She’s Back

She was the talk of the nation, and then she disappeared. How did that happen? No, not Paris Hilton – who has done nothing even remotely outrageous or even very interesting in the last few years – we’re talking about Sarah Palin. In July, back in 2008, John McCain stunned the nation, or confused the nation, by announcing that this woman, the obscure new governor way up there far away Alaska, would be his running mate, and God willing, the next vice president – a heartbeat away from the most powerful position in the world. And as he was an old coot you had imagine Sarah Palin with the codes to all the nuclear weapons and the option to wage all-out war, and perhaps end life on earth, if she chose to – for whatever reason. And the rest of that summer and up until November there was the endless analysis of her inadequacies – intellectually and emotionally and practically – and general unfitness for the office. That interview with Katie Couric didn’t help – Sarah Palin doesn’t read much of anything and doesn’t know much about anything, and doesn’t even try to fake it. And that interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson where she clearly had no idea about the cornerstone of our new foreign policy, the Bush Doctrine (where reserve the right to wage all-out preemptive war on any nation we think may, one day, possibly, somehow, at some hypothetical point in the distant future, be a threat to us) – well, that didn’t help either. And then there was Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live week after week, mocking Palin’s somewhat frightening goofiness, by mercilessly quoting her word for word. The nation was transfixed by all this.

But John McCain had his reasons for choosing Sarah Palin. The hard-right evangelical social conservative wing of his party didn’t think he was really their guy, and the Ayn Rand end-all-government wing didn’t trust him either, nor did the big-business end-all-regulation-of-everything wing. He was a maverick. But McCain was simply the last man standing after the primaries, the compromise maybe-good-enough choice, and clearly the only Republican who stood a chance against Obama, after eight years of the disastrous George Bush the Younger. At least McCain was a war hero – for getting shot down and spending almost all of the Vietnam War in a small prison cell outside Hanoi. No one was supposed to ask how that gave him insight into anything, and so they didn’t ask. He was a hero, somehow.

But McCain’s own party clearly didn’t like him much. He chose Sarah Palin to keep their votes, as she said all the right things he was reluctant to say – Real American didn’t live in cities, or on the coasts, and Real Americans didn’t think much of people who thought they were so smart because they had all those fancy degrees and knew things. No one needed to know things. We’d had enough of the fancy-pants elites who thought they were so smart. They’d ruined everything, and it was time to take the country back from these damned educated and thoughtful un-American creeps – and so on and so forth. And don’t get her started on icky minorities and gays and whatnot.

Well, things didn’t work out and the McCain-Palin ticket went down in flames. He was old and she was young. He was unreliably conservative – sometimes siding with the Democrats in the past – and she was take-no-prisoners committed to the cause, without really understanding the details of course. They should have complimented each other. But she was too toxic. The more she energized the base the more she scared the crap out of the rest of the nation.

And then, the summer after the election disaster, she abruptly resigned her governorship, less than halfway through her first term. She said she felt called to be bigger than Alaska, to be a real national player – or maybe the job bored her, or maybe she actually found Alaska just too provincial – an isolated dump with no big-city bright-lights pulse at all. No one quite knew what to make of it. Books followed, and her curious reality show, and her daughter appearing on Dancing with the Stars – but she faded. Rupert Murdoch paid her big bucks to come on Fox News now and then, but the world was passing her by. She was little more than a curiosity on Fox, and the speaking engagements were few and far between, and then no one was asking her to come and offer her wit and wisdom. Even Tina Fey moved on. Some things just don’t work out.

But here we are four years later and Newt Gingrich is now saying that Sarah Palin will play “major role” in his administration. Henry D’Andrea offers the video clip of Gingrich saying that on CNN and adds this:

Gingrich wasn’t specific, but he said he would “ask her to consider taking a major role” in my administration. I don’t know if Gingrich is being honest, but if he did pick Palin for some kind of high-level position in his administration, that could help boost Palin for a possible future presidential run and would bring aboard a lot of Conservatives that question Newt’s Conservatism. Nonetheless, if he actually picked her for VP, it’d be the most unconventional thing this entire campaign season. I’d love if he did, but he won’t.

It’s the McCain Gambit all over again. People would no longer question Newt’s conservatism. But Gingrich, who may have an ego the size of Alaska, and a real problem with impulse-control, isn’t dumb. He knows there’s not one position she could handle competently – she has a degree in sports broadcasting, was mayor of a tiny town, and then quit her one significant government job before she had done much of anything, and she’s made no effort, again, to familiarize herself with any of the issues. What would he have her do? And this didn’t work for McCain.

But she’s no one to pass up an opportunity to grab at something like her former significance, such as it was, and on Facebook she posts Cannibals in GOP Establishment Employ Tactics of the Left – and if you’re one of the seven people in the world not on Facebook, most of the text is here:

We have witnessed something very disturbing this week. The Republican establishment which fought Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and which continues to fight the grassroots Tea Party movement today has adopted the tactics of the left in using the media and the politics of personal destruction to attack an opponent.

We will look back on this week and realize that something changed. I have given numerous interviews wherein I espoused the benefits of thorough vetting during aggressive contested primary elections, but this week’s tactics aren’t what I meant. Those who claim allegiance to Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment should stop and think about where we are today. Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, the fathers of the modern conservative movement, would be ashamed of us in this primary. Let me make clear that I have no problem with the routine rough and tumble of a heated campaign. As I said at the first Tea Party convention two years ago, I am in favor of contested primaries and healthy, pointed debate. They help focus candidates and the electorate. I have fought in tough and heated contested primaries myself. But what we have seen in Florida this week is beyond the pale. It was unprecedented in GOP primaries. I’ve seen it before – heck, I lived it before – but not in a GOP primary race.

Yes, everyone is picking on Newt, and it’s just not fair, and there’s more:

But this whole thing isn’t really about Newt Gingrich vs. Mitt Romney. It is about the GOP establishment vs. the Tea Party grassroots and independent Americans who are sick of the politics of personal destruction used now by both parties’ operatives with a complicit media egging it on. In fact, the establishment has been just as dismissive of Ron Paul and Rick Santorum. Newt is an imperfect vessel for Tea Party support, but in South Carolina the Tea Party chose to get behind him instead of the old guard’s choice. In response, the GOP establishment voices denounced South Carolinian voters with the same vitriol we usually see from the left when they spew hatred at everyday Americans “bitterly clinging” to their faith and their Second Amendment rights. The Tea Party was once again told to sit down and shut up and listen to the “wisdom” of their betters. We were reminded of the litany of Tea Party endorsed candidates in 2010 who didn’t win. Well, here’s a little newsflash to the establishment: without the Tea Party there would have been no historic 2010 victory at all.

It’s those damned elites again, and they have to be stopped:

Pundits in the Beltway are gleefully proclaiming that this primary race is over after Florida, despite 46 states still not having chimed in. Well, perhaps it’s possible that it will come to a speedy end in just four days; but with these questions left unanswered, it will not have come to a satisfactory conclusion. Without this necessary vetting process, the unanswered question of Governor Romney’s conservative bona fides and the unanswered and false attacks on Newt Gingrich will hang in the air to demoralize many in the electorate. The Tea Party grassroots will certainly feel disenfranchised and disenchanted with the perceived orchestrated outcome from self-proclaimed movers and shakers trying to sew this all up. And, trust me, during the general election, Governor Romney’s statements and record in the private sector will be relentlessly parsed over by the opposition in excruciating detail to frighten off swing voters. This is why we need a fair primary that is not prematurely cut short by the GOP establishment using Alinsky tactics to kneecap Governor Romney’s chief rival.

Yeah, yeah – Saul Alinsky – sounds Jewish and left-wing and all – even if she doesn’t know who the guy is. But the warning is clear. Matt and his buddies, demoralize many in the electorate at your risk. We may be nuts but we can break you.

