Gingrich, the Professor, Lashes Out at the 'Literati' Who Are Bent on Destroying Him

Too much Gingrich? Look away! For those who are morbidly fascinated by Gingrich's inability to cut his losses and shut the hell up, The Huffington Post's Michael Calderone shares the latest spin from the former speaker's spokesman on the controversy over his Medicare comments :

The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment's cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won't be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.

How weird is it for a politician who is routinely described by the press as professorial (he has a Ph.D. in history!) and possibly just too smart for his own good  to lash out at "the literati" who are bent on destroying him because he is not one of them? Pretty damned weird. My own view—which flies in the face of conventional wisdom among "the political elite"—is that Gingrich is just too stupid for his own good. In any case, his pose as an outsider scorned by that hoity-toity inside-the-Beltway crowd is ridiculous not only because he is a well-established Washington figure with easy access to the media but because he had a chance to "disrupt their comfortable world" and blew it. On purpose. Instead of speaking the uncomfortable truth about Medicare (something that Paul Ryan, for all his faults, consistently has been willing to do), he implied during his Meet the Press interview that ferreting out fraud can salvage the program without the need for an overhaul that will entail costs as well as benefits. His main critics in this case are not insular statists but fiscal conservatives who resented his attempt to position himself as a moderate at their expense. They are not the ones who are being cowardly.

[via Politico's Ben Smith]