So it appears to be down to two - although with all the cognitive dissonance floating around the Republican defectorate, who can honestly say? New Hampshire hairplugs - excuse, me, Repubs - chose Romney because a soulless vulture who got rich by helping destroy one small piece of the American economy at a time is slightly more in tune with New England conservatism's Gilded Age tradition of robber baronism, and Newt just isn't slick enough to play in that particular pond. But whence South Carolina, that once proud bulwark of the Confederacy where hard work and dedication were, by long tradition, the exclusive domain of slaves? To paraphrase one remark, Romney just "isn't mean enough" for Palmetto sensibilities - his brand of lying and thieving were entirely too civilized. Gingrich, by contrast, who is himself a man of Georgia (and I use the term "man" loosely here), apparently has a much stronger bead on the kind of snarling, sneering, face-biting hatred and general air of malice toward all mankind outside of rich, white, Southern, Christer conservatism that does best in that market. Congratulations on the "win," Darth Hideous.
What no one in the Republican Party is asking - and indeed, would be totally anathema to the GOP to ask - is what the hell moral credentials either of these stunning examples of disgrace can supply. They're both scumbags. Complete, utter, garbage. Romney is the kind of garbage that has a strangely orderly appearance to it despite being surrounded by muck, and a smell more of inorganic decay and rust rather than the more pungent odors around it. He is a spotless emblem of the internal erosion of American civilization - a meritless wraith who lives a life of total comfort and indifference because he took over productive enterprises other people spent a lifetime building and turned them into nothing more than a quick cash payday for himself and a pink slip for so many others.
The man achieved nothing; built nothing; accomplished nothing; and if not for the very real human consequences of his near-psychotic obliviousness to the cost of his actions on other people, he would indeed be nothing. But because of those consequences, he is actually less than nothing - a person whose net impact on the world is negative. And he couldn't care less, or is even proud of it - or at least insofar as someone with such a cavalier, diffusive personality as his is even capable of real emotion. It's hard to miss how hollow and out-of-tune with human reality he is, nor the fact that he is plainly aware of this weakness in himself and thinks it a strength.
And what of Herr Gingrich? Oh yes, Newt - a piece of garbage so pungent and rank with the stench of rotting moral sewage you have to disinfect your TV screen after seeing him on C-Span. No cold, metallic abstractions from this magnificent specimen of disease - just the God's honest evil. Inhuman malice and self-regard aged like wine - practically an expert sommelier in the cultivation and distribution of every form of bitterness, contempt, ignorance, mendacity, and entitled hauteur to which the vestigial tail of mankind that is the Southern conservative is so easily subject. A man so vile even at first glance that 11-year-old me saw him on the news crowing about the 1994 Gingrich Devolution and said, "Wow, that guy's an asshole." I didn't know why he was an asshole at the time, but it doesn't take much learning in the ways of the world to know the smell of what it creates. Little did I know that first whiff was just the opening salvo in a hurricane of filth and lunacy.
Mr. Gingrich is proof of the idea that pigs and weasels are genetically compatible, and I'm not talking about the way he looks - though it is certainly odd how accurately his face conveys his personality. His deranged albeit mercifully brief rule as Speaker of the House nonetheless managed to launch half a decade of unhinged warfare against President Clinton and the American Republic from within its own democratic institutions, spending more investigating the personal life of a President than they were willing to spend on any social program they could axe without having to flee the country. Tom DeLay and various other anti-American rodents and reptiles all sailed into power on the same plague ship captained by Herr Gingrich, whom we can honestly call the Typhoid Mary of 1990s American politics.
There isn't one single thing Gingrich can point to as an actual achievement of his time in office, unless the word "achievement" is corrupted beyond recognition into an Orwellian war=peace, slavery=freedom inversion of reality. As far as can be seen without a minute inspection of every bill he didn't deign to obstruct, the singular output in his role in leadership was to breed racial hatred (a pastime he has apparently not given up even today), spread bald-faced lies, and somehow create an even safer haven for criminality in Congress than already existed. He is Richard Nixon without the work ethic, and Dick Cheney if he were made of piss-sodden spongy material rather than radioactive dust.
Basically, it boils down to the question already asked: What exactly is the moral selling point for either of these truly contemptible people? Of course, it's a question with no audience, because Republicans do not even comprehend the basic concept of morality - the very idea that their actions should be based on assessment of what effect it has on other people would just seem like naive, touchy-feelie hippie nonsense to them. Everything is power to them. Good, evil, what's the difference? It's movie villain cliche shit, but somehow they actually believe it. They pick the candidate that is most gratifying to whatever their strongest pathological impulse is - if they're greedier than they are bigoted, they will definitely want Romney. If it's hate and the verbal violence of bald-faced lying that gets their rocks off, they'll want Gingrich. There's no reflection or assessment of consequences, and certainly no concern for the United States of America. This is all some kind of animalistic feeding frenzy to them, trying to carve out their little piece of carrion from a country that unsportingly continues to live and resist them.
See, Americans by and large are still human beings, and they still want a decent person in the White House - not some vulture or bigoted pig. Admittedly it's never been the highest criterion, given past occupants of the White House, but it's certainly a very distinctive one if the matchup is Barack Obama vs. tax-evading corporate necrophiliac or bellowing fascist Henry VIII impersonator. For the first time in decades - and from perspectives, more than a century - we have an actual moral leader in the Presidency: A man who makes an effort to be worthy of admiration rather than going around acting like the world should be grateful for his presence. Most criticism of him based on superficial appearances has been utterly obliterated in the glare of the occasional "WHOA" moments when he's unleashed himself at a real point of decision - moments when no one, including Republicans, is left anywhere to hide from the fact that we have a great President right now. Obama is a man of tremendous talent, intelligence, and dignity who applies his qualities toward purposes greater than himself, and on all accounts towers so far above either Romney or Gingrich that I'm at a loss as to what Republicans think they're doing.
