Just a knife...knifin' around...cut cut cut

The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.

Most pieces written about [Ron Paul] are swarmed upon by throngs of the shit-witted; every single word dismantled, rearranged, and cannibalized in a tragic parody of debate. It’s as if SkyNet became self-aware then suffered a major stroke. Just as it’s true that you can judge any book by its cover, you can judge a person by the type of monsters who vouch for them… As it follows, every presidential candidate needs a theme song, one that telegraphs a plagiarized set of emotions that seeks to capture the rapturous feelings of the uninformed masses that follow them. For Paul and his supporters, that song would be “Dancing With Myself.”

Ron Paul fandom (and oh yes, it is fandom) is a collection of mental illnesses poorly diagnosed…

All stripes of weirdo death-cult, wannabe Heavens Gate and Branch Davidian, square-headed Danny Bonaduce-led racist outfits have strapped themselves to the patina of constitutional freedom because they know it’s the only way to avoid having ATF tanks roll over their necks. Under the wizard’s robe, a whole variety of little cockmonglers have thrived: UFO conspiracy handmaidens, survivalists, moon-landing nuts – the type of people who aren’t against big government, but the grown-up world in general.

At the same time, Paul has found a foothold across the political divide with young impressionable folk who have the clarity to see that something is critically wrong with the project of capitalistic democracy, but not the wit to realize that he’s the problem, not the cure.

It’s sort of fascinating watching the Republican establishment finally go nuclear on Newt Gingrich. As near as I can tell, pretty much everyone who actually served with or alongside Newt in the 90s hates his guts. But as long as he was just writing books and doing think tanky stuff, they were willing to let bygones be bygones. Ditto for the period when he was supposedly running for president but, in reality, was just conducting an innovative new kind of book tour.

But now that he has millions of dollars of Sheldon Adelson’s casino money and has even an outside chance of actually winning, the long knives are out. Bob Dole has a scorching attack here. The Drudge Report is now the We-Hate-Newt Report. Philip Klein launches a brutal broadside here. Suddenly everyone remembers the 90s again, and in particular how volcanically unstable Newt was…

[Right-wingers] think that listening to Newt is a hoot, and they love it when he gets the crowds wound up. The problem is that they never quite realized the crowd wasn’t in on the con. The rank-and-file actually took Newt seriously, and now party leaders have to figure out how to suck the fetid air back out of the Gingrich-inspired fever swamps without losing their core audience of old people and the white working class, who are voting for their side because they’re scared to death that Barack Obama is destroying western civilization.