Significance

I'd like to think this comment on Andrew Sullivan's blog is prophetic:

... a Gingrich nomination would be poetic justice - or maybe just justice. Gingrich didn't transform the GOP alone, but he is arguably more responsible than any one person for the Republican party becoming the cynical, reckless, destructive piece of shit it is now. I am not a fan of the Reagan Administration, but there is a big difference - as Newt would say a "fundamental" difference - between the party of Reagan and the one Newt was so instrumental in shaping, the current, decadent GOP.

The Republican Party of today is the party of Newt. I think the best bet for reforming it is for Republican grassroots to nominate someone who so thoroughly exemplifies it, and have him lose spectacularly. It would also be cathartic for the country if Obama finally grasped the nettle and took the opportunity to definitively crush, rhetorically as well as electorally, Gingrichism and its variants.

As I've written many times, I most certainly agree with the characterization of today's Republican party as one of despicable negativity: hatred, fact-averse denialism, untruthfulness, unfocused self-pity, especially of the poor-me Christianist variety, and doctrinaire obstructionism. I'd love to think that nominating Newt and his subsequent thumping would cause the Republican party to reassess itself and to return to thoughtfulness and connectedness to reality. But I'm not so damn sure he'd be defeated: I simply have no idea at this point whether Gingrich, with his appeal to the lowest common denominator, his willingness to lie and to play the card of aggrievement represents the fringe or the mainstream. There's no doubt he tapped into a deep well of "fuck-yeah-hate-'em-all-kill-'em-all" mentality in South Carolina. I really have no idea -- but I worry -- whether it's close enough to where we are as a nation that it would prevail in a general election.

Is there now a majority of voters who believe a president should arrest judges with whom he disagrees, after first ignoring any ruling to which he objects; who think Sharia is about to become the law of the land; who are okay with a president who considers himself king, as long as his view of unchecked power is aimed against a free press and checks and balances, who appeals to resentment of all things non-white Christian heterosexual? Have Fox "news" and the RWS™, with their non-stop, coordinated, and well-compensated stoking of hatred and discouragement of rationality finally succeeded in their deliberate dumbing of enough people to win the day? Lose the future?

It doesn't surprise me that Newt might be the nominee of the current iteration of a once-respectible party; but were he to go on to win, it'd be the absolute end of what remains of the confidence I once had in America's ability to find its way in tough times.