I don’t watch the Republican debates, because they happen when I’m at work. Plus, I’m sure they would bug the fuck out of me. I’m a liberal, you know. I like causing abortions and I would be on food stamps if I could, and I don’t see how we can kick out all the Mexicans. And people should be able to say “fuck” on TV and, we should let people out of fucking jail and let them smoke pot and what have you. And if we don’t give the old people free medicine, everyone with an old person in their life is going to be instantly destitute from the freakish gigantic costs of squeezing an extra forty five secnds of life out of decrepit and demented shells of their former selves, so you know, Medicare. That kind of shit.
But I watched the first five minutes of the one last night in South Carolina. Because Andrew Sullivan started flipping out over it on his liveblog saying Newt had a genius tactical masterstroke responding to a question about his ex wife. Basically ABC was running an interview with one of Newt’s exes right after the debate, where she’s going to spill all kinds of dirt about how horrible he was and left her when she was cripplingly ill and etc. And I thought: oh yeah, that’s right— he left his wife for another woman he had already been boning while the wife had terminal cancer, and this was not too far removed from the time he was going after Clinton’s head for getting his dick sucked by a hot young piglet. And: man, this is old news but once everybody gets reminded of this maybe they wil in fact steer clear of old Newt. They will remember why he’s been out of the picture for the last fifteen years or so.
But no, this was a DIFFERENT wife, whom he had also left for another woman he was already boning while she, this different wife, was afflicted with an entirely different debilitating illness. Whoa. This guy who we remember as Clinton’s greatest adversary is a serially adultering destroyer of terminally ill women. This is going to be some devastating shit.
And so silver-haired mannequin John King brought it up right at the top of the debate and Gingrich had clearly planned for this contingency and completely turned it around with a snarling “HOW DARE YOU, SIR” spiel. I am appalled, frankly, that you would begin a presidential debate with this sort of tabloid fluff and indignity and ignominy and etc etc.
And that is a fucking masterstroke. I am afraid of this guy now. He is on my radar as a credible threat to the second term of Barack Obama, which I care about for some reason.*
Newt’s move was a masterstroke because a brilliant demagogue knows in his bones to always attack, never defend, and Newt pivoted right into a motherfucking righteous attack without a nanosecond’s hesitation. He delivered an eloquent full bore speech that while I’m sure he and his team had planned meticulously and prayed for a reason to shoehorn it in to the first few minutes of the debate, it seemed like and emotional, off-the-cuff, nobly wounded response. This motherfucker is a campaign genius and if he didn’t have a compulsive need to cuckold middle aged broads with Lou Gherig’s disease he would be emperor of the fucking planet. I am terrified of this guy now.
* Or do I? Why do I care? It doesn’t matter who’s president. It genuinely does not matter at all to your life who is president, unless you’re in the military. The president is capable of accomplishing nothing domestically and that’s the way it should be. So who the president is only matters to your life if you are a soldier, or the family of a soldier, or a person living in the country where the president is going to send soldiers to blow up your house at 69 Azadi Street because someone was holding the paper upside down that said Osama’s chief lietenant was living at 96 Azadi street.
But still. I can’t stand another four years of Republicans because I just don’t want to have to hear these fucking guys or look at their smug fucking faces on the five occasions annually that I watch TV news. And I don’t want to hear fucking disgruntled liberals mewling about them endlessly and getting all huffy about their domestic policies that will never be enacted, or be enacted in name only, or fail, or otherwise ultimately mean less than nothing— it doesn’t fucking matter who’s president.
— Rogier
