Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Newt vs. Newton

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Mike Peterson Published: January 28, 2012 1 minute 4 comments

Stuart Carlson riffs on what could turn out to be a magic moment in the campaign.

At this point, I'm less interested in the fact that Newt Gingrich is promising to have a moon base up and running in nine years than I am in seeing who else — besides Carlson and Jon Stewart — is going to grab this juicy piece of low-hanging fruit and what they'll do with it.

Every campaign has these little moments, but, usually, the candidates make the spinmeisters work a little harder.

For example, when, in a 1976 debate with Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford said that Eastern Europe was not dominated by the Soviet Union, he appeared, in some clumsy way, to be denying that the recently signed Helsinki Accords had conceded the Soviet's ownership of the Warsaw Pact nations, to be insisting that the US would always recognize the right of those nations to walk away from the ties that bound them to Moscow.

Granted, it didn't come out that way. Granted, it made him sound like an idiot. But at least it required a little bit of "Say what?" and interpretation on the part of commentators.

I was more appalled in 1988 when Bernard Shaw asked Michael Dukakis if, were his wife Kitty to be raped and murdered, he would still oppose the death penalty, and Dukakis stood there like an automaton and said, yes, he'd always opposed the death penalty, instead of saying either "In that case, obviously, I'd have to recuse myself. We have laws to avoid a society in which personal vengeance is the ruling factor," or, possibly, "Hey, screw you, Bernard Shaw."

In fact, responding to the question with "screw you" seems to be a winning strategy these days, as seen recently when Newt Gingrich was asked if he wanted to clarify the issues of his personal life that have come to the fore.

But it's an ugly world where we have to choose between an unfeeling robot and a petulant child, which brings us to the Gore/Bush debates, in which Gore kept sighing audibly. It was noticeable, but it didn't have to become a story.

Gore may have lost the election in large part because of the way everyone declared his sighs to be an important factor, and not by saying, "Bush was so far off-base that even Gore couldn't listen to him without expressing what I think we all felt."

Instead, it was "Hey, the guy who claims he invented the Internet and uncovered the pollution at Love Canal isn't just a liar — He's also incredibly rude and arrogant!"

Gore's failure to stake out and defend his own identity in that race allowed the opposition to do so, and to influence the media into accepting that definition and running with it.

It wasn't germane and it wasn't fair, but it was like the point in the 1996 campaign when Jay Leno started doing "Bob Dole is so old …" jokes, and you knew "the old guy" was doomed.

It isn't fair, but it is the way things work, and, now that the Internet is part of the game, you can't expect it to become any less so.

So we're lord-I-hope in the home stretch of the GOP nomination race, and, while we've certainly had plenty of unguarded moments that have been seized upon, and some that have not, we've now got a piece of video in which a major candidate carefully and deliberately lays out a plan which he has apparently given some thought to, that is so howlingly ridiculous that you'd think it was a Saturday Night Live skit.

This should be fresh meat for Romney and Obama, but also for the media and the tubes. If you're going to jump on those other more ephemeral gaffes, how on earth (heh heh) can you let this nonsense pass?

We're about to learn a lot about how the rest of the 2012 elections are going to go. If Newt is able to stick around much longer after this, it's going to be a bumpy ride indeed.

Now, here's your three minutes and 37 seconds of zen: