Will Newt-the-historian's marshals be perp-walking Justices Scalia and Thomas anytime soon?

From 1971 to 1974, back when the current University of West Georgia was still West Georgia College, Newt Gingrich managed to secure employment on its faculty, first in history, then in geography. Accounts differ as to whether the assistant professor couldn't or didn't try to get tenure, but it wasn't long before he skedaddled. So much for the career of "history professor" Gingrich.

by Ken

Our friend Zappatero makes a good case that Supreme Court Justices Nino Scalia and Clarence Thomas should be carted off in handcuffs to a federal pen named for would-be president Newt Gingrich. The only flaw I can see in his argument is that it presupposes some sort of rudimentary logic and/or consistency in the fables right-wing pols tell -- I mean, the "policies" they enunciate. Since as we know making up even the crackpottiest nonsense is rewarded rather than punished as long as it adheres to doctrinal right-wing delusions (DRWDs), there's hardly ever any price to pay for even the most glaring inconsistences, again provided they don't run afoul of DRWDs.

How else do you explain this illusion that Newt has managed to maintain of being a "history professor." (Actually, what I found when I tried to pin down his academic credentials was this, in the Wikipedia article on him: "In 1970, Gingrich joined the history department at West Georgia College as an assistant professor. In 1974 he moved to the geography department and was instrumental in establishing an interdisciplinary environmental studies program. Denied tenure, he left the college in 1978," citing a 2001 Time magazine piece by Nicholas Lemann. Beyond that the only academic "credential" I see is that "he is an honorary Distinguished Visiting Scholar and Professor at the National Defense University.") Anyone who has listened to or read Perfessor Newt mangle even the most rudimentary points of history knows that his exposure to the subject consists entirely of random cherry-picking for factoids or outright fantasies that can be woven into his grand hodgepodges of ideologically driven lies.

Anyway, to get back to Zappatero's case, he wrote yesterday in "BREAKING: Newt says arrest Scalia, Thomas," on Square State: "So Newt Gingrich, in his bottomless pit of anti-democratic and anti-labor ideas came up with this one:"

The former House Speaker held a half-hour phone call on Saturday during which he pledged to abolish courts how Kenyan and anti-colonial of him] and eliminated activist judges he believed were either outside the mainstream or infringing too deeply on the commander in chief's authority.

On Sunday, he followed that up by saying he would be willing to arrest a judge who he thought was out of line.

"If you had to," he said on CBS's "Face the Nation" when asked if he would send a Capitol Hill police officer to round up a judge, "or you would instruct the Justice Department to send the U.S. Marshal."

Zap then quotes relevant portions of Article I of the Constitution to support the proposition that Justices Thomas and Scalia, "the only ones that still serve from the Court that interrupted the 2000 Presidential election with a misguided, political, anti-Constitutional, and anti-Democratic decision," are therefore appropriate objects of Newt-the-historian's constitutional wrath. He concludes:

[T]he logic is airtight here: if Newt was the idea man everyone says he is, then he will hold to this idea and enunciate the policies it would entail. He isn't; he won't.

If he was principled, and held to (any of) his wildly varying principles for more than month then he would back up his idea with the most obvious example of activist judges in the last 25 years and call for the the arrest of Scalia and Thomas. He isn't. He won't.

He's an idea man full of dumb ideas. Anyone who thinks he'd be a good president is a fool. Anyone who thinks he has principles should ask him to follow up just one more time and tell us which judges he'd arrest. That would show everyone just how anti-democratic and anti-Constitutional the Newt is. And it would confirm that when Republicans are calling Democrats names and accusing them of something, it's usually the Republicans who are doing it. And the fair and balanced media that's reporting it.

The enduring mystery is how it happens, after all the time he's spent in the public eye, being exposed repeatedly as a fantasist and self-promoting crook, that anyone pays any attention at all to this heap of toxic sludge.

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