Newtie!

I like to stay up late at night, much to my wife's chagrin sometimes. She likes it when we go to bed together, but I really like staying up and channel surfing or reading (OK, mostly channel surfing, but sometimes I'm actually catching up on New Yorker articles). My wife has actually wondered out loud what I could possibly be doing at that time of night, and I wish it was that I had some secret life like sneaking out and fighting crime with a secret identity under the dark of night or passing out coats and sandwiches to the homeless. But no, it's mostly that some of my extreme dweeby tendencies are best practiced out of sight of my lovely wife lest she figure out how big of a nerd I really am. I'm talking, of course, about watching C-Span.

I truly do think that C-Span is the single greatest thing about Cable TV, barely edging out VH1's Behind The Music and the ability to see an episode of Law & Order at any given time of the day. I tend to watch it a lot at night after my better half has gone to bed. It's better at this time because they show speeches given by people earlier in the day or week or interesting interviews with authors/politicians/commentators/documentary filmmakers/etc, rather than during the day when it is mostly boring speeches from politicians to a mostly empty House or Senate chamber (seriously, do any of our elected officials even go to work except during the State Of the Union address?).

Anyway, the other night I flipped it over to C-Span after watching the midnight airing of Countdown with Keith Olberman - I just love his comedic commentary on the news and his never-ending bashing of O'Reilly and FOX - and they were airing, one right after the other, John McCain's kissing-the-ass-of-Falwell commencement address at Rightwingfreakazoid University and Newt Gingrich's speech to the Iowa Republican Party's Lincoln Day Dinner. Seeing the fat bastard giving a speech at a political event made me time warp back to 1995, which on one hand would be cool because it would mean I was 25, but on the other hand it would mean I'd still be working as a pizza cook, and that was a shitty job. The dinner was held on April 29th, which doesn't seem to hold any significance whatsoever in the life of Lincoln. It is more than a month and a half after his birthday and it is nowhere near the dates of the Gettysburg Address or the Emancipation Proclamation. The closest thing in the Lincoln bio to the date of this event is his assassination (April 14th), which seems an odd (not to mention macabre) choice for celebrating. But nobody claimed that Iowans were smart people, except for the ones that were smart enough to escape that horrible place. Lucky me, my mother is trying to get me to attend the upcoming family reunion there in July. I should start practicing my stupid now. But I digress...

I flipped it to C-Span after the McCain speech, that got a lot of media coverage anyway, was over and it was toward the end of the Newt Gingrich talk. Later I learned he was introduced by the Neanderthal twit Sean Hannity. I've watched a lot of the parts that I missed online, but I'll just briefly tell you about a couple of the things he said just toward the end that I saw that night. One was this idea he has to create a Travelocity-like website for prescription drugs that would "reduce the price of drugs in the United States by 40%" and then made a joke about how Canadians would be coming to the U.S. for medication, which got a nice little chuckle out of the Iowa blue hairs. I just love how the idiot thinks that putting stuff on computers just magically lowers the price. The internets is magic!

He also spoke about one of his requirements of citizenship for immigrants to pass a test about the history of our country. I think if he was really worried about the well being of this land he would spend his energy trying to make sure that high school graduates knew more about the Constitution than they do the American Idol contestants. Pssst, hey Newt, guess what? Immigrants already have to take a test on American history and government that most Americans couldn't pass. So you're not exactly throwing out any revolutionary ideas there.

He ended his talk to the Iowa Republicans by touching on the glorious fight against terrorism. One thing he did that I found interesting and honest in a horrifying way was admit that this war could go on for 50 or 70 years. Oh happy days are here again, eh Newt? By the way is it just me or does everyone else also think of Monty Python every time they hear his name? (You know the one - "She turned me into a newt!" "A newt?" "Well I got better.") But he used this moment, in the usual conservative bullshit way, to do some liberal bashing. Here is how he finished up his speech:

