Hoo, Boy!

We have to thank Newt for some things.

Photo credit: Lonnie Webster. Photographed at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, Little Rock, Ark.

Apparently, that "problem" in the Republican Party started turning around decisively in South Carolina. A GOP "operative" named Mike Green posted this knee-slapper on Twitter:

JUST HEARD OBAMA IS GOING TO IMPOSE A 40% TAX ON ASPIRIN BECAUSE IT'S WHITE AND IT WORKS.

The following aphorism has been popping up frequently on Twitter and elsewhere. I've seen it attributed to Robert E. Lee, Mark Twain, and Maureen Dowd, and I'll tell you right now, I don't believe any of those attributions. I'm thinking ... H.L. Mencken:

South Carolina ... too small to be a nation, too large to be an insane asylum.

Mitt Romney, Street-Smart

We're blessed this year, O my brethren, with Republican candidates for President who have become their own self-parodies, and I'm not actually talking about Newt's high-dudgeon at the indency of questioning his morals, which are obviously impeccable and beyond mere mortal inspection.

Not, I'm talking about Mittens' claim last night in South Carolina that he’s the “perfect example of why we need to send to Washington someone who has not lived in Washington, but someone who has lived in the real streets of America.”

Mitt Romney, channeling Arnold Stang pretending to be The Fonz. We nearly died laughing!

Quote of the Decade

"The higher a monkey climbs on the pole the more you can see his butt."

--David Axelrod, on Newt Gingrich

Those cut-ups, The Capitol Steps, are at it again.

Bush The Third, Guns Blazing

It's clearly Rick Perry's nomination to lose. It's also clearly the Tea Party's party now. That was nowhere more obvious than when spontaneous cheering erupted in the Reagan Library when Perry's death penalty record in Texas was reviewed -- 234 people put to death. Damn right! The bloody-minded have their candidate!

Perry wouldn't back down, which is the only thing that counts for Tea Partiers. Democrats too, since they have a president who seems to do little else.

The fact that Perry wouldn't answer straight questions with straight answers will not matter at all. Why do a quarter of Texans lack health insurance, if your state is so well governed? His answer: “What [Texans] would like to see is the federal government get out of their business!” In other words (we think), it's none of your effing business. He also attacked Massachusetts and by extension Gov. Mittens, for its government mandated, effing socialist health-care.

Perry was asked (twice!), Who are the scientists ("the many scientists") who you say have cast doubt on global climate change? Perry couldn't name a single one. Instead, he compared himself to Galileo in one of the dumbest moments of the night, as though Galileo wasn't the scientist of the 16th and 17th centuries who suffered at the hands of the science-denying Rick Perrys of that age. But never mind.

He pitched to the 20-somethings that Social Security is a criminal enterprise, a fraud, aimed at taking their money and giving it to granny. Some 20-somethings seem to have bought into this political head-fake. But 20-somethings also don't tend to vote in Republican primaries, so we'll see how that Social-Security-Ponzi-Scheme daisy chain works out for him in the long haul. But we've got it clear now: The Perry Doctrine is that Social Security = Public Menace.

The one issue on which Perry wavered was his executive order in Texas to vaccinate 12-year-old girls against the HPV virus, especially considering his withering contempt for Gov. Mittens' "government mandate" for health care in Massachusetts. Perry's executive order was a mandate for government-sponsored health care. Not only that. The HPV vaccination is the gateway drug for increased teenage girl promiscuity, since the vaccinations are really about making sexual activity safer. Apparently, Big Pharma won that round in Texas, since they had drugs to sell at government mandate. Can't personally think of a more un-Republican thing for Perry to have done, and it was the one piece of his past history that seemed to cause him some visible nervousness.

FADING, FADING ... GONE

Jon Huntsman, you disappointed us! Your campaign has characterized those other six guys and the gal from Minnesota as "a bunch of cranks," but last night you seem to have been blissfully on some other plane of existence -- perhaps posing for a GQ photo spread -- and you conspicuously refused to take the (calfskin) gloves off. If you're not willing to fight for it, how are you any improvement over the incumbent?

