GOP elephant still at large

Shame on me for jumping to conclusions when I read

the headline on a news story that said:

ELEPHANT RUNS AWAY FROM CIRCUS

I quickly assumed that after months of nonsensical behavior, McNewt Gingrich had withdrawn from the Republican presidential race.

Alas, no such luck. The story told of a 2.5 ton elephant named Baby that escaped from a circus in Blackpool, Ireland, and was running around a car park near a shopping center. It was soon captured, as will be Gingrich, hopefully sooner than later.

The conscience of a severe conservative..

WHAT IS A CONSERVATIVE? Painful though it may be, let me count the themes and variations, with considerable help from those profoundly committed fellows seeking the GOP presidential nod.

Let's begin with McMitt Romney. Funny how he always manages to engage our attention with things he is forced to explain later. Successfully groveling before the Conservative Political Action Conference (he did manage to win the straw vote!) McMitt weirdly referred to himself as a "severe" conservative. That got everybody's attention, Readers, in and out of the ideological fray. Today's Paul Krugman column in the New York Times, for example, was headed "Severe Conservative Syndrome," a hint of the medically-inspired terminology commonly attached to "severe": disabled, depressed, ill, etc. ...

If nothing else, Romney appears to have broken new ground for the word that Republicans have snagged to convince other Republicans that they are just as conservative as, say, Ronald Reagan. But Reagan, of course, is merely a convenient ad hoc throwback inasmuch it can be easily shown that the GOP icon presided over raised taxes, debt ceilings and budget deficits with the best of, eh, severe Democrats.

Still, Romney has revived Orwellian Duckspeak, which, you know, refers to people who talk without thinking.

Meantime, Romney's opponents have found other adjectives to repeat when they are in the company of two or more voters. McRick Santorum argues that he is the only "true" conservative in the crowd, shifting the focus from McNewt Gingrich, who also calls himself authentically tried and true, even more so than Santorum, if you really want to believe that.

Not to confuse you, but there are numerous other references to conservatism that show up regularly, depending on the audience in the hall. To wit: economic, social, ultra-right, Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, post-modern (Probably from George Will) and Neo-

For now, however, Romney has at least won the linguistic honors, Duckspeak be damned.

Or as Krugman concludes: "...you have to wonder whether it was a Freudian slip. For something has clearly gone very wrong with modern American conservatism."

Modern American? That's a new one on me.

Newt to Mitt: Cut the French, Monsieur!

WE SHOULD ALL BE GRATEFUL to Newt Gingrich for reminding us that Mitt Romney speaks French. Until now, we've been having some difficulty translating many of Romney's robust remarks on the campaign trail. But with a snotty reference to Romney's Francophilia in a TV ad (titled: The French Connection) running in South Carolina, Newt has contributed a major vein to be tapped in the days leading to that state's primary.

Aside from my late Aunt Della, who wrongly insisted that our family was French, I've never met many folks who had anything good to say about those people. It's a sort of reverse snobbery practiced by low-brows who can never explain why they hate the French - all Frenchmen! So Newt, who is playing the nasty Penguin to Romney's Batman, has decided to plow up whatever bad will that exists in the Palmetto State with his sniffing attacks.

Even in Catherine the Great's day, French was fashionable and she was quite fond of saying things like Mon Dieu and Bonjour to her Russian subjects when she wasn't purring other things to her many lovers. But an anti-French mood in America took a major plunge when France refused to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq. (Was its opposition so wrong?)

Led by right-wing megaphones (Rupert Murdoch among them), simpleton politicians decried all things French (fries, bread, kisses, Brigitte Bardot et al). Some of that dissipated under the weight of its own ignorance. Until now.

But there is a learning moment for Mitt in this: If he somehow learned to frame his answers in plain English, nobody would care a whit about the assault from the Penguin.

For Gingrich, the good bad news

THE GOOD NEWS for Newt Gingrich, the new Golden Oldie to capture the media's imagination, is that he was endorsed by the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader, the state's biggest newspaper (Sunday circ. 63,991; daily, 48,342). The bad news for Newt Gingrich is that the influential right-wing daily endorsed the nominations of Steve Forbes in the 2000 Republican primary and, for God's sake, Pat Buchanan in the 1992 and 1996 primaries.

The paper's front-page Sunday editorial signed by publisher Joseph W. McQuaid sent waves of breathless reports across the cyberworld, which figured it had some hard news to bestir the saliva of a politically inattentive nation caught up in the frenzy of the National Football League.

According to McQuaid's extrasensory perception, we can count on Gingrich to "improve Washington" just as he did in the 1990s as the Republican House Speaker. You can see where this is all going.

The same, though younger Gingrich, was reprimanded in 1997 by a bipartisan House vote of 395 to 28 and required to pay a $300,000 penalty on ethics violations. The Washington Post reported at the time that"Gingrich admitted that he brought discredit to the House and broke its rules by failing to ensure that financing for two projects would not violate federal tax law and by giving the House ethics committee false information.

Added Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Republican,

"Newt has done some things that have embarrassed House Republicans and embarrassed the House."

No previous House speaker in 208 years had been so disciplined.

How's that for "improving Washington"?

Newt Gingrich's dreamy mission impossible

NEWT GINGRICH is driven by the demon of One Notion Under God. So on Wednesday, he will announce his candidacy for president and tell us why his impossible notion of occupying the Oval Office should make more sense to the electorate than anybody else laboring with the Republican brand these days.

Hooray for Newt for his wonderful impersonation of Crazy Guggenheim. In an act of historic self redemption, the guy has thrust himself into the swamp to prove that at 67 he can still rise above the muck of adultery and a reprimand by his congressional colleagues in 1997 for serious ethical violations. To make sure that he got the message, he also was fined $300,000!

But that was more than a decade ago, folks. Since then, he assures us that he has found God, to whom he regularly pays his respects and promises us that he is saved by moral cleansing. In one of the most absurd explanations of his philandering days the New Newt said that he was so driven by his intense dedication to his work ethic that he detoured some of his energy into his sex life. He has now become such a family man that he and his third wife are never more than an elbow apart.

As he sets forth on his next mission, he doubtless will recall that at least one of his colleagues rushed to his defense after he was reprimanded. That was uttered by another pure-of-heart congressman, Tom DeLay, who was heard to complain: "The highest possible standard does not mean an impossible standard no American could possibly reach."