There's nothing wrong with crowing about doing something undeniably good, especially when there's a certain risk involved; but I'm not just tooting my own kazoo here. There are cosmic points that I'll get to after giving you the bare facts...

Savagery...

I was walking to the gym when I heard an ongoing altercation. Looking ahead, I saw a scrum of older men surrounding a very young man (late teens or very early twenties) who was screaming at a young woman (about the same age), who he later identified as his wife. He had her pressed against an SUV; he was enraged, she was terrified.

The skinny, young man (I'll say "suspect" from now on) got increasingly violent, and the older men, who had been telling him to let her go and don't hit her, backed away, apparently nervous.

The suspect reached around the girl and grabbed her by the back of her neck; he threw her down to the pavement, and she held her arms up to ward off a blow. I did not see him actually strike the woman at any time; the only violent contact I saw him make was throwing her to the sidewalk.

I ran up to them and also told him he should just back off and let her go. The suspect turned on me, screaming obscenities into my face from about two inches away. I stared him down (we were about the same height, but I was sure I had at least 40 pounds on him).

Then he walked away, and after a moment, the woman followed; but she was walking faster. She walked past him and continued walking down the street, putting distance between them; but then the suspect broke into a run after her.

I lost sight of them for a few seconds, then on second thought, I ran after. After turning a corner, I saw he had again cornered her, this time against a huge dumpster. He raised his fist, so I dropped my pack at the corner and ran up to them.

He spun around to face me. This time, he told me that if I didn't get the "F" away from them, he would kill me. But during this distraction, the girl had darted around the dumpster, turned another corner, and run off.

The suspect realized she was gone; he caught sight of the girl some distance away and ran after her.

I walked behind him, then I too saw the girl. The suspect ran up to her and again raised his fist as if to strike her. This time, she dropped to the ground of her own accord and for a third time put her arms across her face, as if to block a punch.

I scurried to the two of them again, and again the suspect confronted me. You get the strategy, right? I was distracting him and distracting him, again and again, so he constantly had to deal with me, not her; whenever he started in on the girl, there I was, getting in his space again. I didn't yell at him, insult him, or punch him out (though I wouldn't have minded, the dirty coward). I just stuck to him like a tar baby.

By that time, a number of other people had come out of their houses; and I knew that one of the original witnesses at the beginning, five or ten minutes earlier, had called the peelers. I could hear a siren, and I hoped it was they.

I remembered I'd dropped my backpack a few streets back, and it had my wallet and keys in it. Since a crowd had gathered, I ran back, got my pack, and returned. By that time, a cop on a motorcycle arrived, and then some others.

They ordered the suspect to the ground, but he refused to comply. Instead, he hurled defiance at them. So they drew their pistols and again ordered him to get on the ground. He looked for a moment like he was going to charge them (suicide by cop?); but in the end, he lay face down on the grass, and the police cuffed him.

I told one of the cops I was an eyewitness and recounted what I had seen and heard. They had me identify him, then interviewed me and took my contact information. My guess is that the suspect will probably plead out; but if there's a trial, I'm looking forward to testifying against him; I don't like men who act like beasts, especially towards women. (Call me old fashioned.)

Finally, the police finished with me; and I headed off... and continued on my way to the gym.

...and civilization

So what's the moral? There are several:

1. First, in the Western culture, and especially in the United States (the best of the West), we instinctively come to the aid of the underdog against a tyrant.

This is not common in the rest of the world. Believe me. In most ports of call, if a stranger sees a man beating a woman, or a big guy (or multiple guys) assailing a smaller, lone victim, the stranger will fade away as quickly as possible. And in some parts of the world -- e.g. the Moslem ummah -- if Abdul sees a big guy assaulting a little guy or gal, or a mob assaulting a lone victim, Abdul will join the mob; after all, who's the obvious "strong horse?"

I'm neither anthropologist nor geneticist, but I suspect the "stick up for the underdog" impulse comes from a gene that evolved only among those early humans who migrated into what is now called Europe, tens of thousands of years ago. If such a gene evolved after the Europe-bound population split from the Arabia-bound and Asia-bound populations, then it wouldn't be surprising that ours is a culture that helps the little guy against the big guy, but theirs have very different, and probably much older cultural imperatives.

2. Second, you've all heard the supposed quotation attributed to Edmund Burke, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Alas, there is no evidence he ever said those exact words. But the sentiment is clear, as is its applicability to the United States in 2012. And the transitive corollary is likewise clear: All that is necessary for good to triumph is that good people get off their butts and confront evil wherever they run across it.

