NEWT GINGRICH: STILL THE DIVISIVE PARTISAN HE ALWAYS WAS. HE WAS UNFIT TO BE SPEAKER AND HE'S LESS FIT TO BE PRESIDENT

It's probably close to incomprehensible to imagine a president worse than George Bush. But if GOP extremist ayatollah James Dobson has his way you might get to live the nightmare. Dobson has all but endorsed Newt Gingrich and has been working hard to rehabilitate his imagine as a philandering and perverted bomb-thrower. Working against Dobson, of course, is Gingrich himself.

There's a reason why so many Americans say they would not vote for Gingrich under any circumstances. And there's a reason why the latest Rasmussen poll shows Gingrich has the highest negativity ratings of any Republican being considered for the GOP nomination. And today Gingrich was on ABC-TV strutting his stuff, attempting to use the Virginia Tech tragedy to bolster his narrow partisan goal of running in the GOP primaries to the right of everyone else. In the past he's tried blaming liberals and Democrats for everything from the tragedy in New Orleans (claiming African Americans were so "so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane") to Republican child predator Mark Foley (who he says wasn't removed by conservatives who knew he was preying on young pages because they were afraid they "would have been accused of gay bashing" by liberals. The jaw drops.

Today he fed an incredulous George Stephanopoulos a bucket of horseshit. He stood by his bizarre and divisive claims that liberals were to blame for the tragedy at Columbine.

GINGRICH: Yes, I think the fact is, if you look at the amount of violence we have in games that young people play at 7, 8, 10, 12, 15 years of age, if you look at the dehumanization, if you look at the fact that we refuse to say that we are, in fact, endowed by our creator, that our rights come from God, that if you kill somebody, you're committing an act of evil.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But what does that have to do with liberalism?

GINGRICH: Well, who has created a situation ethics, essentially, zone of not being willing to talk about any of these things. Let me carry another example. I strongly supported Imus being dismissed, but I also think the very thing he was dismissed for, which is the use of language which is stunningly degrading of women — the fact, for example, that one of the Halloween costumes this last year was being able to be either a prostitute or a pimp at 10, 11, 12 years of age, buying a costume, and we don't have any discussion about what's happened to our culture because while we're restricting political free speech under McCain-Feingold, we say it’s impossible to restrict vulgar and vicious and anti-human speech. And I would argue that that's a major component of what's happened to our culture in the last 40 years.

See what I mean about "worse than Bush? After all, as John points out, Gingrich had a lot more to do with Timothy McVeigh blowing up the Oklahoma City Federal Building than liberals or Democrats had with Virginia Tech or Columbine.

And why would Gingrich make all this noise today? He's busy winning hearts and minds... and pocketbooks over in NRA-ville, where they're starting to panic about a growing clamor for reasonable gun control or even a discussion of rethinking or even repealing the Second Amendment.