Both CNN and Reuters covered this story, but the coolest assessment comes from TBogg:

Gone-to-seed cougar Sarah Palin, who may be the next Mrs. Newt Gingrich if Callista gets a head cold or possibly her period at an inopportune time, is out defending Newt Gingrich from those mean old Republican elites who dated Sarah back in ’08 and then they never called or returned her long weepy drunken voicemails or angry texts and then there was the restraining order issued following that ugly scene in the Taco Bell parking lot….

But the less said about that the better, because Sarah has moved on with her life and is now going all Mama Grizzly Pit-Bull Screechy Wolf-Killer On Meth on anyone who dares says a discouraging word about her lil’ Newt-cub…

Callista Gingrich, however, might want to update her resume…

But in Politico, Ginger Gibson calls Sarah Palin Newt’s Secret Weapon:

Newt Gingrich has a new unofficial campaign surrogate and her name is Sarah Palin. As the 2008 veep nominee sees it, Gingrich is getting a raw deal from the national media and conservative elite, the very same forces who conspired against her when she was on the national ticket. Palin hasn’t endorsed Gingrich – and has no official role in his campaign – but she is repeatedly surfacing at just the right times on the national airwaves to vociferously defend him.

In her latest appearance, Palin stated: “Look at Newt Gingrich, what’s going on with him via the establishment’s attacks,” she said, though the original question was about Ron Paul. “They’re trying to crucify this man and rewrite history and rewrite what it is that he has stood for all these years.”

Palin then called conservative writer Peggy Noonan “hypocritical” for recently calling Gingrich an “angry little attack muffin.”

“They maybe subscribe such characterization of Newt via words like that, but they don’t subscribe those to say Mitt Romney when he or his surrogates do the same thing,” she said. “That’s that typical hypocrisy stuff in the media that I’ve lived with over a couple of decades in the political arena. So I’m used to it.”

“But in order to help educate the rest of the American public, I’ll articulate that it is hypocritical of the media to subscribe to one candidate and not another, that kind of angry attack muffin verbiage to one and not the other.”

Newt is not an angry little attack muffin. He’s not. He’s not.

But of course he is, and he had a new friend:

As has usually been the case with Palin, her exact motives remain a mystery. But it does seem like the two Republicans share a common bond in suspecting the media and Washington power brokers are biased against them.

When asked about Palin’s unofficial advocacy for him on Friday, Gingrich’s campaign had no comment.

But after Palin picked Gingrich in South Carolina, Gingrich spokesman R. C. Hammond told NBC News: “We think it’s a pretty darn clear call to arms.”

Gibson goes on to explain how Palin’s husband, Todd, backed Gingrich before he won South Carolina, and right afterward, she jumped in and called Gingrich the leader of the pack. And Newt gets a freebie:

Gingrich rarely employs the use of official surrogates, lacking the organization of Mitt Romney, who frequently dispatches supporters to make public appearances. A surrogate that is doing so voluntarily is a plus for a campaign that is struggling to fend off a barrage of attacks.

And this has been going on for some time:

The first sign that Palin would ride to Gingrich’s rescue was a radio interview with Sean Hannity right before ABC aired its interview with his ex-wife, Marianne Gingrich, in which she claimed the former speaker wanted an open marriage.

“I call them dumbarses,” said Palin of the media, according to The Huffington Post. “They, thinking that by trotting out this old Gingrich divorce interview that’s old news – and it does feature a disgruntled ex, claiming that it would destroy his campaign – all this does, Sean, is incentivize conservatives and independents who are so sick of the politics of personal destruction because it’s played so selectively by the media, that their target, in this case Newt, he’s now going to soar even more. Because we know the game now, and we just won’t put up with it.”

“Good call, media,” she quipped.

Ah, the scorn of infidels is the praise of Allah. No wait – that’s the Koran, or Saul Alinsky.

And then there was Romney’s gut Chris Christie criticizing Gingrich on “Meet the Press” after Gingrich’s South Carolina win. Christie called Gingrich an “embarrassment” to the Republican Party and Palin warned him not to get his “panties in a wad” over this. And yes, the image is priceless, and insulting, implying Chris Christie should just be a man here. And she drips with condescension:

You know, sometimes, if your candidate loses in just one step along this path, as was the case when Romney lost to Newt the other night – and, of course, Romney is Chris Christie’s guy – well, you kind of get your panties in a wad, and you may say things that you regret later. And I think that that’s what Chris Christie did.