We are faced with enemies in the irreconcilable wing of Islam who want to destroy us. And they're irreconcilable for a simple reason. If they were to win - if we sat down and said "let's have detente," to use a term out of the cold war - their first requirement would be that all the women in this room leave. Go look at how the Taliban ran Afghanistan, go look at how the Saudis run Saudi Arabia. So my first question for all of you - and I love doing this with liberal women reporters, we'll be in the middle of a discussion and I'll say "do you like your job?" and they'll go "yeah," and I'll say "well do you want to keep it," and they'll say "yeah," and I'll say "well then you better hope we win," and they go ""what are you talking about?" I did this one day with a BBC reporter. It was summertime and she was in a short sleeve dress and I said "do you think anybody in the other team is going to let you stay on television?" She was just stunned, 'cause she was sitting there going "I can't be on your side, your the real enemy. What do you mean their the real enemy more than your the real enemy? Now I have two real enemies?" As you could see, she was in total confusion.

Ah yes, yet another silly "strawman" argument from the conservatives. They can't actually knock down the real things liberals say or believe in so they make up fake "liberal" arguments that they can easily knock down. I don't buy for a minute that this conversation has ever taken place with any reporter, liberal or otherwise. I love how he tries to make the claim that the left is completely clueless about how Islamic countries treat their women, like the conservatives have been out there fighting for them all these years. Right pal, whatever. Human rights groups were ignored for years while women were being oppressed beyond belief and Newt and his cronies gave the Taliban free money. And people like Gingrich have helped keep the House of Saud in power for years. That he even pretends to give a shit about the plight of women in the Middle east is beyond laughable, it's just plain disgusting. And the claim that Newt is out there educating the "liberal press" about the horrors of the Taliban and Saudi regimes, how ridiculous can you get? And then there is the whole black and white way of looking at the world, the "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," or "with us or against us" routine. I got news for ya Newtie, hating you and Osama Bin Laden at the same time and wishing you both would die is not a hard thing to comprehend. Hating both Hitler and Stalin even though they were fighting against each other wasn't so hard, it shouldn't be a stretch to wish horrible pain on both Kim Jong Il and Dubya at the same time.

Bombing the hell out of the Middle East or letting radical Islamists take over our country aren't the only two options you fat-ass moron.

He also refered to the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the "dictator of Iran," despite the fact that the president of Iran is a largely ceremonial office and the real "dictator" is the Supreme Leader Seyyad Ali Hossayni Khamenei and the rest of the power lies with the Gaurdian Council made up of leading clerics. Calling Ahmadinejad a dictator is a lot like claiming Miss America rules the U.S. with an iron fist.

He finished up by talking about how winning the cold war was different because they were atheist and "You're never a suicide bomber if you're an atheist because there's nowhere to go," which got another nice chuckle from the upstanding, corn-fed Iowan Christians. Easy crowd.

So why am I telling you all of this? For those of you who don't watch C-Span at one in the morning, you should be warned. This guy was in Iowa remember. And he was there just a few days before that, and he'll be there again in a couple of weeks for an event. I'm sure he also has some New Hampshire events on his schedule. And South Carolina and Ohio and Michigan. Newt is trying to make a comeback and take out another contract on America, this time shooting for the top prize. He's running for President, and we need to warn everyone. Right now he's quietly making the rounds in the small GOP gatherings making his little jokes and making himself out to be some sort of humble, wise, old outsider with fresh ideas and a new direction for our country (gives me a gag reflex just to think about it). Pretty soon though, we'll be seeing him all over the place telling us about American values (the replacement phrase for "family values" from the 80s/90s) and how we should live our lives. Just in case anyone forgot, here is the Cliff's Notes version of Newt's "values:

Adultery (for him at least) = Good
Two men in a long term committed, monogamous relationship for over twenty years = Evil
Democrat draft-dodgers = Evil
Republican draft-dodgers = Good
Democrat president getting blowjob from staffer = Evil
Republican Speaker of the House getting blowjob from staffer = Good, very good
Poor citizens bouncing bad checks = Evil
Congressmen bouncing bad checks, with overdraft fees paid by taxpayers = Good

And of course, his best "family value" is:

Serving your wife (who you've been cheating on) with divorce papers as she lies in a hospital bed recovering from cancer treatment = Priceless

Warn everyone you know. Newt is back. And he's fatter and dumber than ever.

God, I need to stop watching C-Span.