Steve Stark's current "Presidential Tote Board" column

in the Boston Phoenix, adds up Newt Gingrich's strengths and weaknesses as a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination. It can safely be skipped, you've read it already in many many other places.
Ah...but Gingrich for President is an in-teresting notion within the context of the hard right's perpetual audition for ever newer men on horseback to save movement conservatism from an administration composed of movement conservatives.
Think of Newt as the GOP's own William Jennings Bryan, blustery and absurdly wrong about nearly everything. Gingrich has long been lauded by the credulous likes of Chris Matthews as a "man of ideas", most of those selfsame ideas being either puerile or simply bad.
Newt presents himself as an intellectual, he claims to be well-read, but like most sci-fi fans he hasn't revised his opinion about anything since he was sixteen years old.
In truth, he is the last of the bawling boob-bumpers, an invariable booster of naive solutions and crowd-tested nonsense, a fervent believer in every idiot nostrum out there from a balanced budget amendment to the US Constitution to a space based missile defense shield.
The man is fond of quotation, but entirely bereft of sense.
Reporters and pundits, who always set a low bar for so-called thinkers in politics, love Gingrich for his baby-boomer credentials and his yappy college room-mate persona.
As President though, he'd be a perfect catastrophe, taxes might go down but the public debt will incur a national going out of business fire sale.
Hell,the cost alone of extending secret service protection to his ex-wives and mistresses would be prohibitive, irrespective of whether or not the nation is ready for a lecherous puritanical gargoyle as president.
For all Gingrich's alleged brains, he will be even more wrong headed than Bush and will no doubt stumble into a serious show down with a democratic congress within six months of his inaugural, landslide or not, count on that. Confrontation at first serious and then increasingly petulant and inane was a hallmark of his Speakership, nothing in his subsequent record indicates he has changed his modus operandi one whit.
Alas though, the GOP has fallen heir to an unbelievable succession of disasters all of their own making. They have unfailingly all of the great issues of the day in a pinched ideological fashion, with no recourse to the facts defining any situation no matter how complicated or perilous.
Their zeal resembles that of a gaggle of tenderfoot boy scouts building their first camp-fire only to end up burning down the campsite and much of the forest beyond...a catastrophe they feebly attempt to blame on John Kerry and the Dixie Chicks.
Ah but the GOP is desperate for a charlatan any charlatan who can make all this mishaugas disappear and save them from themselves. Hell they need Newt Gingrich, who else can they count on to believe in the face of so many setbacks and embarrassment?
Me? I doubt he is electable, like Guiliani he is an apocalyptic gaffe waiting to happen. Moreover, when he was Speaker of the US House, he was routinely dope-slapped by Bill Clinton with an offhanded glee. Senator Hillary Clinton must be slavering at the thought of running against a tried and true punk-ass b*tch like Speaker Newt.
But these are matters of fact and history, in other words just the sort of thing Newt will happily ignore when the moment of truth arrives.

Wooga Wooga A-bandon Ship!

More swan-dives over the listing sides of the USS McCain.
John Kerry went thru a patch as bad as this, at one point he was polling behind Al Sharpton in New Hampshire...but he had the troops and a message. McCain has a wasted rep for integrity and too long a history of carrying just enough water for the White House to alienate his once beloved independents.
I revise my estimate, I'm not sure McCain will last til August at this rate.
In truth, he is a candidate who belongs to the past in every way. The days when a feisty sounding independent can crash into the GOP nominating process and carry the day like Wendell Willkie or Dwight Eisenhower are long gone. These days you start out groveling before the religious right, abase yourself before the market worshippers and if you get nominated you lie and smear til' election night.
That is the GOP path to power, men on horseback who don't owe the usual ass-holes bigtime need not apply.

The Missus Departs

Lady Bird Johnson has up and died at the tender age of ninety-four.
I think of her and poor Pat Nixon as the last of the old-timey first ladys...dutiful and subdued...smart but burdened with too few standout role models when it came to being First Lady.
Ah well, being congenitally classy Ladybird coped....oh how she coped.
Her lasting contribution to the betterment of the Republic being the 1967 highway beautification act, an early blow against sprawl and pollution that was derided at the time as naught but a genteel southern lady's version of Flower Power. In time her passsion to beautify our roadsides would march in lock step with enviromentalism and anti-sprawl activism a host of worthwhile causes...we struggle even today to catch up with her ideas.
Well goodbye Missus Johnson give our best to Lyndon, Jack and Harry we'll try our best with the wildflowers out there.

Heard on WTKK this morning

amidst an advert for "Ken's Steak House" in Framingham a wee gratuitious snark at Governor Patrick and his alleged inability to get the property taxers lowered.
It is a little thing I know, but does Ken Steak House have to pay for the editorializing in their commercials or is that added in as a freebie?

Michael we hardly knew ye...

Apparently, WTKK wants to hire Howie Carr to become their new drive time morning yakker replacing Michael Graham who replaced Mike Barnicle who replaced Don Imus....remember Imus? I could wax nostalgic I really could.
Well thank Ghod is all I can say, the Boston airwaves are all but bereft of wingnut windbags, Howie's proposed and as yet unlitigated move to WTKK will bring a welcome note of diversity to all white liberals infesting local radio.

Pursuant to yesterday's post

on the virtues of flag-waving in Euclid OH by way of Jeff Jacoby's Globe column and as a public service to all eleven of my readers, including Michael Graham, I post this link to the United States Flag Code.

As an olde Eagle Scout, it just drives me crazy to see otherwise well meaning people flying the flag in rainstorms and the like so that the National Ensign gets soaked and looks like a bath-towel left on the line. There are rules governing the display of the flag of the United States, I wish people would read and abide by those rules.

The Flag Children

Today, Jeff Jacoby lectures the Commonwealth on our lamentable lack of flag waving and contrasts Massachusetts unfavorably with the simple catch-in-yer-throat patriotism of his boyhood home, Euclid Ohio.
Then suddenly, seized as if by some frenzy, Jacoby drags Howard Zinn out of the Sacred Groves of Academia and rhetorically assaults the BU Prof with a tire iron.
Sigh....in other words, Jeff couldn't think of anything sensible to say about Scooter Libby's sentence commutation or the impending collapse of the Iraqi Government.
I often wonder, at the end of the day, when the sun is gone red with a nameless fury and things go still and quiet, when Jeff is done carving up scarecrows and cutting down straw-men by the regiment....if the Boston Globe columnist doesn't feel faintly embarrassed with himself?
I mean, he rarely makes a fair argument with a real opponent, generally his modus operandi is to seek out the weakest thesis advanced by the sketchiest character and run them thru a rhetorical wood-chipper.
Jacoby does this week after week, and calls it, "debate", but even he has to realize what a fraud the whole thing is.
Euclid Ohio may actuyally fly more flags that the whole of Commonwealth, but I doubt it.
One wonder though, are their columnists less inclined towards mental buncombe than ours?