And then she took it a step farther, saying this, demonstrated a “lack of self-discipline” (unlike her mastery of the political process) with the on the Fox Business Network:

Poor Chris… This was a rookie mistake. He played right into the media’s hands. The host had asked Chris, “Does Newt embarrass the party?” I think he asked him twice, and there, Chris played right into it.

She knows how to handle these things. No one else does. Yes, that’s absurd on the face of it, given what happened in 2008 and since – but her ego is as big as Alaska too.

And earlier she had praised Rick Perry for dropping out of the race and throwing his support behind Gingrich:

“I think what Rick Perry having dropped out and that patriot having done well for the front-runner, whom I will call Newt Gingrich now, being the front-runner, having endorsed him, was a good smart move,” Palin said on Fox News after the results rolled in. “He kind of took one for the team there, the conservative team, when he dropped out.”

Palin quipped: “I don’t know, do political pundits back there in the Beltway feign surprise, or are you really surprised that Newt Gingrich did as well as he did?”

Don’t try to figure out the grammar in that first sentence there. Only asshole elitists do that sort of thing.

But there was Stephanie Pappas with the odd science story of the week:

There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice…

And of course there’s controversy ahead:

The findings combine three hot-button topics.

“They’ve pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics,” said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. “When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it’s bound to upset somebody.”

Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience.

Add this:

There is reason to believe that strict right-wing ideology might appeal to those who have trouble grasping the complexity of the world.

And this:

They found that what applies to racism may also apply to homophobia. People who were poorer at abstract reasoning were more likely to exhibit prejudice against gays. As in the U.K. citizens, a lack of contact with gays and more acceptance of right-wing authoritarianism explained the link.

And from Charles Blow there’s this:

Hey, I get it: Republicans have to reject and condemn virtually everything President Obama proposes, no matter how noble, to satisfy their base. This is our political predicament.

Rick Santorum, however, has followed that logic out the window. In New Hampshire last week Santorum accused President Obama of “elitist snobbery” and “hubris” for suggesting that “under my administration, every child should go to college.”

Santorum had the basic questions. Who are you? Who are you to say that every child in America go to college? And Blow demonstrates that Obama never said that, in fact Obama consistently talks about trade schools and apprenticeships too, and also that college maybe just might be a good thing too:

Oh, the hubris and elitist snobbery of wanting a more educated, more highly employed work force.

But Sarah is back, just in time, to demonstrate how elitist what’s called a good education, and knowing things, really is – or to demonstrate what it means to not know things. And we’re back to 2008 again. Luckily we know what that means.

One More Round

Sylvester Stallone is a strange man, and those six Rocky movies over thirty years are stranger still – and there may be another one on the way – because “artists must again and again go through the dark.” Why? And how do you define “artist” in this context?

But those first six films grossed over a billion dollars, and that’s not exactly chump-change, and Stallone has expensive tastes. Of course the character Stallone plays, Rocky Balboa, is certainly a chump – a dim-witted talentless boxer who always manages to win that one big fight, by enduring getting the crap beat out of him for many long rounds – in slow-motion close-up shots – until at the last moment when he somehow clobbers the other guy but good, or the other guy collapses in exhaustion. And the heroic score swells – something about the Eye of the Tiger or some such thing.

And you can see the appeal of such narratives – the illiterate loser, too slow to realize what is going on around him all the time, every single day, overwhelmed and defensive about everything in his life, wins big in the end by getting beaten to a pulp, and then not actually dying. So there’s a message here – you don’t have to be smart, or aware, or curious, or even coherent, or even employed, or even employable. You don’t have to be successful at anything at all. You just have to be willing to endure being beaten nearly to death. It’s inspiring, if you like that sort of thing. So we get these periodic cinematic paeans to all the heroic dumb-as-dirt incoherent ordinary folks, who will win eventually, if they don’t die. That’s a large demographic – the inarticulate sullen who dream of winning something, anything, one day, if they can manage not to die. It’s their only hope. But it is hope. And Stallone gets his homoerotic martyr jollies, and a lot of money, pretending to get beat up on screen. Everyone wins.

