Newt Gingrich: Still ready to party like it’s 1996

Here is the headline this morning that jumped off the monitor at me… what was it about it that was so strangely familiar…?

Gingrich: ‘Absolute obligation’ to investigate Pelosi

Let me see if I’ve got this straight… the Republicans don’t want any investigations into the Bush administration’s actual use of torture in interrogating prisoners, but one of their leading lights is demanding an investigation into when Nancy Pelosi knew about that which they don’t want investigated?

I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning…

I haven’t been following the news very closely this week – busy at work, busy at home – but every time I turned on the tv in the afternoon, the news channels were full of people talking about Pelosi. What did she know, when did she know it? Apparently some time early on, she was briefed on the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding and now is in a world of trouble for fudging when she was told about it.

Must be a slow news day, I thought.

By the second day I was kind of surprised it was still all the rage. Slow news week!

And this morning CNN.com informs me that an outraged Newt Gingrich – until this morning, one of the more reasonable surviving Republicans I thought – is demanding an investigation into what Pelosi knew about Bush’s crimes and when did she know about them.

Newt is making the classic mistake... actually, it’s a beginner’s mistake and I’ve heard him talk enough about political history to know that he considers himself some kind of expert. Go figure. Anyhow, he’s fighting this war (with the Democrats) using the last war’s battle plan. In this case, tie up the opposition in endless investigations and turn the public against them – hell, the last time they tried it they only half succeeded. In spite of their best efforts, Clinton still sauntered out of office with a job approval rating in the sixties.

It still pisses me off, though. And disappoints me, too. I thought Gingrich was tacking to the middle in his run-up to the 2012 election, the middle being a woefully underserved constituency in today’s GOP and just waiting to be tapped. But no. Sorry, middle. Instead, it turns out he’s still courting the same ultra-partisan voters he always has and flogging the same old tired agenda of winning through character assassination that was only partially successful in the past.

The problem today’s GOP faces is the perception, based on the last eight years of Republican governance, that the GOP doesn’t know how to govern. Crying for spurious investigations doesn’t do anything to address that perception, it just perpetuates it.

If this is going to be the big philosophical face-off of the 2012 GOP – the Sarah Palin/God, Guns & Guts wing versus the Gee, Weren’t the Nineties Fun faction – they should just cut to the chase and cede the election to Obama right now.