Stay Classy, Catwoman

And then there were two.

Ok, technically three, but really just two. And really, just one.

Newt Gingrich is “scaling back” his campaign for president.

Scaling back. Heh heh. Scaling back, is that what the kids are calling it nowadays?

Like he actually has a chance at the nomination, right?

Newt Gingrich will never be President and the only one who doesn’t seem to know this is Newt Gingrich.

His bid for the GOP nomination, let alone the White House, was DOA right from the beginning.

Sure, there were a few flickers of life, he appeared to rally a few times, a twitch here, a spasm there, but Gingrich never really had a chance. His campaign has been brain dead for a while now and the only thing keeping it breathing at the moment is the SuperPAC oxygen tube jammed down his windpipe.  His next of kin, the ones he hasn’t alienated over the years, are gathered around his bedside like Cleveland Indians fans dumb enough to buy season tickets and stuck now staring down at the field, sheepishly sitting in a half empty stadium and cheering weakly more out of a sense of duty than for any actual hope of winning. About half of them gave up the deathwatch a month ago. The Rest? He’s a fighter they say, he’ll pull through. God will grant us a miracle, you watch and see.  Any minute now. Any minute now…

But even diehard Indians fans don’t really believe their team will go all the way, not even with God in their dugout.

The doctors just shake their head and nod knowingly to each other, they’ve seen this all too often.   They smile sadly and make noncommittal noises – and inside they resent the resources this corpse is taking away from other more viable patients.  It’s time for some battlefield triage they think, time to salvage what organs they can, pull the plug, and call the meat wagon – or the glue factory.

Unfortunately for everybody, the argument over pulling the plug is verging on the ridiculous.

And so, there he is, Gingrich, a bloated meatbag gone cold and clammy, heart still beating sluggishly, but he’s brain dead and his organs are failing one by one and there’s nothing left but a bad smell.  The only question now is what time the coroner will stamp on the death certificate.

Newt, true to course, continues to display his usual sullenness:

“None of you guys would call a football team or a basketball team and say, 'Why don't you drop out?' You'd say, 'There's a season. Let's play the season…”

Note that when Bachmann, Huntsman, Perry, and Cain all dropped out of the race, Newt didn’t encourage them to play out the season.  He smirked his smug jock-douchebag smirk and waved bye bye at the losers.  Adios, suckers. But now? Now Team Newt has played thirty-two games.  He won on his home court and he managed a small victory during one away game. That’s it.

He’s 2 and 30 (of course, that’s two better than Ron Paul, but still).

Newt’s right, you don’t have to tell a sports team to drop out – they get eliminated in the playoffs.

At this point what we have with Gingrich is less an assisted suicide-sports mashup analogy and more like that time Sean Young got piss drunk, put on a homemade Catwoman outfit, and assaulted Tim Burton and Michael Keaton on the set of Batman Returns. 

That’s right, Newt Gingrich has become the crazy Catwoman wannabe of presidential campaign politics (and when I say Catwoman, I mean it in both the drunkenly obnoxious Sean Young and the horrifyingly bad Halle Berry sense.  And, of course, in the Batman Returns sense too. Catwoman, no matter how you slice it, always ends up costing somebody a lot of money and turns out to be a stinker, just like Newt).

Conservatives may not care much for either Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum, but they’ve made it abundantly clear that they like Gingrich even less. A lot less, actually.

Just like Catwoman, Newt’s death spiral is more than a little cringe-inducing.

And so here we are, Gingrich is out of money and running in the red, he’s fired his campaign manager and half his staff, his schedule has been cut to the bone, but he’s adamant that he’ll stay in the race.  He can’t win the nomination, hell, he can’t even win second place, but he’s staying in.  He’s out, but he’s not out out – instead he’s apparently going to concentrate on winning Twitter and Facebook because hey, social media, that’s where the real battle is. Sure.  And seriously here, what the hell is it with these people? Bachmann, Cain, Perry, they didn’t “quit,” they just “suspended” or “reassessed” their respective campaigns, only Huntsman had the good grace and self-confidence to say, “I did the best I could, but I’m done now.”  Are these people really so insecure that they can’t admit when they’ve lost? Really? (that’s a rhetorical question, don’t bother to answer).

Gingrich can’t win. I know it. You know it. Democrats know it.  Independents know it.  Republicans know it.  Stone age tribesmen who speak the click-click language and live deep in the jungles of Mindanao Island eschewing all contact with the outside world know it.  Gingrich knows it. It looked like he might have had shot back a couple of months ago, before people remembered who they were dealing with, oh yeah, that’s right, Newt Gingrich, blech.  But now? Newt has about as much chance of being president as Sean Young has of a speaking role in The Dark Knight Rises.

So, what the hell is he doing?

Well, he made his intentions pretty clear in a radio interview this morning,

“Romney has to earn this, it’s not going to be given to him.”

One thing about Newt, he’s consistent.  He’s always been a selfish hypocritical son of a bitch.  He tries to have a president impeached for adultery, while he himself is committing adultery. He talks about morals and ethics, while engaged in unethical behavior.  He says something obnoxious, and blames the press for repeating it.  He complains that other politicians haven’t been “vetted” but is outraged when his own words and behavior are placed under a microscope.  He’s a career politician and the consummate Washington Insider who  denounces “Washington insiders” and “politics as usual” – the very politics as usual that he himself is largely responsible for creating. He talks endlessly about personal responsibility, for everybody else, but he never takes responsibility for his own actions – with Newt it’s always somebody else’s fault when he screws the pooch, or screws somebody else’s wife.  Hell the last time he stepped out, he blamed America, not just one or two of us, America.

Newt resents the fact that try as he might, the vast majority of the country remains steadfastly unconvinced that he is half as awesome as he thinks he is.

Here’s where the rubber meets the road, Newt talks about uniting the nation and pulling together as Americans, but he can’t even put aside his monstrously bloated ego long enough to unite his own party – how’s he going to do it on a national scale?  Answer, he’s not. And he has no intention of doing so.  When Newt talks about unity, he’s just talking about the people that he likes, the rest of us can go to hell, or move to Canada, whatever.  He’ll do what he has always done, throw everybody who’s not on Team Newt over the fantail and into the ocean. He’s a selfish, self-centered, self-involved son of a bitch who’s only in it for himself.  And most people can sense that, even if they don’t know exactly why they don’t like him.

He has lost and he knows it. 

He’s going to have to back Romney, he knows that too and it just galls him. 

Newt is going to back Romney because Romney is going to be the GOP candidate.

But, Newt being Newt just can’t admit it.  He’s got this idea that he’s somehow going to make Romney “earn” the nomination.  As if Romney isn’t at least as an experienced politician as Gingrich is – without the three wife and ethics violations baggage – as if Romney hasn’t put in just as much time in the political trenches. Newt knows exactly what the outcome is going to be here, and he knows he’s going to back whoever the GOP nominates even if it’s Cannibal Hitler’s Head in a Pickle Jar. But he is still going to make everybody else pay just out of selfish spite.

And that right there, more than anything else, tells you what kind of President he would be – exactly the same as the kind of Speaker he was, just exactly as the kind of man he is every single day. 

Newt hasn’t changed, not one bit, he’s still same old hypocrite.

He keeps talking about how the current occupant of the White House ignores the so-called will of the people, but he himself fully intends to force a contested GOP convention and somehow snatch the nomination for himself out of the resulting chaos against the clearly stated will of Republican voters. 

He wants Romney to earn the nomination, but he wants the GOP to just hand it to him. 

Don’t be surprised if he shows up in Tampa wearing a Catwoman costume.