not getting our meaning, let us spell it out for you. Rick Santorum is probably one of the greatest practitioners of hypocrisy in modern times; a hypocrite of such Jovian proportions that he dwarfs even the great hypocrites of our day — men like Pat Robertson, John McCain, Dick Cheney, John Boehner, Sarah Palin … yes, Palin technically isn’t a man, but for the sake of the argument, let’s just agree that she is in order to keep things moving.

Instead of rehashing all of the evidence for Little Ricky’s hypocrisy, evidence which has necessitated our creation of the word rickpocrisy, evidence which you’ve all heard before — and if not, you just haven’t been doing your homework — we thought we’d focus on something new. Something both apt and yet wonderfully and deliciously scandalous that highlights in sharp relief the sheer chutzpah of this man and — as she will be the primary focus of our discussion today — his wife, Karen.

Is it fair for us to single out Karen Santorum for criticism when it’s her husband who is the one fighting tooth and nail to impose his morality on the rest of the nation, by his incessant whining about our society’s moral decay while on the campaign trail, or, in his former incarnation as a Congressman and Senator, by statute?

We think so, essentially because she’s right out there on the front lines of the culture wars along with her husband. She’s just as committed to a future in which all of us are forced to toe a sexual and religious line that is a throwback to the dark ages as her husband Ricky is. She publicly lectures us and writes about the beliefs she shares with her husband, which include being against premarital sex, and cohabitation without benefit of marriage. She’s an advocate of having the Constitution define marriage as being between a man and a woman, and she’s also big on no abortions (no exceptions) and no contraception. Just like her husband, Ricky, as one might expect. But Karen Santorum’s talk varies considerably from her walk, at least the walk she used to walk when she was in her salad days. It’s something she doesn’t acknowledge publicly, not even for the useful “born again” story value her owning up to it might have with her fan base. Instead, she’s running away from a past she fears will derail both her present and her future as culture warrior extraordinaire. This, we feel, puts her squarely in league with her husband in the hypocrisy sweepstakes, and that makes her fair game.

If Michelle Obama sat around on a White House couch all day smoking cigarettes and eating Doritos and Ding-Dongs while at the same time was using her position as First Lady to advocate that kids get up and out of the house exercising and eating healthy, she would find herself on the receiving end of our ire too. We can’t imagine the president being especially pleased, either. With her eating Doritos and Ding-Dongs, that is.

But we digress.

While just as much as of a staunch pro-lifer, pro-marriage, pro-family advocate as her husband, Karen Santorum’s commitment to the cause would seem to be, on the surface at least, a bit more personal than that of her husband, Little Ricky. It was Karen, after all, who had to do the lion’s share of the heavy lifting required to bring all of Little Ricky’s progeny (seven at last count, not including a a misfire .. more on that later) into the world. She’s even taken on the responsibility of home schooling the little tykes, while Little Ricky was busy earning a living lining his pockets at the government trough (which included an attempt to bill the Penn Hills school district back in Pennsylvania for their kids’ cyber school classes while they were living in Virginia). It seems that Little Ricky’s only significant contribution to the process of family building — beyond all of the taxpayer money he brought home in order to fund a lifestyle far more lavish than that of the average working family — was his unbridled seminal incontinence.

Still, Karen wasn’t always such a strong advocate of family values.

30 years ago, in 1982, long before she met and married Little Ricky, Karen Garver was a 22-year old nursing student at Duquesne University. While she was there, she contacted Dr. Tom Allen when she was looking for an apartment near the Duquesne campus. Dr. Allen was a friend of Karen’s parents — her father was a doctor, too, and Dr. Allen referred a lot of patients to him over the years. Karen knew that Dr. Allen owned a building near the campus and that there was an apartment in the basement. Dr. Allen lived on the upper floors of the building, which also contained offices for his obstetrics practice. Dr. Allen, who was around the age of Karen’s parents, was divorced, with six grown children of his own. He agreed to rent Karen the basement apartment.

