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"When was the last time there was a poll on the gold standard?" asked Ron Paul last night during his bronze-medal acceptance speech. He was referring, I think, to a CNBC online poll last August that showed that 69 percent of its respondents favored a return to the gold standard. Of course, online polls are easily manipulated and, when it comes to measuring public opinion, online polls are hardly the, well, gold standard.

(For her part, Michele Bachmann later went full nutty. "I hope never to be a politician," she said, as her campaign for president staggers on. She accused Barack Obama of withering in the face of America's great challenges. She kept harping on "socialized medicine," which we don't have here. She spent another three minutes describing all the work she'd done in Congress trying to stifle the president's agenda, even though she hopes never — NEVER — to be a politician. "And it is to the God of our Fathers to whom we give praise tonight." Sixth place? Yeah, she's still nuts. But not a politician. You want to see a politician? Check out Rick Perry. Goodhair all but pulled the plug last night, which makes him and his deep-pocketed finance wizards very important people going forward as this thing unwinds. If he, say, holds a grudge against Willard for the way he got roughed up in the debates, then it's possible that some of Rick Santorum's money problems may have been solved on Tuesday evening.)

Paul's speech last night was an odd mix of grandiosity and joviality. He certainly did not change the debate in any meaningful way, and he certainly did not have the impact on the Republican party that he claimed last night to have had, and he is not the paradigm-shaping political figure that he claimed last night to be. The Republican party is not going to get behind the gold standard. The Republican party is not going to decide we should remove ourselves from NATO. The Republican party is not going to decide to wave at an Iranian nuke. (More on that subject in a paragraph or so.) He has an absolute ceiling within the party in which he has chosen to run, and in which he has chosen to stay. Also in that party happens to be one N. Leroy Gingrich who, warming up to begin his month-long evisceration of Willard Romney, took a solid swipe at Paul's foreign policy, calling it "stunningly dangerous for the United States." And then he got going.

Gingrich has been so good at creating causes for himself that he inevitably inflates to the proportions best suited to his own self-identification as (maybe) the Definer Of Civilization's Rules that he is doubly dangerous when he gets a real issue in his craw. Now he's got one — the pummeling he took from Willard's surrogates over the airwaves over the past three weeks. And this time... it's personal.

(That he is running against a new political reality of which he himself applauded the creation, of course, will not slow him down at all. This is the guy who still talks about how he exposed the "House Banking scandal" in 1992, in which it was discovered that Gingrich himself had bounced 22 checks. God, what brass ones the man has.)

He started off by fulsomely congratulating Rick Santorum: "I congratulate Rick Santorum, who waged a great positive campaign. I wish I could say the same thing for all the candidates." And we were off.

Do we want a Reagan conservative, asked Gingrich, or "do we want a Massachusetts moderate who was pretty good at managing the decay up there...

(Wait a second, Sparky. I resemble that remark.)

"...and who showed no desire to change the government or to change the culture there. We're not going to use nasty ads. But, I do reserve the right to tell the truth and, if the truth is negative, that says as much about his record as it does about the politics."

And, turning things up to 11, and not for the last time, Gingrich explained that the carpet-bombing he received from Willard and his plutocratic wingmen was not only bad politics, but that it dishonors the war dead. "Everyone of us should remember this because young men and women have given their lives to enable us to do this. We should be worthy of them."

The arsonist again has found a building worthy of his skills. Mercy.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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