But it’s not real life. Of course it’s not. In real life Rocky Balboa would be dead – ask any doctor or nurse or paramedic who ever watched one of those Rocky movies. They’re absurd. And in real life, watching two exhausted heavyweights stumbling around in the final rounds of long fight, too tired to throw a punch and just leaning against each other, slowly shuffling their feet, is just depressing. No one is going to be a winner. They’re just putting in time, hoping the bell will ring pretty soon and the judges can add up their points and it will be over, one way or the other.

And that’s kind of like watching the Republicans these days, the final days before the Florida primary. It’s almost as if they’re too tired to throw a punch and just leaning against each other, slowly shuffling their feet, and putting in time, throwing a halfhearted punch now and then, just for the hell of it, if they can. And on this day one of those halfhearted punches came from Newt Gingrich. See Conor Friedersdorf with To the Moon, Callista! Newt Gingrich Promises Lunar Colony by 2020:

Speaking at a Florida community college Wednesday, Newt Gingrich promised voters hit hard by the end of the Space Shuttle program that by the end of his second term, there will be an American colony on the moon. Ultimately, he said, it ought to be the 51st state. (Sorry, Puerto Rico.)

And the kicker was in Gingrich’s explanation for why he was proposing this:

The reason you have to have a bold and large vision is you don’t arouse the American nation with trivial, bureaucratic, rational objectives.

He doesn’t belief in rational objectives! Bully for him. But it was a wild and weak punch.

On the other hand, people had been picking on him, people like Bob Dole:

I have not been critical of Newt Gingrich but it is now time to take a stand before it is too late. If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state, and federal offices. Hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who rarely took advice. It was his way or the highway…

Gingrich had a new idea every minute and most of them were off the wall. He loved picking a fight with President Clinton because he knew this would get the attention of the press. This and a myriad of other specifics like shutting down the government helped to topple Gingrich in 1998.

In my run for the presidency in 1996 the Democrats greeted me with a number of negative TV ads and in every one of them Newt was in the ad. He was very unpopular and I am not only certain that this did not help me, but that it also cost House seats that year. Newt would show up at the campaign headquarters with an empty bucket in his hand – that was a symbol of some sort for him – and I never did know what he was doing or why he was doing it, and I’m not certain he knew either.

But maybe Newt has always been a kind of post-rational guy. And now it seems to be his new thing too.

But Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen report on the hammering Newt has been enduring from Matt Drudge and others:

Drudge linked prominently to the American Spectator’s R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.’s similarly harsh takedown of Gingrich over character: “William Jefferson Gingrich.” In it, Tyrrell writes: “Newt and Bill are 1960s generation narcissists, and they share the same problems: waywardness and deviancy. Newt, like Bill, has a proclivity for girl hopping… His public record is already besmeared with tawdry divorces, and there are private encounters with the fair sex that doubtless will come out.”

Drudge runs hundreds of links to stories of all stripes about candidates, but has been seen by Republicans as favorable to Romney in the past.

Conservatives are circulating a piece written by the editors of the National Review: “The Hour of Newt.” The editors, who have been extremely critical of Gingrich for weeks, waved conservatives off the Gingrich bandwagon. “Gingrich backers say that he is inspiring. What he mostly seems to inspire is opposition.”

Ann Coulter, the conservative columnist writing on her self-titled website, warns: “Re-elect Obama, Vote Newt!” She, too, gets Drudge promotion, with a column punctuated with this punch: “Hotheaded arrogance is neither conservative nor attractive to voters.”

Tom DeLay, a top deputy to Gingrich during the Republican revolution of the mid-1990s, joined the chorus of other conservative members breaking their silence about Gingrich’s erratic leadership style. In a radio interview with KTRH, DeLay said: “He’s not really a conservative. I mean, he’ll tell you what you want to hear. He has an uncanny ability, sort of like Clinton, to feel your pain and know his audience and speak to his audience and fire them up. But when he was speaker, he was erratic, undisciplined.”