It just seems like they're groping in the Dark that has increasingly become their home - their willful self-deception that being ignorant, worthless, and selfish does not make them weak. That doesn't mean we're certain to defeat them - nothing is ever certain: There's a reason that the best defense against toxic waste is to limit how often you handle it, no matter how many precautions are taken when you do. But the GOP increasingly comes to resemble something the world first learned in 1945, on the ten-year ashes of the Thousand-Year Reich: For all its obsession with strength, Evil is weak. For all its momentary cunning, Evil is stupid. In its basic state, it is an instinct-driven animal that will thoughtlessly follow its impulses over a cliff. And in its far rarer state of intelligent malice, it still loses because its version of Reason is mere deductive mechanism - the reworking of external factors to serve an internal need without ever turning the eye inward to understand context. It cannot rise above cynical logical mechanism to the kind of inductive leap of imagination that so often informs the greatest advances in science and philosophy.
By its very nature, Evil does not know what is in its own best interests, because it does not understand that it is part of a larger whole. It rejects that knowledge out of an inflated sense of self-importance and the complementary contempt for everyone else that comes with it. "How dare the world speak to me of responsibilities, when in myself I know I am a giant far above all you puny mortals! I am Atlas, except I won't Shrug because I want to steal your shit and make you obey me." And thus, quickly or slowly, the solipsistic mentality the GOP embodies is nothing more than a mailing label addressed to the Garbage Heap of History. They prove time and again that they are, ultimately, a self-correcting problem. The task of Democrats, then, is twofold - not to join them on their trek to nothingness, and to stop them from dragging the United States of America down with them.
The first part is simple, although I won't say easy - be aware of what you are in context, and the simple fact that a lot of things are a lot more important than you. The second part is hard, because it entails far more than just winning elections, as difficult and exhausting as that can be by itself: We have to be on a completely different path than they are, not merely standing in the way of their descent. We have the right leadership in the White House to do that, but we still need the right people in Congress and in state and local government - and more importantly, be the right people ourselves, because everything else flows from that.
This is something Republicans will never understand, and it will always make even their most despair-inducing crimes against humanity ultimately futile: They are not merely unworthy of what they seek, but incapable of keeping what they already have in the presence of any sincere challenge. What they represent is oppression by default, saying to America "Got any better idea than to let us run roughshod over you?" As long as the answer is unambiguously Yes, and that fact rings clear even to people who are not highly engaged, then all the Republican Party's lies, schemes, and criminal behavior will be in vain. And they're becoming less and less competent at obscuring that answer as time goes on and their hatred increases.
Time was, a man like Nixon or Reagan could be pure evil and yet still present no obvious threat to the everyday lives of the average citizen, however horribly they were screwing over particular classes of people they found inconvenient. Those who were engaged with politics knew plainly what was going on, but people who didn't pay special attention didn't see it, and when the consequences finally touched their lives, they didn't make the connection. But that kind of predation no longer satisfies the Republican pathology - "we hate those whom we wrong," and Republicans hate, hate, HATE America. It irks them on a basic spiritual level that other people dare to consider themselves their equals. How dare they?!?! How dare (insert hated minority) get so uppity? How dare the help form a union and demand health and dental benefits? How dare anyone not born here - like their all-important selves - try to come here and expect to be treated equally? How dare anyone who isn't them enjoy the same legal protections and opportunities they do? Their cup of hate runneth over.
They cannot be contented with screwing people over through indirect institutional mechanisms anymore. It's not personal enough - not satisfying enough for them. If the Bush regime taught us anything, it is that Republicans now demand to rub it in America's face how much they hate this country and everyone in it who isn't a carbon-copy of themselves. They go beyond what is necessary for a selfish agenda and actually achieve a kind of Anti-Zen state of pure malefic altruism - an almost selfless desire to destroy others in a glorious kamikaze charge. This is their agenda today, to one degree or another: Confronted by the limits of their ability to accumulate power, they will instead simply try to debase everyone else to increase the relative potency of what they do manage to take. It has become so petty, so constant, and so sharp a picture of utter collective psychopathy that it's really amazing they don't just randomly break out into Tourette's syndrome outbursts of racial epithets and threats of mass-murder in the middle of campaign speeches. "And I want to say how important education is to...to...Nigger nigger! Commie faggot! Y'all gone die! DIE!...to me, and that's why I support the Happy Joy-Joy Cute Baby initiative...DIE DIE DIE!"
See, personally I don't think the GOP agenda is to actually choose between the shallow, cavalier narcissist-vulture that is Mitt Romney and the hatemongering cesspool that is Newt Gingrich - just to establish which one will head the ticket and which one will be VP. The fact is their vileness is complementary - one pleases the bigots while the other pleases the gollums; one takes obvious prurient pleasure in lying, while the other one just seems incapable of knowing, let alone telling, the truth about himself or anything else; one is a hateful, malevolent force while the other one is just an impersonal suction cup of a parasite stealing everything that isn't nailed down without any strong emotion about it one way or another. The yin and yang of evil - the aristocratic fascist to whom people are just numbers on a bank statement, and the beer-hall orator fascist who looks at people and sees their skulls beneath their skin. They know that either one alone would be extremely vulnerable, while together the two would provide mutual distraction. And besides, it's too obvious a ploy for a Party whose penchant for evil cliche is becoming, well, cliched.
So who is the Master Sith, and who the apprentice? Darth Tax-Evader, or Darth Hideous?