“That first night, as soon as it got dark, she called to say she was scared and asked if she could come up. I figured it was a come-on, but that was OK,” Dr. Allen, who was something of a hound dog back in the day, recalled. After that first night, Karen never left, and moved in with Dr. Allen.

Karen was 22 at the time, and Dr. Allen was 63. They lived together for 6 years.

Now, before you start thinking about how ironic it is that noted anti-premarital sex advocate Karen Garver Santorum was making the beast with two backs with a man nearly three times her age without the benefit of God’s matrimonial blessing, we have to stop you short in order to tell you that this story gets even better.

Dr. Allen was a leading abortion provider in the Pittsburgh area, an outspoken advocate of reproductive rights, and active in the ACLU and in other liberal causes. He assisted in getting one of the first hospital-sanctioned abortion clinics in Pennsylvania up and running. He also helped found a “therapeutic abortion” clinic at Pittsburgh’s Magee-Womens Hospital back in the 1960s. Dr. Allen was one of the major players in reproductive rights in the region.

And, of course, Karen was fully aware of all of this. According to Dr. Garver, “Karen had no problems with what I did for a living.” For six years, Karen Garver Santorum benefited from living with a man who performed abortions. She lived very comfortably on the money that Dr. Allen brought in from what her husband describes today as wanton baby killing. She probably still has a trinket or two lying around the Santorum household that she purchased with what she and her husband would now readily call “blood money”.

Now, before you start thinking about how ironic it is that noted anti-abortion activist Karen Garver Santorum was living the high life spending Dr. Allen’s abortion money that kept her in a Pittsburgh Symphony subscription, drinking bubbly, eating black eggs, and with a closet full of Ferragamos for all occasions, we have to stop you short in order to tell you — at the risk of repeating ourself — that this story gets even better.

Or, maybe worse. You be the judge.

As one of the leading obstetricians in the region for decades, it turns out that Dr. Allen actually delivered Karen Garver back in 1960. He was the doctor who brought her into the world — 22 years before he started banging her.

And you were thinking that the Woody Allen and Soon Yi thing was icky?

Now here at OMT, we have a pretty high tolerance for sexual behavior among consenting adults. As long as nobody’s getting hurt, we really don’t give a shit what people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms. But we know that many of our readers don’t share our permissive outlook, and so we fully expect some of you to be saying things like ewwww, and yuck when you think about the fact that Karen Garver Santorum was living with and sleeping with the very same man who yanked her from her mother’s birth canal 22 years earlier.

We wish we were making this up — and regular readers of OMT can be forgiven if they think that we are — but we assure you, this is all true, all legitimate, all the real deal. Our imagination is pretty vivid, to be sure, but we’re not that good.

Interestingly, Karen didn’t manage produce issue in those five years of having all that sex with the guy who delivered her, in stark contrast to the fecundity she has exhibited since she hooked up with Little Ricky. So we are left to assume that (1), she and Dr. Allen used contraception, which is something that Karen today is vehemently opposed to, (2), they did not use contraception, and Dr. Allen, by then in his mid 60s, was shooting blanks, or (3), well, maybe he wasn’t shooting blanks and something did happen. And what with him being a leading abortion provider and all, it would have been easy for the two of them to sweep the whole unpleasant situation under the … well … that’s all just sordid speculation now, isn’t it? Here at OMT, we’re above such sensationalist tripe.

For the most part, anyway.

But c’mon now, with her being in her 20s and him being in his 60s, it would be reasonable to consider that he wasn’t at all interested in having any more kids, especially since he already had six, or that she wasn’t ready to have kids yet — and hey, let’s face it, what 20-something babe wants to start having kids with some old geezer who’ll be in his 80s when the kid graduates from high school? Regardless, the likelihood of Karen and Dr. Allen using contraception is within the bounds of reason. But again, we’re just speculating.

As for Dr. Allen’s virility, it turns out that he always had an eye for younger women, having had affairs with several young chickies before Karen. “My first marriage didn’t do very well because of that behavior,” he says. After he and Karen broke up, he married a woman 30 years his junior, to whom he’s still married. Of course, he’s 92 now and uses a walker, so there’s little chance that some young nursing student is going to come along, figure him for a catch, and wreck his marriage. And as for whether or not Dr. Allen might have had fertility problems when he and Karen were cohabitating, it’s not a stretch to consider that with his having a specialty in reproductive medicine, he would have all of the latest treatments at his fingertips (so to speak) to assure that he wasn’t shooting blanks.

