The Rude Pundit

Mitt Romney: Always the Bully:
The Rude Pundit didn't think he'd spend so much of his time writing about dressage, the "sport" in which horses are "trained" (read that as, "have the shit beaten out of them") to prance around like they're walking through fields of, well, horseshit for the delight of people who like that sort of thing.

But there, at the end of the Washington Post article about Mitt Romney's jolly sadism towards prep school classmates, is the tale of John Lauber, the boy who Romney tortured most by cutting off his long hair. Turns out that Lauber was gay, that the long hair did mean what Romney and his fellow savages probably thought it meant. And then there's this: Lauber ended up "taking dressage lessons in England and touring with the Royal Lipizzaner Stallion riders." Let that hang in your brain for a moment or two.

As with many things about Mitt Romney, it's hardly a surprise to learn that he was one of those pampered nancy boys who, because he wouldn't drink or ball like crazy because he'd get raped by the ghost of Brigham Young or however the fuck they threaten Mormon kids, took out his young adult hormonal rage on others around him through "pranks." So he treated a nearly blind teacher like the man was Mr. Magoo, tricking him into walking into a door for the giggling approval of the other prep school bitch boys. Romney was a joker, don't you know?

Sure, sure, there's shit that Romney did that can be chalked up to stupid teenager behavior. But at least two of the acts detailed by the Post would be considered felonies. There's the hair-cutting incident, where scared, closeted, hippie-haired John Lauber, "his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help" as he was tackled and held down by a group of classmates, while "Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors." Romney can't even claim he was drunk or on drugs. He just did it.

Then there's when Romney disguised himself as a cop to harass some fellow students: "Romney flashed a police siren and, bearing a fake badge and cap, approached two friends and their dates parked on a dark country road...Candy Porter, a Kingswood boarder from a small town in Ohio, had a strict 11 p.m. curfew. As Romney and his Cranbrook pals played out the joke, pretending to be shocked over empty bourbon bottles in the trunk, Porter thought of the dorm mothers waiting at the door and the threat of expulsion. 'I just remember being like a deer in headlights,' she said. 'I just remember being terrified.'" Ha-ha. Too bad they didn't have YouTube in the 1960s.

You gotta wonder, though. There's a kind of omerta among boarding school students, like a frat not talking about hazing, so if the multiple sources for the Post article were willing to talk so freely about what a bucket of shit Romney was in school, they must hate him, like on a personal, visceral level. Maybe it's because Romney was, even then, an out of touch elitist who judged those around him by their wealth, as several of the former students note.

The Rude Pundit spoke to his Cheater and the Rude co-host, Jeff Kreisler, who attended Exeter. He said about Romney, "I'm a prep school Ivy League prick and that guy pisses me off...He's the guy who would be home for a break and crashes Dad's car and instead of getting in trouble, he gets a new car. He's the guy that everybody would wish had a horrible tragedy that money and power couldn't save him from just so he could struggle." Romney did have a bad car accident in France when he was 19 where he nearly died. Probably he wanted to buy Citroen and put it out of business in revenge.

As far as "pranks" went at Exeter, Jeff continued,  "There was this one kid. He was in my dorm. He was an entitled prick. We cut out magazine letters and made a fake ransom note and put it on the bulletin board saying, 'You're going down.' We had a dorm meeting about it. This other rich asshole, he had like 400 CDs. So we rearranged his CDs and cases. It was a dick move. But we gave him shit,  and then we helped him put all of it back in order."

See, for Jeff, "The things that we did showed that the entitled ones could be brought off their high horse. I was never involved in picking on anyone for a weakness." And if someone did go too far? They got expelled. Of course, at Cranbrook, just outside Detroit, what was the chance they were going to boot out the governor's son?

So what does this have to do with the current Mitt Romney? Would you want to be judged by the idiotic things you did in high school? Of course not. But if the right can bring up President Obama's youth in Indonesia as something that makes him un-American, then the left gets to bring up Romney's cruelty as proof that he's a sociopathic dickhead. And, for that matter, it does matter because Mitt Romney has skated through his life with a fake veneer of compassion when he's always been a heartless son of bitch who didn't care about picking on the weak and the isolated. Someone show us a story where Romney stood up to someone more powerful than he was. No, the bullying continued, at Bain Capital, as governor. Fuck that guy. If the Rude Pundit had a time machine, he'd jump in and head over to Cranbrook, 1965, and kick Romney's pussy ass all over the well-manicured grounds of the joint. The best revenge against him is to deny him what he desires most in the world, the presidency.

