An indepth profile of Newt Gingrich by political writer Matt Bai in yesterday’s NY Times Magazine makes a good case for his re-emergence as the idea man for a party that is without any new ideas — and even the possibility of his becoming the presidential candidate in 2012. That would depend on many factors falling the right way. Newt just wants to rebuild the party, he says, but he doesn’t close the door to a White House run.

It is easy to be provoked by these fools but we may be giving them a whole lot more credit than they warrant. Consider that the wily James Carville is actively trying to promote the idea that the drug-seeking clown Limbaugh is THE leader of the GOP. Palin’s coming out speech? The one that thrust her mediocrity upon the world stage…a succession of weak one-liners that made Ann Richards’ speech to the Democratic Party Convention in ’92 (silver spoon in his mouth) look like a serious philosophical treatise. The bunch of them, the vituperative (psychoanalytically rich) Ms. Coulter, the splenetic Mr. Limbaugh – are jesters, clowns, and base sensationalist rubes turning a buck. Really nothing more. The amount that they matter to the great challenges and questions of the current age is approximately zero. Moreover, I think the people of the United States “got it” and were fairly emphatic in their rejection that inept comedians/comediennes had the stuff it takes to be trusted with the levers. They can spew their vile and ignorant bile on the few stages they can cobble together. Damn few places on the planet they can even walk around without fear of being locked up or shot and I guess we should be thankful for that…though I wish they could be shot…or locked up. I just finished “Zapata and the Mexican Revolution” and I can state without hesitation that if Limbaugh and Coulter were living in Mexico around the turn of the last century, that they would have been shot for no other reason than being utterly objectionable asses. Recall the quote from Pascal as well. “Nothing is as approved as mediocrity, the majority has established it and it fixes it fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way.”