Someone is worried Rocky may win the fight, by managing not to die:

A top conservative media figure said the flood of attacks reflects a “Holy crap, it could happen” moment in the movement, as Republican leaders began to realize after Gingrich’s South Carolina victory that he could become the nominee, the global face and voice of their party and theology.

“It could happen, and it would be a disaster,” said the conservative, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect private conversations. “All of us who were around and saw how he operated as speaker – there’s no one who’s not appalled by the prospect of what could happen. He thinks he embodies conservatism and if he wakes up one day and has a grandiose thought, he is going to expect all of us to fall in line behind him.

“There’s just so much risk on so many levels,” the official continued. “Everyone’s thinking, ‘It could really happen.’ He could win the presidency if there’s a way to win with 45 percent – a second recession or a third-party candidate. The immediate worry is him winning the nomination and losing the election, tanking candidates down-ballot. In a worst-case scenario, you could see unified Democratic governance, and we’d be back where we were in ’09 and ’10. It’s insane.”

And Vandehei and Allen report this feeling is pretty widespread:

Remember 2010 (Gingrich certainly does): The establishment doesn’t have a great track record in picking candidates and warned primary voters against tapping Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware because they were too radioactive and couldn’t win in the November general elections. The voters didn’t listen, and it cost Republicans the Senate.

Remember 2010 (Romney certainly does): Republicans lost two elections they should have won.

And Greg Sargent in the Washington Post discusses the implications of this:

The New York Times reports today – based on unclear sourcing – that Mitt Romney has endorsed a strategy of raising doubts about Newt Gingrich’s “emotional stability.”

But then there’s Sarah Palin – “Look at Newt Gingrich, what’s going on with him, via the establishment’s attacks. They’re trying to crucify this man and rewrite history, and rewrite what it is that he has stood for all these years.” And Rush Limbaugh on his radio show said he saw all the headlines, calling it all a “coordinated” effort to smear Gingrich – “Now, when I saw all it is stuff – and obviously it’s a coordinated document dump here, opposition research dump. It’s obviously coordinated.”

Yeah, yeah – the exhausted heavyweights are throwing half-assed punches now, and Kevin Drum comments:

It’s sort of fascinating watching the Republican establishment finally go nuclear on Newt Gingrich. As near as I can tell, pretty much everyone who actually served with or alongside Newt in the 90s hates his guts. But as long as he was just writing books and doing think-tanky stuff, they were willing to let bygones be bygones. Ditto for the period when he was supposedly running for president but, in reality, was just conducting an innovative new kind of book tour.

But now that he has millions of dollars of Sheldon Adelson’s casino money and has even an outside chance of actually winning, the long knives are out.

But it is like watching the sad end of a long heavyweight fight between mediocre boxers:

What’s most ironically amusing about all this, though, is that underlying a lot of the attacks on Newt is the complaint that he’s not conservative enough. Weirdly enough, there’s some truth to this by modern GOP standards. Newt’s tone and temperament are perfectly suited to the no-compromise-no-surrender spirit of the tea party-ized GOP, which is why he’s so appealing to the base during debates. But the truth is that for all his bluster, Newt was perfectly willing to do deals during his time as Speaker. He likes to think of himself as a world-historical figure, and that means getting world-historical things done. Simple obstruction is not really his MO. That makes him doubly unreliable, since obstruction is the sine qua non of movement conservatism these days.

Conservatives think that listening to Newt is a hoot, and they love it when he gets the crowds wound up. The problem is that they never quite realized the crowd wasn’t in on the con. The rank-and-file actually took Newt seriously, and now party leaders have to figure out how to suck the fetid air back out of the Gingrich-inspired fever swamps without losing their core audience of old people and the white working class, who are voting for their side because they’re scared to death that Barack Obama is destroying western civilization. In the end, I don’t think they’ll have much trouble pulling this off, but in the meantime it makes the whole spectacle even better fun for us jeering liberals.

