Lean Left

Jesus Christ . . . The Huffington Post asked Newt Gingrich’s press flack Rick Tyler for a quote about Newt’s campaign meltdown. This is what they got back:

The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world.

The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles.

But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.

Do these people listen to themselves?

Leaving entirely aside the notion of Newt Gingrich – as clubbed-up a Republican as you can find anywhere in the land and, oh, by the way, the former Speaker of the House – taking his stance as a “Washington outsider” against “the establishment” and “the political elite” . . . leaving entirely aside the notion of a desperately insecure but nonetheless PhDed former professor and published (lousy) author railing against “the literati” . . . WTF is “the billowing smoke and dust of tweets”? Getting criticized on Twitter is like storming the beach on D-Day, is it, wanker? (Compare this to Ben Stein’s analogy of the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn to the guillotining of the nobility during the French Revolution. You really can’t embarrass these people, can you?)

More than that, though, is the weirdly dirty-feeling bromance-novel quality of the text. I can’t help feeling that if he had gone on for just one more paragraph, it would have included the phrase “sinewy thighs”.