Newtie

This will probably be utterly dull for anyone who isn’t fascinated by American domestic politics, but I can’t resist applauding a delightful evisceration of Newt Gingrich by Charles Pierce.

Pace, E.J. Dionne and Jonathan Alter, but there isn’t a public figure alive more worthy of undistilled invective than Newt Gingrich, recently resurrected intellectual satrap of the unpleasant, the uninformed, and (very likely) the unshod. I know all of us good liberals are supposed to be battling this out in our shiny armor on the higher plain of our ideals but, sakes alive, how can we do this when somebody rolls back the stone and out staggers, blinking at the daylight, the greasy adulterous king of the Undead, come now to play the role of advisor to Emperor C-Plus Augustus and the rest of the lads and lassies?

Remember the heady days of ‘94, before Bill Clinton outmaneuvered Newtie until he left Congress wearing a barrel? Newtie - who has yet to learn that a string of adjectives is not an argument - was a towering intellectual figure on the landscape. […]

There’s more - much more - in that vein later in the posting: it’s well worth reading to the bitter end.

[Via Avedon’s other weblog - scroll down to the entry for Sunday 27 April 2003]