Michele Bachmann ... eh.

PURE ENTERTAINMENT

Newt Gingrich, whose Statler-and-Waldorf angry muppet act has become a drinking game at our house.

Ron Paul, who I believe promised to get me a gallon of gas for a dime.

Herman Cain, who wandered off into the dusty weeds over "the Chilean model" for Social Security.

You couldn't make this stuff up.

Newt: That Dog Won't Hunt

Madam Virginia Foxx was first in line to sign on enthusiastically with Rep. Paul Ryan's plan to end Medicare.

Yesterday, presidential aspirant and serial adulterer Newt Gingrich threw both of 'em on the bonfire of the vanities, saying on "Meet the Press" that the Ryan plan was too "radical."

Because she holds no -- ZERO -- open town hall meetings, Virginia Foxx has not had the ineffable opportunity to hear from anybody in the 5th District, except her most ardent butt-smoochers. She always claims that everybody always tells her how splendiferous she's performing in Mugstomp-on-the-Potomac.

Even Newt Gingrich doesn't think so.

Newt Gingrich Wants Me for His Army

So a little after 8 this a.m., the phone rings, and this young man on the other end sez he wants me to take an important opinion survey, but first would I listen to a short, informative message before answering some questions.

'Fraid we never got to the questions, because the recorded message was from one Newt Gingrich. I wasn't taking notes -- hell, I was only on my first cup of coffee -- but I clearly heard "liberal, liberal, liberal ... socialist, socialist, socialist" and the general pitch that the serial fornicator Mr. Newt and I (presumably, or else why was he calling me?) could together Take Back Our Country.

When the young man came back on the line, I'm afraid I didn't take his questions, since it hardly seemed worth the effort to mess with his minimum-wage call-center head ... since he was not the author nor perpetrator of this particular piece of crap and only the victim, really, of needing a job.

What I learn from this is that THEY'RE STILL IN CAMPAIGN MODE and intend to cajole and bully the voters for the next two years.

If anyone else gets the same call, perhaps you'll be more patient and let us all know what corporate scum claims to be paying for it.

What Would Jesus Bomb?

According to Justin Carl Moose, 26, of Concord, NC, Jesus would bomb Planned Parenthood.

Moose is a self-described "extremist, radical" and the "Christian counterpart of Osama bin Laden." The FBI arrested Moose in Concord this past Tuesday in what is described as "a sting operation." Apparently, he had been posting tips on bomb-making and threats against Planned Parenthood on his Facebook page and had "collaborated last week with a confidential informant to plan the bombing of an abortion clinic in North Carolina."

From the Charlotte Observer:

According to the FBI affidavit, Moose advocated violence for a variety of causes and communicated with like-minded abortion opponents online.

Moose's Facebook page, which was still public Thursday [but NOT today, far as we can find], contained posts expressing anger at abortion doctors, President Barack Obama's health care plan, and plans to build a mosque near ground zero in New York City. It also included expressions of support for those who have killed abortion providers.

"Whatever you may think about me, you're probably right," he wrote on his Facebook page, according to the affidavit.

"Extremist, Radical, Fundamentalist...? Yep! Terrorist...? Well, I prefer the term 'freedom Fighter.' " ...

"There are few problems in life that can't be solved with the proper application of high explosives :)" Moose wrote two months [after President Obama's health care plan was approved in March]....

There's a lot more, including the NewChannel36 live footage showing the Tea Party "Don't Tread on Me" flag flying over Moose's home.

Fox News must be so proud. Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich too.

Gingrich Disses Palin But Sticks to Party Line on Gay Marriage

Did you know that Newt Gingrich recently converted to Catholicism, which as a religion has been known to frown on serial monogamy?

Newtie gives an interview to Christianity Today in which he takes the expected hard line against gays and abortion but can't seem to remember who Sarah Palin was, and when prompted, refuses to name Sarah as one of the presidential front-runners in 2012.