By the way, Lauber died in 2004. The assault in high school had to have had an effect on him. But, man, what a "vagabond life" he had. After he abandoned the Lipizzaners, "he received his embalmer’s license, worked as a chef aboard big freighters and fishing trawlers, and cooked for civilian contractors during the war in Bosnia and then, a decade later, in Iraq." His story sounds amazing, touching, heartbreaking, exciting. Romney's? Not so much.

Well, at least the NRA can take comfort that Romney's always had a thing for guns:

Yes, that is exactly what it looks like. And that's the look a bell tower sniper gives just before opening fire on the school below. Let's not allow America to be that school.

One Battle Won, One Battle Lost on the Way to V-Gay Day:
No shit that it was a political calculation. In one of the most ignorant, backwards-ass editorials you'll read on the subject, the conservative roach swatter known as the National Review (motto: "Consistently against civil rights since before the Mulatto president was born") opined against President Barack Obama's statement that "I think same-sex couples should be able to get married." Said "the Editors" (which really just means an intern being flogged by Jonah Goldberg before he jacks off at his desk to pictures of his mom, or, as it's called at their office, "Firing a Derbyshire"), Obama's "dishonesty is not merely a matter of pretending that he has truly changed his mind about marriage, rather than about the politics of marriage."

Of course it was political. The nation, as whole, has shifted towards supporting gay marriage. Actually, let's be a little more cynical about this. The Rude Pundit believes that when you see a poll that says, as a recent Pew one does, "65 percent of college-educated white women and 68 percent of whites under 30 backed the idea," what you're really seeing is that large swaths of the population just don't give a jolly rat shit about who's marrying who. The Rude Pundit talks on a regular basis to voters under 30 and to college-educated white women. You know what most of them say about gay marriage? "I don't care. If you wanna get married, get married. Now, pass the bowl."

What happened in North Carolina and has happened in 30 other states to their constitutions is less about a national feeling against allowing gays and lesbians to fuck connubially than a feeling among most straight Americans of "who the fuck cares?"

In North Carolina, where Amendment 1 passed, saying that no way, no how are gays gonna be able to be happy and, oh, all of you living in sin can go fuck yourselves, too, the turnout was 34% of registered voters (for comparison, 70% voted in the presidential election in 2008). So that's 61% of 34%, which, by the Rude Pundit's awesome ability to use a calculator, means about 21% of registered voters in North Carolina voted to ban everything but man-on-woman marriage. (Suck it, Nate Silver.)

And when you break it down by county, the ones with the highest turnout are the dirt-poor rural ones where, you can bet, every Jesus-licking church was busing the seniors and mountain inbreds to the polls. Mitchell County in far western NC, where the county seat is the town of Analrape, the turnout was over 50%. In Mecklenburg County, where Charlotte is, the turnout was 28%. Because for the most part, straight people don't give a fuck if gays get married.

So what are the lessons of the last 36 hours or so in the unstoppable march of rights?
1. The next step for gay marriage activists is to figure out a way to harness the power of the apathy of large swaths of the straight population. Get them to the polls. The best way to do this? Ask: Who do you wanna stand with? Americans who just want the same rights as everyone else who happen to be the people who create a lot of the entertainment you love? Or this guy:

2. If the Rude Pundit was running some organization trying to get big money out of politics, he'd be attempting get some gay-haters on his side today. Because you can sure as shit bet that President Obama knew damn well that, with 1 out of 6 of his big money donors being from the GLBT community, he better give something back.

However it happened, though, it's pretty crazy cool to have the President say, "Okay, fine, get married, mazel tov."

As a political calculation, it diminishes Mitt Romney in ways that make him seem nearly microscopic in moral stature. It drives a wedge between Romney and moderates. And, whatever differences we have with the President, and there are many, it energizes progressives enough to be willing to get in the game again.

As a message, it is a seismic shift in American identity. No, it doesn't change anything in the short term. But as a symbolic gesture, it's like the first time a dude you're crushing on invites you back to his place for a beer and a blow job. Ah, refreshing and satisfying, with real, genuine hope for the future.