That too is very, very American. I wouldn't say it's unique to the U.S. or even to Western Civ; but coupled with the first point, intervention by ordinary blokes is the primary deterrent to crime. Yes, social conformity can be a very good thing indeed!

Intervention can take several forms: You can confront the evildoer directly, the direct approach. Or if the odds are too great against you, you can call the coppers -- bearing in mind another, fruitier maxim: "When seconds count, the police are just minutes away!" And if even the police are suspect (or outgunned by the "cowards, traitors, and empty words"), you can serve as a witness at trial -- or in extremis, as a witness to history, as with Émile Zola's J'accuse!, or the Diary of Anne Frank.

3. Finally, you must be able to distinguish between those evildoers who are truly dangerous and those who are just going to "shout you to death"; and you must respond according to that distinction -- or you might find yourself inconveniently dead.

I could tell that this particular suspect was not going to physically attack me; he's only comfortable attacking people who can't -- or won't -- fight back. But under different circumstances, I would have used a very different strategy to accomplish much the same end. For example, if a woman was being assaulted by multiple men, I wouldn't just wade in like Conan the Contrarian; I would only get beaten to a pulp, and the vicitm would be no better off for my useless heroics and hysterics.

Rather, in that circumstance, I would probably get someone to call the cops -- and then I would tail the perps from a distance as well as I could, trying to glean any information that would lead to an arrest: A license plate, a good description, or a house they fled to.

There is always something you can do, and always something you should do. Even if it's only a little, a whole bunch of "littles" add up to a "big," possibly even to arrest and conviction. And if everyone does his "something," then the current culture of crime and corruption will wither away.

So as I oft like to conclude, it's time for us all to put on our manly gowns, gird our loins, and pull up our socks. And the next time you see "something big going down," as they used to say on Baretta, don't complain about it... get up on your hind legs and do something to stop it!

It didn't hurt that I misunderstood and somehow got the impression that the host was James May from Top Gear (who has also done travelogues). Turns out it was one Jamie Oliver, but no matter; if he wasn't the ascerbic and witty May, at least he was an actual chef, who has a cooking show on BBC titled the Naked Chef, which I've never seen.

What I didn't realize was that Jamie Oliver is also a liberal, anti-white bigot -- and a bloody fool, even by liberal-Progressivist standards.

In this travelogue, Oliver drove a camper through Georgia and then down into Florida for the cook-off. In the Georgia section, he dropped in (with advance notice and permission, one assumes) on (i) a white family of hunters; (ii) a group of white, atavistic trolls huddled under a bridge awaiting a lonely wanderer to waylay; (iii) the black owner and black pit boss of a barbecue joint; (iv) a genteel ladies' cake society; and (v) the female owner of a soul-food restaurant. (I omit the races of the last two because they're obvious.)

His first stop with the hunters turned into a bizarre commercial for Britain's National Health Service. When the doyenne of the hunter-gatherer tribe complains that she has lost her health insurance due to the recession, Oliver leaps into the breach to note, smugly, that in England, "health care is totally free... you don't have to pay anything!"

Really! So the money for the NHS simply materializes from thin air? Nobody has to, for example, pay staggering and exhorbitant taxes? There are no problems with rationing health care, denying vital procedures for seniors because they won't live very much longer anyway, refusing to authorize painkillers because they're worried an 87 year old dying cancer patient may become "hooked," sheer incompetence, involuntary euthanasia, and good, old-fashioned death panels? Nothing of the sort -- it was all a dream...

Marveling to the camera some hours later, Jamie Oliver extolls the British system of "free" health care: "I never even thought about it," he muses, with a shake of his head and a tear in his eye. And yes, I do believe him: He never has.

Later, under a bridge and next to a burning 55-gallon drum, Oliver entraps one of the trolls into using That Word as part of a silly, unfunny joke; he clearly entices them.

But in a later segment with the soul-fooder, Oliver tremulously tattles what he heard (using the phrase "the N-word," of course), eliciting a sorrowful shake of her soulship's head. "It's still the South," she explains in that pained, world-weary way I have so often heard from black women who want us to believe that Jim Crow is alive and secretly plotting a return to slavery; "there's the hairy, hidden hand of the white man," as Louis Farrakhan once put it, "working the machinations behind the scenes." (Institutionalized racism! Exchanging white sheets for black robes! Code words!)

In response to Oliver's probing about personal experiences of racism, she describes an instance where she drove to some carpark, where she espied a truck festooned with a Confederate battle flag, a gun rack (no indication whether it was full or empty), and, she claimed, a bumper sticker that read, "Hey, [N-word], Lincoln lied: We don't owe you no forty acres and a mule!"

