Wow. Another state, another winner.

So, it turns out that Rick Santorum actually won Iowa, Romney did win New Hampshire, and now Newt Gingrich has decidedly won South Carolina.

That would be two so far that the expected, inevitable Mitt Romney hasn't won.  I covered the possibility that Romney might not be so inevitable as even I thought here, but I think it's worth revisiting how a Gingrich win will effect the GOP--

I don't think it's good for them.  

In a way, I kind of welcome the idea of Newt Gingrich facing Barack Obama. There might be a desire for the hardcore right to see a culture warrior smear Obama about his Alinsky tactics and food stamp presidency; they might yearn to see someone paint the president of the United States as an Other and an alien, maintaining that he's both a Kenyan anti-colonialist and a Euro-centric socialist, or whatever string of ultimately meaningless adjectives and nouns the 1990's counter-culturalist bomb-thrower wants to paint my president as.

I said "counter-culturalist". I mean it.  He derides the values of LGBT and secularist Americans--I say we are fast becoming mainstream not because we are at war with American values, but because we appreciate the freedoms they represent and will defend them against demagogues like him until our dying breaths. He launches what an earlier day in journalism might have called "dog-whistles" of race-baiting--today we would call them "air-raid sirens" of shrill racialist nonsense.  When he talks about my president as a "food stamp president", he is dealing with a kind of fire that might sting people who are expecting it, but will blow back on himself with a righteous fury.

Look at this shit, here:

This is some monstrous racist bullshit from the first days of Barack Obama's presidency. It isn't like we don't know what this puffed-up pompous grandiose douche, Newt Gingrich,  is saying.  We know, and by now, we know it's wrong.  We know what he's doing when he uses this tactic against President Obama, and we know what he's doing when he denies it and smears an honest questioner of his tactics like Juan Williams in similar fashion. 

But let's be clear--even if Gingrich isn't intending this only as a racist hook, he's still wrong in every possible way--food stamp beneficiaries right now are nearly half children and about a quarter elderly, and a good number of the remainder are students. And besides that, unless he can just hire a mess of people with government jobs (as if!) what does he want to be in the meanwhile--the Starvation President? Seriously, fuck off with that nonsense.

Clearly, Newt Gingrich would be divisive as a candidate because he only sees demographics, and has always been willing to smear minorities on the off-chance it would gain majority support. He did it re: Prop 8, and he's done it with Muslims regarding the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" and the threat of sharia.  I just don't see how this can work today, and I am willing to bet it won't.

Gingrich very well might win the nomination, but I believe that if he does, he will have done and said enough to discredit his party for a long time to come.

If I didn't say that was change I could believe in, I'd be lying.