Dick Lugar Gets an Indiana Teabagging:
Let's face it: Richard Lugar's heart wasn't in it. As soon as he was gonna get teabagged, he knew that he would go through the motions, but, if after over 30 years of service to Indiana, he had to pretend to give a damn about the opinions of the racists and cretins of his state, of which there are many, then he might as well just throw in the towel. He might as well coast through the race just to get to the end. Which he pretty much did.

In April 2008, in a speech he gave when he received an award for ethics in government, Senator Lugar pretty much read his own epitaph. The focus of his talk was "bipartisanship." Of course, the backdrop for this was the 2006 reaming Democrats gave Republicans in Congress, as well as the probable election of a Democrat to the White House. So, you know, it ain't as if he wasn't being somewhat self-interested, cravenly justifying his own diminished power. Still, the speech is fascinating for how utterly naive it is, how out of touch with the reality of Bush-era politics (which seem like salad days compared to post-Bush) he was, how very old school it was, like the fact that he took his job seriously enough to work with Teddy Kennedy and Sen. Barack Obama to accomplish things and to live in Virginia, something that Richard Mourdock used against him in yesterday's Republican primary.

Here's Lugar: "Too often bipartisanship is misrepresented as the byproduct of moderate political views or the willingness to strike deals. We should be clear that bipartisanship is not centrism, and it is more than just compromise. It is a way of approaching one’s duties as a public servant that requires self-reflection, discipline of study, and faith in the good will of others." Lugar then accurately pegged the breakdown of bipartisanship as coming from the last decade (beginning, perhaps, with the grandstanding impeachment of Bill Clinton) and from the proliferation of information sources that offer up "news" with perspective as part of it.

He ended the speech with a list of questions he believed a thoughtful budding politician should ask him or herself to avoid "partisanship." Really, it's just hilarious, considering that Republicans have abandoned any pretense that they will accept anything other than total power and capitulation:

"Do you accept that members of the other party love their country and are people of good will, and do you avoid portraying them as unpatriotic?

"Do you believe that members of the opposing party can frequently contribute to good policy and do you make an attempt to include them in early deliberations?

"Do you seek out opportunities to work with leaders of the other party?

"Even as you participate in partisan debates, is your first impulse a sober reflection on what is good for the country?

"Do you study an issue in depth with an open mind and do you avoid an overreliance on your party’s orthodox positions and arguments?"

Now, here's the Indiana GOP Senate nominee: "I certainly think bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view."

It's not that Lugar was noble. Far from it. It's that he was practical. He believed that government ought to get shit done. And for that Mourdock was able to portray him as an Obama-loving carpetbagger. Never mind that Lugar voted with Republicans 92% of the time. Never mind that that placed him ahead of good conservatives like Roy Blunt and Jim DeMint in loyalty. (Yes, that probably means some bills weren't conservative enough for those cocktards.)

Oh, Republicans. Your monster continues to rampage, nearly unabated. You thought you could contain the inarticulate rage you unleashed against the President. Instead, you have allowed the lab experiment free, and it's just a matter of time before it gets around to destroying its creators.

The Washington Post's Michael Gerson Thinks Obama Needs to Be Nice:
It's always sad when a motherfucker doesn't even realize he's fucking his mother. Think about pitiful Oedipus, the ur- in the scenario, fucking his mom when he only thought he was bagging a hot queen. At least he had the good sense, once he realized he was a motherfucker, to rip out his eyes and wander the wilderness. Such tragic nobility is thin in this craven age of ours. There's a particular kind of motherfucker, who, like Oedipus, is maybe deluded into thinking that he is not somebody who looks at mothers and thinks, "Yep, I'm gonna fuck 'em." Pretty much the entire Bush the Stupider administration falls into that category. Can you listen to John Yoo without thinking, "Oh, fuck you, motherfucker"? And that motherfucker is so cold, he will brush you off his shoulder.

Today's motherfucker is Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson. As one of George W. Bush's speechwriters for over five years, Gerson is responsible for penning lines that got us into the Iraq war, like that whole bullshit about a smoking gun becoming a mushroom cloud. Yep, Gerson made the lies palatable and focus grouped and made sure that the scared idiots in this country wanted blood. The pathetic part of it is that Gerson seems to have believed in his own propaganda. That's a willfully blind motherfucker who'd make Oedipus say, "Damn."