Mull that for a bit and keep it in mind.

Later, Oliver monologues to the camera yet again, back in the safety of his camper, singing the vile racism that lurks just beneath the epidermis of all American whites; he repeatedly references American chattel slavery, seemingly oblivious to the fact that black slavery was ubiquitous in the world until the nineteenth century -- yes, even in Great Britain.

Sternly looks he into the camera's eye and intones, in his best imitation of Richard Burton as the psychiatrist in Equus, that the Ku Klux Klan still exists in America; for the soul-fooder actually encountered one of them. (He was referring to M'Lady's truck with the Stars and Bars and the alleged offensive bumper sticker.)

So what do I now know about Jamie Oliver?

1. He is an America basher, hunting for anything disreputable that he can use to bash the U.S.A.
2. He utterly buys into the liberal myth that race is the most fundamental divide in America; that no race is superior or inferior to any other -- except that white southerners are louts and crackers and surely inferior to blacks, Hispanics, and other races.
3. He buys into every liberal-Progressivist canard about such leftist policies as nationalized health care: It's wonderfully good medical care; it serves everybody; there's no penalty for pre-existing conditions; and it's all totally free. England, "this precious stone set in the silver sea," is surely the Philosophers' Stone, that turneth base metal into gold!
4. Jamie Oliver thinks anyone flying the Stars and Bars -- in the South! -- and (allegedly) affixing rude stickers to his bumper is a dues-paying, whisky swilling, loyal member of the KKK.
5. Ergo, Jamie Oliver is a blooming idiot.

But he's a very special type of idiot: He is yet another victim of liberal metaprogramming, a wildly successful propaganda play that strikes at the disabled -- the mentally disabled -- convincing them that anyone who disagrees with the (infinitely malleable) core axioms of liberalism or Progressivism is so ignorant, insane, or immoral that those "of the body" never need even to listen to their arguments. In fact, it's best not to listen, because antiliberalism is so spiritually toxic that merely hearing it is sufficient to putrify the liberal soul.

It's not a philosophy or even an ideology; it's a libertine lifestyle harnessed to a universal excuse machine, driven by a willful program to diminish the mental capacity of its victims, thus making them politically pliant and loyal to the point of mania to the Liberal in Chief, whoever he happens to be at a particular point of space-time. (Always a "he," feminism notwithstanding.)

Liberals need educating. Progressivists need reforming (and penance). But liberalism and Progressivism themselves, as strategies for world dominance, must be expunged.

Why? Because both Romney and Santorum are team players who recognize the most important goal is winning -- not picking who gets to be team captain.

But if, perchance -- per very likely chance -- it's Mitt Romney who does so well that after Super Tuesday, it becomes crystal clear that he is going to have sufficient delegates for nomination... I have no confidence whatsoever that Newt Gingrich would concede. On the contrary, I believe Newt would fight on, his attacks on Romney growing more and more vicious as Gingrich becomes more and more desperate.

I believe Newt would fight right up to the convention, and would then make a desperate bid to armtwist delegates into defecting, at least to force a brokered convention. I believe Newt would barnstorm the country, giving impassioned speeches about how evil, dishonest, rich, and corrupt Mitt Romney is (while virutally ignoring Obama), doing his durndest to damage Romney's brand enough that, in Newt's imagination, Romney's delegates realize Mitt can no longer win (now that Newt has so traduced him) -- so they may as well jump ship to the Gingrich campaign. It's Newt or nothing!

Newt's followers will see this as exhilarating, yet more proof that he must be nominated: "Only Newt has the guts to take the fight to Obama, bringing a Newtron bomb to the gunfight at the B.O. Corral, hounding the Occupier in Chief at every stop, willing to say or do anything to win. Why, in the face of Newt's relentless ferocity, surely Obama will drop out of the race in metaphysical terror!"

Of course, those who are not his followers will more likely see the refusal to accept the will of the voters as obsession verging on madness.

In fact, even after the convention, if Romney is nevertheless nominated, I cannot see Gingrich ever campaigning for his rival. Rather, I more easily see Newt, like Teddy Roosevelt, announcing a third-party bid for the presidency -- and with similar results: "I cannot let down all those intrepid, true conservatives who believe in me. We will fight on, and we will win! And even if we don't, at least we will have held true to our sacred principles, which is far more important than mere winning!"

And what if that third-party effort splits the Republican vote, just as it did in 1912, allowing Obama to "Wilson" his way into a second term with a minority of the vote? Well, so mote it be; can't make an omlet without breaking a few legs.

