Newt Gingrich's Lost Marbles Speech

Some days I think we're living in a loony bin and the loonies figure they know best, being loony and all, and are trying to stage a coup. Other days, I know it.

The Nation

Jay Bookman, writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, says that Newt Gingrich's speech last week at the American Enterprise Institute was full of "hateful, vile garbage [that] makes Joe McCarthy look measured and responsible." Joe Klein, in Time, notes wryly: "Newt Gingrich is clearly running for President. How do I know? He gets dumb and angry when running for office [and] pander[s[ to the yahoos." Amy Sullivan, also in Time, suggests that Gingrich might be encouraged by the "Burn a Koran Day" organized by a kooky, right-wing church in Florida.
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[...] Widely touted as a major address on the failings of the Obama administration on national security, Gingrich's remarks in fact veered weirdly into outright craziness and near-drooling paranoia.

So what's new? Well, it looks like Neutie is trying to be the Bull Goose Loony. Have no fear, someone's bound to top him - "I'm crazier than you are!" "Oh yeah? Watch this!":

Stripped to its basics, Gingrich sounded like a psychotic Paul Revere as he warned his listeners—who, it seemed, watching the tape, applauded only sporadically and politely—that "sharia" is on the verge of taking over America. Yes, sharia. "I believe sharia is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States," Gingrich thundered. Not only Obama, but the entire American establishment, is "willfully blind" to the existential threat unfolding right before our eyes. To Gingrich, it's so obvious that it's like saying "two plus two is four," yet the Orwellian monsters who control our government insist that the answer is five, or three, or something else! The threat is so dire that Gingrich even proposed a new law to protect Americans who are one-step away from having full-bearded, scimitar-waving, Koran-thumping Taliban jurists ordering their very limbs to be chopped off and their women stoned. Gingrich, warning that the "fight against sharia" is the defining struggle of our time, intends to propose a law "that no court anywhere in the United States will be allowed to substitute sharia for American law."

Above all, he warned, it's the American left that doesn't get it. It's the left, he said, under the "destructive influence of a secular, socialist system," that sympathizes with radical Islamists and "prefers our opponents to us." It is the left, said Gingrich, which inexplicably fails to understand that sharia "is a direct, mortal threat to every value that the left has." Doesn't the left get it, that women shouldn't be stoned to death? Gingrich wondered. Luckily, we on the left have Gingrich to remind us of the values we hold dear.

Neutie's right about one thing - the American left doesn't get it. We don't get why anybody that batcrap crazy was ever in a position of power. Of course he fucked up everything he touched, but I guess he figures he can be President Of The Tiny-Brained if he doubles down the crazy over non-existent crises. He may know his audience all too well.

I say we get copies of sharia law (if there is such a thing) and carry them around instead of our little red copies of the Constitution and whip 'em out and quote from them every time we get around wingnuts. If we don't tell 'em what it is, I bet the American Taliban'd agree with most of it. Hey, people really like the tasty canapés on the silver platter with the colored toothpicks in 'em if you don't tell 'em they're Snausages smothered in jalapeño ranch. Heh. Don't ask how I know that, let's just say I'm a thrifty host.