Newt Gingrich, moral leader

Newt Gingrich speaks to reporters Newt Gingrich, America's new dead mouse. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Nick von Hoffman, the great liberal columnist of an earlier era, once called Richard Nixon the dead mouse on America's kitchen floor, by which he meant that while we were repulsed by the site of him, we couldn't help staring in a kind of fascination.

The dead mouse of our era - well, there are a lot of them, but on balance I have to say Newt Gingrich. You can watch him for hours, and he even emits a certain odor. I never tire of the man.

Last night, Lawrence O'Donnell rounded up Gingrich's recent television appearances in which he was asked by his interviewers about his extramarital dalliances, specifically cheating on his second wife exactly while he was calling Bill Clinton a moral monster. After stringing together three or four clips of Gingrich explaining that he was now 67 years old, O'Donnell explained what that really means:

"Newt is the only 67-year-old presidential candidate who has ever stressed his age. He's stressing it only when making the point that he thinks maybe he can now finally be trusted to maintain sexual exclusivity with his third wife. He's basically saying, 'I'm too old to do it the way I used to do it, Viagra can't work miracles, you don't have to worry about me anymore.' It's the only part of newt's questions that is absolutely consistent, the I'm 67 and a grandfather bit. He is the only candidate that wants you to think he's old. You didn't hear John McCain reminding you he was 72 when he ran for president. Bob Dole was not fond of mentioning that he was 73 when he ran for president."

But the really unbelievable clip came from a Fox News interview last Sunday, when Chris Wallace asked Gingrich if he wasn't being a hypocrite in going after Clinton while he was off picking nonmatrimonial daisies himself, to which Gingrich replied: "I don't know what you would have had me do."

Well, uh, as O'Donnell noted, how about, you know, not do it?

Then there was this:

"I have two grandchildren -- Maggie is 11, Robert is 9," Gingrich said at a church in Texas, according to Politico. "I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American."

An aide, evidently reasoning to himself that America could either become a secularist gomorrah or an Islamist's Eden but scarcely both at once, clarified that there should have been an "or" before that "potentially." Fine, that's an aide's job (I hope he's being paid well). But Gingrich doesn't care about that "or" one way or the other. He has this special dialectic unfolding in his own head by which America can indeed be both securalist and Islamist. The rest of us, to whom this seems a contradiction, just aren't on his plane.

I notice that he now seems to be mentioned in the first-tier of GOP candidates. How did this happen? He'd certainly be a delightful nominee. I'm also warming to Herman Cain. More on him later.

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