Why do I think this? Because I am convinced that Newt Gingrich sees himself as a rebel with a cause, a holy crusade that transcends all earthly politics: the recreation of the Republican Party and the conservative movement in Newt's own image.

In that sense, he is very like the One he seeks to supplant, seeing himself primarily as a transformative figure in world history, and only secondarily as a Republican. His catachismic incantation of those acts of greatness he will surely perform in his first hundred days is grandiose and more than faintly ludicrous; his skin stretches as thin as Obama's, perhaps thinner; Newt sees himself as the smartest guy in every room, whose ranging brilliance untethers him from party, ideology, principle, and internal consistency. He is large; he contains multitudes. Newt Gingrich stands beyond conservatism and liberalism, beyond Right and Left, beyond good and evil.

Newt is Nietzschean, the mouth of destiny. And if thwarted, he could decide to pull the temple down upon all our heads, to punish Mankind for snubbing its messiah. Now it's personal!

I did not form these musings before he jumped into the race; I've always rather liked him, especially because of his science-fiction connection. I was enthusiastic when first he decared.

But his cosmic campaign comprised little but cataclysmic explosions and excessive CGI. Just as when I watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, I was driven by the frenzied roller-coaster ride (who wants to ride a roller coaster for weeks without cessation?) to this conclusion: Newt Gingrich is our Barack Obama.

I hope that, unlike their Barack Obama, Newt returns to sanity and realizes that, especially with the trouncing in Florida, he simply cannot win the nomination. Why? Because it is increasingly clear that Newt could only win the general in the unlikely event that Obama so alienates himself from the entire electorate, even from his own wretched, corrupt party, that the Republican nominee essentially runs unopposed.

We may hope for such a turn of events, but hoping for the best of all worlds is not a viable electoral strategy. Better to nominate someone who has demonstrated not only ferocity but also gravitas, who is not a scrappy, fist-fightin' rebel (with or without) but is instead presidential. That generally works much better for Republican nominees.

Romney tends to overregulate himself, never stepping "outside the box." Newt Gingrich, alas, lives eternally outside the box that his fellow citizens inhabit.

Romney, the obverse, that boy needs to get out more and start showing us ideas that haven't already been gummed to death by everybody else first. But Newt, the reverse, needs to find his way back to the actual mainstream of America (whch is much more conservative than the mainstream of journalism). Come back, Newt, and all will be forgiven!

At this point, I'm more afraid of a Gingrich nomination and even a Gingrich presidency than a Romney nomination and presidency. It's akin to my reaction to the two main political parties: I have about as many disagreements with the GOP as I do with the Democrats; but the things I hate about the latter seem much more dangerous to me than the things I hate about the former.

Same with Mitt vs. Newt: The latter's savage, unfair, and leftist attacks on Capitalism itself, and his j'accuse against Romney for being "anti-immigrant" (which is liberal code for "racist") are far more damaging to the American experiment than are Romney's attacks on Gingrich for his (nonexistent) ethical lapses as Speaker or on Newt's lobbying -- as I now believe, having changed my mind since a few weeks ago -- for Freddie Mac.

Romney's transgressions damage only Newt Gingrich, or possibly himself, if there's blowback; but Newt's attacks strike at the very heart of the distinction between Right and Left: If conservatism can be deformed to encompass class warfare, racial favoritism, and hostility towards the normal functioning of Capitalism, then what is left of the ideology?

To me, today's Newt is more dangerous than today's Mitt: dangerous to the success of the presidential and related elections; to the presidency itself; and even to the Great Dichotomy between Right and Left -- Capitalism vs. command; individualism vs. collectivism; republicanism vs. authoritarian parliamentarianism; American exceptionalism vs. national homogenization leading towards one-world government. If today's Newt is nominated and even if he is elected, it will be a disaster for those of us who desperately cling to that which makes America different from all other nations.

But I'm holding out hope for tomorrow's Newt. If tomorrow's Newt can lasso his wild horses and start showing discipline and consistency in his rhetoric, adverts, and especially his attacks on Romney (he can still go over the top attacking Obama); if he can begin thinking not only broadly but deeply; if he can if he can start seeing his candidacy less as reviving Gingrich and more as restoring America; then my balancing act between Romney's timidity and Gingrich's mania might start tipping back towards the latter.

(Alternatively, if Mitt become bolder and more effectively aggressive about pushing a pro-growth, revivalist, and more American vision of America, then I might show even more enthusiasm for his candidacy.)

