I for one can’t watch the Repugnant Debates.  I have to depend on others to give me the details textually so I can skip and skim. Newtie, as usual, slung his tongue around without much relation to the facts of his own life, or that of others.

In Monday night’s debate, Gingrich characterized the end of his Congressional career after the 1998 midterms as wholly volitional, making his exit sound like a self-sacrificing blaze of glory rather than the acrimonious firestorm it was.

With Gingrich, the distance between reality and rhetoric isn’t shrinking but growing, and the incongruities mount. He has lately fallen in love with his rants against “the elites,” and casts himself as their most determined foe, but I can’t for the life of me figure out a definition of elite that doesn’t include him.

Frank Bruni in the NY Times

I’m with Bruni is his caution to those Dems who think Newt would be the easiest for Obama to wallop.  Sanity would suggest so, however the American people gave W Bush a second term despite knowing what he had given us in the first four years.

In a country which celebrates loud-mouthed braggarts it isn’t a given that one wouldn’t be elected in a kind of American Idol p0erversion of the thoughtful consideration of men and matters the forefathers imagined.

The lead editorial in the NY Times reminds us, as does Bruni, that the Gingrich contempt for the “elites” must surely be self contempt.

Newt Gingrich’s victory in South Carolina turned on an almost comically broad deception, an inversion of the truth in which the insider whose personal wealth and political experience are entirely creations of Washington becomes the anti-establishment candidate. That it worked speaks poorly of voters who let themselves be manipulated by the lowest form of campaigning, appealing to their anger and prejudices.