If you want to call what Newt spews "ideas," doesn't it matter that they're all cracked?

"Over his long and checkered career, Newt has said some wild and crazy things -- most are deeply offensive, while some are outright bizarre."

-- George Zornick, introducing his Nation bloglist of "The Eleven Craziest Things Newt Gingrich Has Ever Said"

by Ken

Sometimes -- heck, most of the time -- our beloved standing-pat Village on the Potomac closes ranks behind a notion so wacky, you can only shake your head and wonder how it is that these people aren't all required to dress in clown suits. One notion (I refuse to dignify it as an "idea") that's really been getting my goat, as you may have noticed the other day, is that Newt "The Perfessor" Gingrich is a font of ideas, verily the Republican Party's leading generator of ideas. ("Longtime GOP congressional aide" Ron Bonjean, quoted the other day by the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza: “He is an idea factory and Republican voters love him for it. They have watched him on TV while his think tank produces a stream of solutions to America’s problems.”)

This loopy proposition, you'll recall, is advanced in the act of asking whether all those other things about Newt will offset his stupendous idea-generating capacity and derail his (chortle) presidential candidacy.

Now all of these people have to know that, with due respect to Newt's low-life dirty street fighter's cunning, he has probably never had an actual idea in his life. In terms of functional intelligence, the clown is a moron -- as well as a thug of both the intellectual and bullying kind. What he does is scour the ideasphere for ideas good, bad, and indifferent which he can mangle into ideological grist for his mission of thuggery.

So I'm grateful to The Nation's George Zornick for putting together a bloglist of "The Eleven Craziest Things Newt Gingrich Has Ever Said." Now I realize that 11 isn't an enormous number, and many connoisseurs of Crazy Things Newt Has Said will be miffed to see some of their favorites. Still, these 11 are a useful start toward a proper appreciation the veritable idea factory that is our Newt.

I don't want to steal George's thunder, so I've just picked out three dillies:

(2) “The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.” [To Mother Jones magazine, October 1989]

(4) “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.” [To the National Review, September 2010]

(10) “How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane.” [Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, March 2007]

And just wait till you see George's No. 11!


POSTSCRIPT: ARE THOSE IDEAS STUFFED IN
NEWT'S MOUTH, OR COULD IT BE HIS FOOT?

Since this post was written, orginally scheduled to go up last night, I've had a chance to see Sam Stein's HuffPost report, "Newt Gingrich Was More Supportive Of Individual Mandates Than Mitt Romney." This is what happens when you're such an incessant spewer of ideas. Some of them turn out to have a limited shelf life.

#