But honestly, both those candidates deserve a stern "come to Jesus" meeting for serially violating Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment.

What a pair! But given the alternatives, with Rick Santorum fading into the wallpaper and Ron Paul heading further and further off the wall, we're going to have to nominate one of those four-letter words, Mitt or Newt.

Our only hope is the sheer ferocity of Barack H. Obama's hatred of a strong and prosperous America and of mainstream Americans. Once we have a nominee, and assuming the loser will join the winner's campaign, we still have an excellent (much better than even) chance of ensuring that the obamachete is a one-term germ.

Our previous forrays into the eye of Newt and mitt of Romney can be found here:

• South Carolina's Newtron Bomb: Part 1 - the Unbreakable Thread
• South Carolina's Newtron Bomb: Part 2 - Newt In the Box

Gingrich also talked extensively about immigration policy in Latin America, and, in a nod to Cuban-American voters, he offered to push for "Cuban Spring" if elected president.

What, Newt will push for the Muslim Brotherhood to colonize Cuba? Or is he just completely out of touch with what the putative "Arab Spring" has actually wrought in the Middle East?

Another newtron bombard from Newt "Shoot from the lip" Gingrich!

This illustrates my problem with Gingrich as nominee, an October surprise every day. In the very same article, we find this:

The former House speaker ripped Romney's immigration policy, laughing off the idea of self-deportation that Romney had suggested during a Monday night debate saying it wouldn't work.

During a debate earlier this week, Romney said he favors self-deportation over policies that would require the federal government to round up millions of illegal immigrants and send them back to their home countries. Advocates of Romney's approach argue that illegal immigration can be curbed by denying public benefits to them, forcing them to leave the United States on their own.

"You have to live in a world of Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts and automatically $20 million income for no work to have some fantasy this far from reality," Gingrich said, alluding to details in Romney's income tax returns made public on Tuesday. "For Romney to believe that somebody's grandmother is going to be so cut off that she is going to self-deport, I mean this is an Obama-level fantasy."

You think Barack H. Obama's oppo research won't be able to latch onto the obvious rejoinder? Heck, the Romney campaign and even Newsmax caught on immediately:

But Gingrich's campaign has spoken of the self-deportation policy he ridiculed Wednesday.

Romney's campaign directed reporters to past comments by Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond, who said that only a small percent of illegal immigrants would likely be allowed to stay in the U.S. under Gingrich's plan. Hammond went on to say that the vast majority of them would likely "self-deport."

(And note, he is still sticking it to Mitt for being richer and more successful than Gingrich has ever been. Evidently, Newt really and truly has a great big grudge against Capitalism.)

Words pop into his head and bubble out his mouth without even a moment's pause for reflection. Can Newt Gingrich ever demonstrate the discipline to think twice before speaking?

Or even after?

I very much worry that conservatives, in their understandable zeal to find a candidate who is energetic in attacking the real enemy of freedom (Obama), will saddle us with the caffeinated squirrel from Under the Hedge -- a candidate who windmills his arms with great vigor, flailing ineffectually, producing "sound and fury that signifies nothing" -- but electoral disaster.

It won't take long:

Friends, cronies, benefactors, and fellow citizens of the world. From this point on, I promise to govern like a Republican.

 

 

(Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more.)

 

I'd like to thank each guest in the audience for the $4,000; your rubber chicken will be served momentarily. We now return you to your regularly scheduled pogrom.

Big Lizards: All the news you can eat!

Let's suppose for sake of argument that Newt Gingrich ends up being the Republican nominee for President of the United States. What, in that hypothetical, does he need to do in order actually to win, rather than humiliate himself and demolish the party (and country) in the process?

First, here's what he doesn't need to do: He doesn't need to continue fighting with the useless-idiot moderators at these debates. All right, all right, we get it; the lamestream media are biased against the Right. (And not only that... someone is wrong on the internet.)

But as effective as such Newtiments may be among conservative Republicans, that's how badly they play among independents and Reagan Democrats -- who we need in order to win the general election. Even if a question is unfair or vile and would never be asked of a Democratic candidate, ordinary general-election voters still want to hear an answer; to evade the question by attacking the questioner sounds... cagey, evasive, furtive.

It's all right to use a few seconds to bash the inquisitor; but then, for God's sake, answer the blasted question! Don't make it sound like you have something to hide, Mr. G.

Gingrich sort of did that in the Charleston debate when immoderator John King led off with a question about Marianne Gingrich's claim in an ABC interview that Newt had asked for an "open marriage." After lambasting King for asking the question, he did finally answer the question... sort of. But he spent a minute and a half attacking King, then another thirty or forty seconds backing up and running over the corpse once more (not only was King merely dead, he was really most sincerely dead). Sandwiched in between was essentially a one-word answer: No. Meaning, No, he says he didn't aske MG for an open marriage.