But the punches are so feeble. Drum also points out that one week ago CNN’s John King asked Newt Gingrich if it was true that in 1999 he asked his then-wife Marianne Gingrich for an open marriage so that he could continue having an affair with his girlfriend-mistress Callista, who is now his third wife, if you’re keeping count. And on national television, in front of a huge audience, Gingrich said this:

Now, let me be quite clear. Let me be quite clear. The story is false. Every personal friend I have who knew us in that period says the story was false. We offered several of them to ABC to prove it was false. They [ABC] weren’t interested, because they would like to attack any Republican.

It seems that this was a lie. Gingrich’s campaign has finally admitted what ABC knew all along – Gingrich hadn’t suggested any personal friends to them at all – and obviously they hadn’t refused to interview any of these personal friends, as they just didn’t exist. So Drum adds this:

There’s an odd de facto standard for political lying: you can mislead people to almost any degree and it doesn’t really count against you. It’s he-said-she-said. But if there’s a clear, smoking gun fact that you plainly misrepresent, no matter how trivial, then it’s a scandal. By that standard, Newt ought to be in trouble. His dealings with ABC News may not be all that important in the cosmic scheme of things, but by DC standards this is a flat-out, premeditated fabrication and therefore a scandal. Gingrich told a bald-faced lied and he knew he was lying when he did it.

This all fits Newt’s personality. He’s always been more brazen than even your usual hardened politico because he knows that nobody really cares about fact checking. But he went over the line this time. I wonder if he’ll pay a price.

Hey, a tired boxer throws crappy punches. And the other guys do too. In fact David Frum pretty much excuses Mitt Romney’s rather silly caricatures of Obama:

Elections turn on more than facts, promises, and programs – especially this current campaign for the Republican nomination for president. More perhaps than most, this election turns on shared feelings. Many Republican primary voters have been sold a narrative or image of the Obama presidency in which a radical socialist alien president is seeking to wreck and overturn the American way of life and the free enterprise system. That narrative is nuts, but unless you signal that you share the nuttiness, your campaign goes the way of Jon Huntsman’s.

Romney, having no interest in martyrdom, has sent his share of such signals. And it is those signals that I doubt he believes. Whatever else Mitt Romney may be, he’s certainly no fool. So when he says something foolish, I assume there must be a part of his brain that knows better. What choice does he have?

It’s the late rounds. These things happen. And then the bell rang for another round, and they had another debate:

An aggressive Mitt Romney repeatedly challenged Republican presidential rival Newt Gingrich in a fast-paced campaign debate Thursday night, ridiculing the former House speaker’s call to build costly projects in key primary states and to colonize the moon.

Romney vehemently denied Gingrich’s own accusation that he anti-immigrant – more so than any other candidate. And, as charges flew back and forth, Gingrich rebutted any suggestion that he couldn’t rein in surging federal spending.

They slugged it out, and after the bell at the end of the final round, one judge, Kevin Drum again, has declared a winner:

You know those basketball rematches where a team that got pummeled last time suddenly comes out totally on fire and wins by a mile? It’s never clear quite why that happens, but it happened in the Republican debate tonight. I don’t know what Romney ate for breakfast this morning, but he came alive and wiped the floor with Newt Gingrich in this debate. He went after Gingrich for his Freddie Mac connections and made it stick. He was outraged when Newt said he was anti-immigrant, and for once he actually sounded outraged.

And when Gingrich tried “to buy some anti-media cred by attacking Wolf Blitzer” he got stomped:

BLITZER: Earlier this week, you said Governor Romney, after he released his taxes, you said that you were satisfied with the level of transparency of his personal finances when it comes to this. And I just want to reiterate and ask you, are you satisfied right now with the level of transparency as far as his personal finances?

GINGRICH: Wolf, you and I have a great relationship, it goes back a long way. I’m with him. This is a nonsense question. Look, how about if the four of us agree for the rest of the evening, we’ll actually talk about issues that relate to governing America?

BLITZER: But, Mr. Speaker, you made an issue of this, this week, when you said that, “He lives in a world of Swiss bank and Cayman Island bank accounts.” I didn’t say that. You did.

