Amongst our weaponry: Fear. Surprise. A fanatical devotion to whoever's cutting the checks ...

(Jeff Haynes/Reuters)

Amongst our weaponry: Fear. Surprise. A fanatical devotion to whoever's cutting the checks ...

(Jeff Haynes/Reuters)

"We are really at risk someday in your life time of losing an American city [in a terrorist attack]," Gingrich said, adding that in that context "defeating Barack Obama becomes a duty of national security."

Gingrich also stated that Obama "is incapable of defending the United States," making no mentions of his counterterrorism success, including the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

Newt Gingrich, speaking at Oral Roberts University Yes. Yes, imagine a president would would "lose a city" due to some circumstance. Heck, imagine terrorists attacked, I don't know, maybe New York, or the Pentagon, and maybe it came to light that the president wasn't really paying much attention to the national security issues that preceded it. What a dereliction of duty that would be. What a shameful, shameful president that would be. If only we had the services of a friendly gasbag pseudo-historian, who could perhaps tell us whether or not such things ever happened.Yeah, go figure.

Dear Newt Gingrich: Your mouth is hurting America. Your big-ass, rancid maw is causing damage to America just by virtue of you opening it. Your rhetoric makes everyone who comes in contact with you dumber by osmosis. Please stop now.

For Republicans, though, this kind of rhetoric is so old as to be commonplace. They only have two plays left in their playbook. The first is to claim that putting any non-Republican in office would be "dangerus to Amerka"—you have to get the right tone of drunken belligerence in there for it to really count. The second is about how government is out to steal your money and give it to probably-ethnic people, so to stop them we need to just give all that money to rich people who will keep it safe for us.

Comparing presidential histories for the past three or four administrations, I don't think there's much question as to which administrations were better or worse on national security. Or the economy. Or, hell, anything else. Luckily, the Republican Party is populated primarily of people who have been living in sealed, soundproof boxes for the past twenty years, and who thus have no memory of that Republican guy who used to be in the White House, and what went on when he was. These are the people Newt is appealing to, so what's important is not that he has a nice intellectually stimulating Lincoln-Douglas debate with his audience (been a while since you heard that one, eh?) but that he hits all the right Republican conspiracy theories, and hits them as loudly as possible. Conspiracy theory number one: Vote Republican or you're all going to die.