It played very well in the context of a primary crowd comprising conservative GOP voters in the deep South. But that approach will fall flatter than a platyhelminthes among those voters who don't consciously consider themselves "political."

Second, we don't need Newt Gingrich's penchant for a ten-RPM (revelations per minute) scream of consciousness, where idea follows idea so quickly that most viewers are left breathless and dizzy -- but not persuaded by any of them. Such machine-gun rapidity of thoughts, ranging from brilliant to downright goofy, leads to idea overload; the audience simply tunes them all out as random noise, turning Gingrich's soliloquy into "wugga wugga wugga economy, wugga wugga wugga space, wugga wugga wugga ObamaCare."

He doesn't need to prove that he thinks a plethora of thoughts; we got that already. Instead, Newt needs to prove that he can think deeply and popularly. He needs to pick two or three central themes -- two domestic policies and a foreign policy, for example -- and pound the living daylights out of those plans! Something with a simple, catchy mnemonic, like Herman Munster's "9 -- 9 -- 9," but with as much detail as Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI, 96%) "A Roadmap for America's Future."

Does Gingrich have the discipline to stick to the script, rather than branching out into an endless eddy of ad libs, regurgitating recursive rodomontade and increasingly repetitious rhetoric? Honest to Godot, I don't really know.

Third, the very last thing we need is Newt the Master Debater... because in the general, that's all it will be.

Anybody who thinks Barack H. "Bubble Boy" Obama is going to pick up Newt's gauntlet of three three-hour debates, mano a mano, also believes in the Truth Fairy. Obama has nothing whatsoever to gain from debating Gingrich. Heck, I wouldn't even be surprised if President B.O. refused to debate "nominee" Newt Gingich al all, not even a single debate.

The president has a remarkably easy way to pull that off: He dithers about debates until there is only one more time slot on the table. He reluctantly agrees to that debate, citing the press of "the people's business" and that he can't take time to play with Newt Gingrich.

Then, just before that debate, Obama deliberately and secretly precipitates a Crisis. This Crisis becomes all consuming -- and Obama summarily cancels the debate for the duration of the Crisis... which lasts into the final month of campaigning. And mysteriously, Obama just plain runs out of time to debate hapless Newton Leroy.

What would Newt do -- debate a GOP stand in pretending to be Obama? Debate an alternate Democrat to be named later? Debate himself? How many people do you think would watch any of those? More to the point, how many people who are not already Newtists will tune in?

Yeah, that's what I think, too.

If Gingrich's entire campaign is a series of Lincoln-Douglass debates -- what does that mean, Gingrich speaks, then Obama shows up the next day with a rebuttal? -- then what becomes of his strategy if Barack Obama simply refuses to play ball?

What we so desperately need from the Newtonian is a good old-fashioned retail campaign, with Newt's voice ringing "from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city""

• Newt speaking at Elks clubs and national monuments, college campuses and church bean suppers, Wall Street and a Detroit assembly line.
• Newt on the talking-head shows, conservative talk radio, and NPR.
• Newt flooding the airwaves and the internets with adverts, YouTubes, Tweets, and lots of "exciting news" on Farcebook and MyFace.
• A phalanx of Newtists whose full-time job is to anticipate the next attacks on Newt Gingrich and to make ready a forceful, pithy, and easily absorbed pushback to each attack. No attack should be allowed to stand unanswered for longer than fifteen minutes; so the Gingruption Rapid-Response Ring (GRRR!) had better know what slander the Left is going to hurl into the politosphere even before the Left itself knows.
• Newt campaigning among the peons. Newt answering questions quickly and decisively. Newt kissing hands and shaking babies.

In other words, Newt behaving like a regular nominee for the presidency... the same battle plan that would be followed by Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum. That is the only way that Newt Gingrich would be able to beat Barack Obama; he can't just cruise above the country at Flight Level 350, delivering pronunciamentos via aerial bombardment. "As God is my witness, I thought those turkey ideas would fly!"

Does he have the attention span to conduct this type of campaign for month after month? Again, I just don't know; he strikes me as a bloke who bores easily.

If "Retail Newt" shows up, then we have a really good chance. But if it's just the old "Tsunami Newt"... well all I can suggest is that you put on your manly gown, gird your loins, and pull up your socks; it's going to be a bumpy ride, heading into a crash landing.