In his latest "column" (if by "column," you mean, "the dried dog shit that's left on your shoe after you think you've scraped it clean"), Gerson joins the "oh-my-stars-and-garters" crowd in decrying how mean that ol' meanie President Obama is being while campaigning for reelection.

"The brand of the Obama reelection campaign, so far, is ruthlessness," he writes. What has the man who has been accused of being a foreign-born, America-hating communist who wants to take away everyone's guns and round up people to be put in concentration camps (and that ain't even getting into the overt racism) said to give Gerson the vapors? "It has accused Mitt Romney of being soft on Osama bin Laden. It has singled out some Romney donors by name for public attack. Romney, we are informed, enjoys shipping jobs abroad, which is 'just what you’d expect from a guy who had a Swiss bank account.' Obama has accused Republican congressional opponents of social Darwinism and indifference to autistic children."

Well, fuck, at least Obama's ruthlessness is about things that we might consider "real" and not the fantasies of paranoid oxycontin addicts masturbating into their microphones.

Indeed, Gerson misunderstands Obama in the way most conservatives do. "[T]he Obama brand once consisted mainly of inspiration," he says. The right needs to impose this narrative on Obama. See, now they want Obama to be seen as once having been Hopey the Change Negro who has now been transformed into Blackie the Panther. Hopey would have never used Osama bin Laden's death in an ad. Don't we all miss Hopey? Don't we all hate Blackie? (Note: Out here in reality, we know that he's neither.)

For what is Gerson lamenting when he writes, "Obama’s talent for inspiration was the single most interesting thing about him as a politician. Without that aspiration, what is left of his appeal?" Is he bemoaning the loss of something that he so desperately loved?

Oh, wait, here's Gerson on October 15, 2008: "During the financial crisis Obama has contributed nothing of note or consequence. His only recent accomplishment has been to say questionable things in the debates -- attacking Republicans and capitalism for a credit meltdown that congressional Democrats helped to cause, blaming America for Iran's nuclear ambitions, talking piously about genocide prevention when his own early Iraq policies might have resulted in genocide -- all while sounding supremely reassuring and presidential."

Or perhaps the column from September 17, 2008, which says that the Obama who wanted to unify the nation in his early speeches "is no longer in the race" because of his attacks on McCain, which suggests that Hopey was gone a long time ago. Because people like Gerson helped create a GOP that killed him. But that won't prevent them from beating up the ghost of hope.

One last note on Gerson's sad little scribbles. He writes about two Obamas: "There is the Hyde Park Obama, lecturing on constitutional law, quoting Reinhold Niebuhr and transcending old political divisions. There is also the South Side Obama, who rose in Chicago politics by doing what it takes."

Can someone tell this bespectacled motherfucker that Hyde Park is on the south side of Chicago? And that perhaps that difference isn't as strict as he needs it to be?

Biden, Bin Laden, Obama, Osama:
Okay, one more piece of ancient history that all of a sudden seems rhetorically relevant. It's a 1980 commercial from the Reagan/Bush campaign and a group of traitorous bastards named "Democrats for Reagan." It's one that Karl Rove could have written. Amid predictable images of chanting, evil Iranians, a B-movie announcer intones, "In a copyrighted story in the New York Times on October 27th, William Safire wrote: 'The smoothest of Iran's diplomatic criminals was shown on American television this weekend, warning American voters that they had better not elect Ronald Reagan. Ayatollah Khomeini and his men prefer a weak and manageable U.S. president, and have decided to do everything in their power to determine our election result.' A reminder from Democrats for Reagan."

Safire also wrote, a week later, "I like to think that voters will it as they see it, Carter or Reagan or Anderson, unmanipulated by the religious fanatic who hates us all." That bit of wisdom never made it into an ad.

The Rude Pundit brings this up because of this moment on Meet the Press with David Gregory's Bowl-Cut yesterday. Interviewing Vice President Joe Biden, who was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee several times, Gregory asked, "There was a bizarre moment this week with the release of these letters from Abbottabad where Osama bin Laden was hiding. And at one point he, he talks about his desire to kill President Obama , leaving you in power because he concluded you'd be, quote, 'totally unprepared to lead.' How, how did that sit with you? I mean, you had to come across that."