The thrice-married Gingrich also marvels about how anti-family the Democratic party supposedly is, having apparently memorized "The Works of the Pharisees" in his catechism. So he has determined to speak as a Pharisee and pray in the open as a Pharisee.

Newt Gingrich, Sob Sister

The things one learns from the Sunday morning gasbags!

First, we hear George Will say the greatest thing that President Obama has done -- really, an act of sheer statesmanship -- is to remove the "buy American" provisions in the stimulus plan.

Less than an hour later, some senator from Arizona (McCain, I think his name was) said that it's just plu-perfect AWFUL that the bill has a "buy American" provision in it.

One of these two gentlemen is right and the other is lost somewhere in the space-time continuum.

But the best yuck of the morning came out of the mouth of Newt Gingrich on ABC's "This Week." Newt was alarmed -- perhaps even a little saddened, in that smug, self-serving way of his -- about the "partisanship" that has reinvaded Washington, all because President Obama thinks that it was Republican policies that got us into this mess. It's just a fact: Newt's shit don't stink.

And, oh yes, via the new chair of the Republican National Committee Michael Steele: a government-created job is not actually a job. It's really more of a social indiscretion, like paying your sister $37,000 out of campaign funds for work she didn't actually do.

What Conservatives Think Is Funny

Chip Saltsman, Tennessee Republican operative and campaign manager for Mike Huckabee, is a self-declared candidate for chair of the Republican National Committee, and he thought it would be cool to send out Christmas greetings to all 168 members of the Republican National Committee, who'll be voting for their new party chair come January, and to tuck in a bonus CD of Rush Limbaugh-inspired novelty songs, one of which was "Barack the Magic Negro." Other songs on the CD, all of which enjoyed some air time on Rush Limbaugh's radio show, include "John Edwards' Poverty Tour," "Wright Place, Wrong Pastor," "Love Client #9," "Ivory and Ebony," and "The Star Spanglish Banner."

Chip Saltsman thought it was funny, bless his heart. Others ... not so much.

"I am shocked and appalled," Mike Duncan, the current party chairman, said in a statement released Saturday. Mr. Duncan's shock, appalling as it was, might have been ramped up somewhat by the fact that he's running against Saltsman (and four others) to continue in his job as party chair.

Newt Gingrich was even more categorical in his denunciation: "This is so inappropriate that it should disqualify any Republican National Committee candidate who would use it."

Blah, blah, blah.

We wouldn't be talking about this even now except that as of today there's a new North Carolina wrinkle: Dr. Ada Fisher, a Salisbury doctor and one of only three black members of the Republican National Committee, wrote an open letter to Saltsman:

"Racist actions and deeds have no place in the party. The lack of sensitivity in understanding the historical election we just had and the challenges this nation faces as we must bind our wounds as well as bring our people together requires that we set aside our biases and search out those constitutional principles inherent in our nation's foundings and our parties operation which must undergrid us as we move forward."

Okay then. Dr. Ada Fisher, bless her heart, trying to talk a little racial sensitivity to the likes of Chip Saltsman ... not that that's going to help. And indeed, the next shoe to drop dropped just minutes ago, when Thunder Pig, a conservative western NC blogger, accused Fisher of a kind of partisan treachery with a posting headlined "Ada Fisher Joins Lefties, RINOs in a Racially Motivated Attack on RNC Chair Candidate."

Ada Fisher ought to be ashamed of herself!

For the record, Fisher herself had already come out in support of South Carolina GOP chairman Katon Dawson as the new RNC chair. Also for the record, until approximately 38 minutes ago, Dawson was the member of a country club that wouldn't allow Dr. Ada Fisher through the front door.

Never mind that. And never mind, too, that Thunder Pig's high dudgeon directed at Ada Fisher for criticizing Saltsman does not so far seem to extend also to Mike Duncan and Newt Gingrich. Are they RINOs too?