So far, I have not heard the meme from either camp that if the Other is nominated, We shall sit out the election or vote to reelect President B.O. This is important; one of three men will be the Republican nominee: Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, or Rick Santorum. It would be utterly devastating if, say, Romney supporters said they would not support Gingrich in the general, or if Santorum supporters insisted that if Romney is the nominee, they will sit out the election.

I still believe Gingrich is the least, not the most electable of the three (as his supporters imagine), and that he would not make a good president even if elected. Nevertheless, if he is nominated, I would wholeheartedly throw myself into his campaign without qualm or reservation. Similarly so for Romney and Santorum. I would even campaign for Ron Paul, should he get the nod... though I believe the odds of that are somewhere in between nothing and naught.

In 2008, I know a lot of conservatives and libertarians who were so enraged that none of their own was nominated that they did in fact refuse to vote for McCain; most just stayed home, but a few actually voted for Obama in a fit of pique. While I don't believe that was determinative -- Obamunism would have won the day anyway -- it might not have been such a butt-whupping, and the Democrats might not have ended up with such a stranglehold on the Senate. In fact, I believe angry, anti-liberal "protest-voting" handed us ObamaCare and the Trillion Dollar Spree.

Newt Gingrich has a boatload of marital baggage; he has a frightening unlikeability problem; he's no more consistently "conservative" than is Romney; he's unpredictable and gets more wild hairs than a Tazmanian devil on a splintery fence post; and he frightens the horses. As Wolf Howling notes, Newt does have a much greater ability to communicate and defend his ideas than does Mitt or Rick:

John McCain lost the 2008 election because he ceded the major issues to the Obama narrative. Outrageously, over half the nation still thinks that the subprime crisis was caused by Wall St. greed. Bush failed to reform Social Security because the left was able to demagogue the issue. The Bush presidency was crippled because of Bush's failure to directly challenge the left's despicable campaign to loose the Iraq war. The base understands this. The ability to communicate may well be the single most important skill for any conservative nominee for President today. As Erickson says, look back at Ford, Reagan, Bush, Dole, Bush, and McCain, the only ones who have won have been those that unapologetically and vocally embraced conservativism. Newt needs to emphasize precisely that. [Note that by "won," Wolf Howling means "prevailed on policy;" GWB won reelection but had a miserable second term. -- DaH]

However, Newt has in the past abused that same rhetorical skill to defend decidedly anticonservative and unlibertarian ideas -- including the individual mandate of ObamaCare, stimulus packages, earmarks, and legendarily, Globaloney itself alongside Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury).

But with a conservative Congress keeping Newt's nose to the fire, he would surely be such an enormous improvement over Obama -- and not a single Republican have I heard denying that fact -- that I expect the entire Right and two-thirds of the center ultimately to vote for nominee Gingrich... assuming he doesn't manage to turn the entire election into a referendum on Newtism.

Similarly, even the most flamboyent Newtist would readily admit that President Mitt Romney is vastly preferable to the devil we have.

So keep fingers crossed that the rancor doesn't rise to the point where the shorthand slogans "anybody but Romney" and "anybody but Newt" become literally true, and the losers in the primary become spoilers in the general.

New federal protections could mean that most of the remains of an estimated 160,000 Native Americans held by universities, museums, and federal government agencies may soon be transferred to tribes.

Under the new regulations, museums and agencies are required to notify tribes whose current or ancestral lands harbored the remains that the tribe is entitled to have them back.

Back? When did they ever have them in the first place?

Yeah, well, kiss the field of anthropology goodbye: Regardless of where any particular tribe lives now, tribes collectively claim that tribal "Native American" ancestral lands cover all of North and South America; hence any non-European remains must be "returned" to tribes that didn't even exist five or six thousand years ago, when the bones were inside a living person.

This is exactly the sort of anti-science outrage that belies the claim that Obama or the Democratic Party has anything to do with "progress."

This ruling (that "unidentified" actually means "identified as belonging to some Indian tribe") is of a piece with the absurdity that all museums and universities should "return" Pharaohic artifacts to modern-day Egyptians -- who are not in any way related to the Egyptians who created those artifacts. Modern Egyptians are Arabs who speak, read, and write Arabic; they are much more closely related to Saudi Arabian Bedouins than to Ramses or Tutankhamen. They simply wandered into Egypt millennia after the Pharaohs' civilization collapsed -- squatters in an empty building who demand the return of all the paintings that used to hang in the lobbies.

And notice Obama's Interior Department offers no such solicitude for the remains of people of European descent; museums needn't return the remains of Conquistadors to Spain.