GINGRICH: I did. And I’m perfectly happy to say that on an interview on some TV show. But this is a national debate, where you have a chance to get the four of us to talk about a whole range of issues.

ROMNEY: Wouldn’t it be nice if people didn’t make accusations somewhere else that they weren’t willing to defend here?

Drum:

Ouch. Gingrich has tried that bit about nasty attacks being OK when you’re on some radio show or something but not when you’re on national TV, and for some reason he’s gotten away with it even though it’s transparently self-serving and ridiculous. Tonight he didn’t.

This was all in the first half hour, but by then the debate was over. Romney lost a bit of his mojo later on and reverted to the stuttering, stumbling Mitt that we’ve seen in the last two debates, but not enough to hurt him, especially after Newt was forced to endure ten minutes of attacks over his support for a lunar colony during the second hour.

And Drum calls this attack from Romney both brutal and effective:

ROMNEY: I spent 25 years in business. If I had a business executive come to me and say they wanted to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the moon, I’d say, “You’re fired.”

The idea that corporate America wants to go off to the moon and build a colony there, it may be a big idea, but it’s not a good idea. And we have seen in politics – we’ve seen politicians – and Newt, you’ve been part of this – go from state to state and promise exactly what that state wants to hear. The Speaker comes here to Florida, wants to spend untold amount of money having a colony on the moon. I know it’s very exciting on the Space Coast.

In South Carolina, it was a new interstate highway, and dredging the port in Charleston. In New Hampshire, it was burying a power line coming in from Canada and building a new VA hospital in New Hampshire so that people don’t have to go to Boston.

Look, this idea of going state to state and promising what people want to hear, promising billions, hundreds of billions of dollars to make people happy, that’s what got us into the trouble we’re in now. We’ve got to say no to this kind of spending.

Drum:

Coming from a guy like Romney who’s famous for his willingness to say pretty much anything to anybody, this was a great job of jiu jitsu. It was also true. Gingrich really has been pandering to state interests relentlessly – and nowhere more so than in Florida.

I don’t know how much debates really matter compared to the tidal wave of advertising that’s inundating Florida right now, but if they do matter then Romney won the Florida primary tonight, and almost certainly the nomination along with it. The punters on InTrade obviously agree: Romney’s chances of winning shot up from 66% to 89% and Gingrich’s plummeted from 12% to 5%. Adios, Newt.

And there’s Rick, the News Guy in Atlanta, in an email:

It was interesting to see what may be the end of the Gingrich debate tactic (or is it a strategy? Frankly, I can’t always distinguish between the two) of trying to hijack leadership of all the candidates on stage, by redirecting the focus elsewhere and attacking the common enemy: the media.

But when he tried it again tonight – essentially responding to Wolf Blitzer’s question about what he had said about Romney’s Cayman Islands finances (et al) – calling it a silly question, not worthy of discussion, then admitting it might be a fair question in some non-candidates-debate forum but not in a debate, then turning for support from Santorum, then suggesting that all four of us candidates band together against this kind of thing – he got the rug pulled out from under him by the other front-runner, Romney, who finally came to the realization that he should no longer be helping Newt score points, saying maybe it’s time that any candidate who makes claims elsewhere should be willing to defend them in the debate setting.

You could see Newt’s body go limp, all the power having been drained out of him. Even though I want Newt to win the nomination, I just couldn’t help not loving this scene.

You could see Newt’s body go limp, all the power having been drained out of him – like the boxers in the Rocky films, actually. And Rod Dreher continues the fight metaphor:

Romney won this debate, and probably Florida, and so the nomination. Newt collapsed, as bullies and blowhards often do when somebody fights back. Santorum auditioned for Romney’s VP, and greatly enhanced his chances. Ron Paul shines on, that crazy diamond.

And that was that.

But maybe Gingrich really is Rocky Balboa – too slow to realize what is going on around him all the time, every single day, overwhelmed and defensive about everything in his life, who will win big in the end by getting beaten to a pulp, and then not actually dying. And he has his natural constituency – the inarticulate sullen who dream of winning something, anything, one day, if they also can manage not to die. But this isn’t Hollywood. And those are awful films.