The actual quote from a Osama letters (subtitle: "An Extraordinary Correspondence") is about concentrating attacks on visiting American officials. "They are not to target visits by US Vice President Biden, Secretary of Defense Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff (Chairman)Mullen, or the Special Envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan Holbrook. The groups will remain on the lookout for Obama or Petraeus. The reason for concentrating on them is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make Biden take over the presidency for the remainder of the term, as it is the norm over there. Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the US into a crisis." You got that? One way to spin this is that bin Laden feared President Obama. Another way would be to use this whenever anyone says that Obama is a secret Mooo-slim.

To his credit, Biden answered diplomatically. He didn't look at Gregory and say, "Are you fucking serious? I'm supposed to answer a dead terrorist's opinion of me? Here's how that sits with me: Blow me. No, not bin Laden, but you, David. Blow me."

This is of a piece with the swift boating of the President being undertaken by outside groups, who are attacking Obama for using the death of Osama bin Laden as a demonstration of his foreign policy successes and abilities. Gregory, quoting the ever-reliable New York Post, asked Biden, "Was all of this together in effect his 'Mission Accomplished' moment?" Again, Biden could have grabbed Gregory by his tie and gritted his teeth in that Biden way and said, "Listen, motherfucker. Here's the difference: we actually accomplished the mission." But, alas, he did not.

You can be assured that if bin Laden was still free, Republicans would have been running nonstop ads about how Obama hadn't captured him and how bin Laden was plotting right now to shoot down your airplanes and make your women wear burqas. But that strategy is out the window, so all they can do is go with this bullshit "spiking the ball" thing.

Hey, you know who else spiked the ball? Ike. Yep, in his reelection campaign in 1956, President Eisenhower used his ending the Korean War as a reason to vote for him. That ad asked, among other things, "Can we dismiss the man who has kept us at peace, and take a chance on a man untried and inexperienced in international negotiations and world problems? What do you say? Are you willing to bet everything you love and hold dear that [Adlai] Stevenson can also keep us out of war? Are you that sure of it?" How is that Republican strategy any different than Obama asking what Romney would have done?

There you go, Obama campaign. Ike's got your back. Oh, and you know where the ad begins? At a football game. Where there's end zones. Where one...

Late Post Today:
Looks like it's finally time for that Goober fan page the Rude Pundit has been working on to go live on Facebook.

Back later with more Southern-fried rudeness.

A Day of Hateful Prayer Around America:
Goddamnit, the Rude Pundit totally missed the National Day o' Prayer yesterday. Why did no one inform him of it? Fuckity von Fuckington, how could he have known? The only mention on the TV that he could find was on Fox "news" program The Five (aka "The Inbred Cousin of The View"), when, at the end, one of the who-the-fuck-cares-who-it-was panelists mentioned it. Otherwise, nada. Radio silence, man.

Oh, now that doesn't meant that around the good ol' U.S. of motherfuckin' A. there wasn't the usual sticky orgy of God-love. When some random preacher says, "You gots to be prayin'," hands are goin' in the air because, really, what the fuck else do people have to believe in anymore?

In Gaston County, North Carolina, with its awesomely named county seat, Gastonia, four dozen prayifyin' peoples gathered at the courthouse, and, just like Jesus would have wanted, they prayed for the passage of Amendment 1, which prevents icky queers in icky love from getting married for forever in North Carolina. As Pastor Kevin Kellough of the trying-too-hard-named Church of the New Testament of the Firstborn put it, "We are ready and equipped as the persons and the sons of God to stand in the gap and make up the hedge, for there is ungodliness trying to redefine marriage." By the way, you gotta love "persons and sons of God." It's like Pastor Kevin forgot about women. Make of that what you will.

In Coshocton, Ohio, about 200 people got out in the steamy spring to get their pray on. Carol Lawrence, co-pastor of Shepherd's Christian Assembly (Who the fuck comes up with these names? It's like they roll dice with Jesus-sounding words on 'em and whatever random combination comes up, they use it) said, "Our country was based on Christian values, no matter what anybody says." And then her next sentence really was "It was founded with religious freedom." And then two sentences later, she really said, "I'm glad our leaders here in Coshocton will participate and are accepting of Christian beliefs in our community." Yes, the oppressed Christians of Coschocton finally got some recognition. The 50 churches for 11,000 people certainly operate underground for fear of Obama's Muslim stormtroopers coming in to squash it and paste beards on the men and staple veils on the women.