Let's state it bluntly: People who lived millennia ago have no living next of kin and do not belong to any modern country, state, or tribe. It's utter lunacy. Too, allowing scientists to study prehistorical remains does not in any conceivable way disrespect people living in modern-day "tribes"... even if we assume for sake of argument that tribalism itself isn't a barbaric anachronism anyway, generally meaning only a collection of people with the privilege to operate a casino in despite of local laws.

A big wet-fish handshake to President B.O. for this wonderful parting gift to the American scientific community. (I wonder if the latter, as other minorities have, will begin to rethink its abuse-ridden love affair with the Left?)

[Hat tip to Friend Lee.]

Still, I'm not averse. I have a pitch for a new SF novel -- my first in a number of years -- under submission right now... to Big Publishing. But hey, if that falls through, I have enough confidence in the novel, via my 26 friggin' years in the novel-writing biz, to spend what it takes to publish it myself.

But not through Amazon Digital Services, however.

Comes to that, I would publish through an independent company (Amazon will still be happy to make it available through the Kindle, of course). And if I go that self-publishing route, I promise, as God is my witness, to contract to make the book available via "print on demand" in a regular dead-tree version, in addition to digital media.

There must be many others like myself who just can't bring ourselves to read novels on screen, or even on e-ink; at least until that technology improves markedly, particularly in the realm of pixel density.

A high-quality print job usually uses a density of 1,250 dpi ([printed] dots per inch, a linear measurement); that gives the human eye the illusion of continuous print, like an old-fashioned inked forme. Display monitors aren't that dot-dense -- or pixel-dense, as electronic displays are measured. High-quality monitors can range from barely over 100 ppi (pixels per inch) in large displays to a maximum of somewhat over 300, but only on very small displays, like some cell phones. 300+ ppi on a large display would be prohibitively expensive, due to the cost of the display technology.

It's tough to compare dpi to ppi, because the wider range of colors available to monitors generally makes up for the lower pixel density. Except in black and white, however, where the only color is (surprise!) black. By a curious coincidence, black and white is the normal "color scheme" of the interior pages of most books. In that respect, the comparison is direct: 1,250 dpi, or even up to 1,800, in actual print, versus less than 350 ppi on the best (and smallest!) screens. The Amazon Kindle, as well as the Barnes & Noble Nook, clocks in at 167 ppi.

A more useful measurement than ppi (dpi) might be ppsi (dpsi), pixels (or dots) per square inch; since letters, punctuation, and other characters are two-dimensional, ppsi/dpsi gives you a better idea how dense each character is: A 167 ppi Kindle screen yields just under 28,000 ppsi; but a 600 dpi printed book translates into 360,000 dpsi. And high-quality printing, 1,250 dpi, yields a whopping 1.56 million dots per square inch.

I don't own a Kindle (or Nook), and I have no plans to buy one -- until, that is, it can display black and white text at a minimum of, say, 600 ppi. At that pixel density, the number of dots/pixels alotted to an individual character would be about 13 times as many as in the same size character on an e-ink reader. (The full 1,250 ppi, mimicking high-quality, slick magazine print, generates character images using 56 times as many dots per square inch as a Kindle or Nook.) That is a big, big difference... enough to spell the difference between what's comfortable for me to read and what gives me a headache trying to resolve the text!

All of which is preamble to my quandry: I am very happy to publicize the first novel by Aaron Worthing, Archangel (click the link to take you to the novel's page on Amazon)... but I cannot honestly say that I have bought or even plan to buy it. Worthing, as many of you already know, is an erstwhile blogger at Patterico's Pantaloons who recently admitted that the name is a pseudonym (Aaron Worthing, not the blogname).

I have nothing bad to say about the novel; the only reason I haven't read it is that I cannot read low-quality displays without cranial pain. Alas, since Archangel is only available in Kindle format, I can't read the darned thing!

Aaron is a great guy; and as Beldar says, the conceit of the novel is certainly interesting: a superhero who appears on 9/11, rescuing victims of the most evil terrorist attack in human history -- and changing history itself in the process. Alack, the low level of e-ink display technology prevents me from being able to enjoy a book that exists only electronically.

Aaron's novel Archangel might be as fantastic as the immortal Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, by Gary Wolf. Lord knows I hope it is... because then Aaron might indeed earn the Big Bux for which we authors ever seek, as Parsifal sought the Holy Grail. And that would illustrate the triumph of Capitalism, in all it's small-business glory.

So if you enjoy reading books on Kindle, I strongly urge you to buy ($9.99) and read Archangel... then please let me know what you think of it!