But again, speculation …

Karen’s relationship with Dr. Allen really pissed off her parents — devout Catholics with 11 other children — to no end, and it ended up straining their relationship. Of course, we’re sure that she’s come a long way toward mending fences with them since she hooked up with Little Ricky, even though at a paltry 7 children, they are no match for the 12 that Karen’s parents cranked out. Haven’t these people heard about overpopulation?

Today Ricky and Karen are both on record blasting the moral decay that cohabitation without the benefit of marriage represents, and they want to put laws on the books that punish people who engage in that kind of behavior, which they deem sinful and destructive to society. As if our jails aren’t already overcrowded. Karen apparently had some kind of trauma stemming from her living with and screwing her mother’s wealthy obstetrician, and she wants to make sure that nobody ever has the chance of making the same mistake that she did. Or something like that.

But on with our story.

It wasn’t long after Karen and Dr. Allen broke up (she was getting into her late 20s by then, and the good doctor was probably jonesin’ for some fresh meat) that she met up with Little Ricky — they got married, and the rest is history.

Well, until 1997, when Karen became critically ill in the 20th week of one of her pregnancies. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported at the time that Little Ricky and Karen were considering an abortion in order to save Karen’s life, something they now oppose for other people when the mother’s life is in danger. The only thing that kept them from going through with it was Karen suddenly having a miscarriage, expelling the fetus, and making the procedure unnecessary. Because of this, they were able to have an intact body to grieve and bury, something which both Little Ricky and Karen feel was very important, and instrumental in helping them through the tragedy.

But today, Little Ricky and Karen don’t want young couples facing the same problem to have the option that they were considering. After getting over his personal grief, Little Ricky led the charge against the infamous “partial birth abortion”, a late term procedure which permits the fetus to be removed from the body intact, and with minimum of trauma to the mother. Ricky opposed it in all instances, regardless of whether or not the mother’s life was in danger. This, even though he and his wife were considering having a late-term abortion when Karen’s life was threatened. Evidently, they now feel that if you just wait things out, everything will work out in the end, because that’s what happened to them.

Except that their extraordinary good luck was just that – extraordinary good luck — a hand that most couples in that position aren’t dealt. Oftentimes the mother dies, sometimes both the mother and the baby dies. While in the Congress and in the Senate Rick Santorum fought tirelessly to prevent other couples facing a medical emergency from having the option to work with doctors to determine what might be the best course of treatment. Little Ricky and his wife never had to deal with the tough decisions that most couples in this situation face; because they were able to dodge that moral bullet, they only think they did, and now they think they know best.

And so they want to deny other couples in the same situation that Ricky and Karen came within an eyelash of facing in 1997 the opportunity to have a body to grieve and bury. A process that Ricky and Karen thought was so important for them that Karen made it the basis of her book, Letters to Gabriel, thereby compounding the hypocrisy of their denying others the opportunity to grieve by crassly making money on their grief with book sales to the legions of like-minded morons who look to these two hypocrites as role models.

So Karen can have premarital sex with a man 40 years her senior who performs abortions, until she meets up with Little Ricky, with whom she seriously considers having an abortion until nature intervenes, giving her the good fortune of not only living to tell about it, but to tell about it in a book from which she manages to reap substantial royalties. But now they don’t want anyone else to have any of the options (or the fun, if you consider having sex with the doctor who delivered you as being fun) that they had.

Now do you have an inkling as to what rickpocrisy means?

We thought you might.

These two are a match made in … no, no they’re not. They only think they are.

Still, Mary Magdalene used to be a streetwalker before she hooked up with Jesus and he turned her life around. People can change.

But Karen Santorum is no Mary Magdalene.

And Little Ricky Santorum is no Jesus Christ, no matter how much he may think he is.