As for the President, well, Texas Governor Rick Perry has got you covered. "Let's pray for our president, for his wisdom," he said to "Amens" in Austin. "I pray that God pierces his heart." Is there ever a wrong time to imply violence? No, there isn't. And Perry hoped that Obama would "truly understand God's will to protect innocent life. I pray for his true understanding of God's will for this country."

The President had issued the customary proclamation of the National Day of Prayer, honoring soldiers, asking for special dispensations for the poor and sick. But he had to screw the pooch by saying, non-denominationally, "I invite all citizens of our Nation, as their own faith directs them, to join me in giving thanks for the many blessings we enjoy, and I call upon individuals of all faiths to pray for guidance, grace, and protection for our great Nation as we address the challenges of our time."

Shh. You know who he didn't mention in it? God (except in a pansy "in the year of our Lord" way). Oh, that'll come back to bite him in the ass. In the name of religious freedom, you know.

Kicking Gingrich While He's Down Because Why the Fuck Not?:
And so it was that on May 2, 2012, one of the most disgusting, spitting pustules in the vile recent history of the diseased American body politick finally decided that he had had enough of people despising him in public. Yes, Newt Gingrich realized that his quest for the presidency was so quixotic that Sancho Panza would have just stabbed himself in the heart to avoid it.

So, like the complete debased cocksucker that he is, the kind of bloated, herpes-ridden old dude you find in the bathrooms of shitty bars, begging you through the glory hole in the stall wall to let him blow you just so he can feel something akin to being wanted, Gingrich of course ended his campaign with a head-slappingly self-aggrandizing piece of delusional stream of consciousness that seemed more like the rantings of someone who had had acid slipped into his Metamucil.

Seriously, check out this line, which comes after a long tangent on how awesome it'd be to mine asteroids and travel in space and how the nation oughta support that shit: "I happen to think that's a better future than methamphetamine and cocaine, and I'm going to argue for a romantic American future of doing things that matter that get to the human spirit." There's your choices, America: moon colonies or crack. What do you choose, you pathetic, Obama/socialism-loving losers?

Like he was trying to become the yam queen of the country farm festival, Gingrich explained his whole life's purpose: "This August, it will be 54 years that I have worked essentially on three things. One, what does America need to do to be free, safe and prosperous? Two, how would you explain that to the American people so they gave you permission to do what is needed? And three, how would you implement the change if the American people gave you permission?"

Which means, essentially, that two out of three of his goals involve how amazing it would be to be a leader and the first one is bullshit since his political accomplishments actually led to the rightward swing of the Congress, which has led quite conspicuously to less freedom and prosperity. So that means that he has failed miserably at his entire adult life, which, if you think about it, is pretty patently obvious.

And then he talked about his shitty movies and a children's book character: "Callista and I have done seven documentaries. She's entered the author phase of trying to lead and educate with Sweet Land of Liberty, in which Ellis the Elephant introduces 4-to-8-year-olds to American history in an effort to fill the vacuum left by all too many modern educators." Read that as: "Please buy our shit. Callista won't let me pretend she's me while I fuck her ass if I have to close the credit line at Tiffany's."

When he started the speech, he thanked fucking everyone, including billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who, as Gingrich proudly said, "single-handedly came pretty close to matching Romney's super PAC." Bought and paid for by a single man, motherfuckers. It's like he's the Michelangelo of politics, with his Medicis paying him to paint a Sistine Chapel from pigments made of shit.

Then there was this one, which said everything you needed to know about his campaign: "I also want to thank Herman Cain, who was tremendous in campaigning for us, particularly on Super Tuesday; and Michael Reagan who campaigned for us, and I think communicated pretty clearly the relationship we had with his dad; and then Todd Palin, who also worked very, very hard."

A failed candidate, a talk radio host, and Sarah Palin's husband? A triumvirate of idiot grifters, two of whom we'd never know about if it wasn't for their horrible relatives. How much more clearly can it be demonstrated that Newt Gingrich's entire reason for entering the race was to squeeze every dollar out of his followers, that it was all a scam, hell's book tour, an excuse to fondle zoo animals?

And how telling that, even with the con in play, he still ends up $4.3 million in debt? How bankrupt does a man have to be before you realize just how bankrupt he is?

Now Newt Gingrich can waddle off to the great junkheap of history, all of his great ideas cast aside, wasting the final years of his worthless life calling out to phantom moon colonies, cursing the people who brought him down, wondering how a man who once reigned like a gluttonous king can die as a punchline of his own making.