Will Piles on Gingrich; and, Rick Perry's Back

Have at it, George:

Gingrich embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive. And there is his anti-conservative confidence that he has a comprehensive explanation of, and plan to perfect, everything.

Granted, his grandiose rhetoric celebrating his “transformative” self is entertaining: Recently he compared his revival of his campaign to Sam Walton’s and Ray Kroc’s creations of Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, two of America’s largest private-sector employers. There is almost artistic vulgarity in Gingrich’s unrepented role as a hired larynx for interests profiting from such government follies as ethanol and cheap mortgages. His Olympian sense of exemption from standards and logic allowed him, fresh from pocketing $1.6 million from Freddie Mac (for services as a “historian”), to say, “If you want to put people in jail,” look at “the politicians who profited from” Washington’s environment. . . .

Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how.

Meanwhile, Rick Perry's backers are reminding everyone that he had back surgery shortly before entering the campaign last summer. Perhaps, they suggest, he looked so dazed in his first few debates, and in that drunken New Hampshire speech, because of some combination of pain and painkillers. This strikes me as plausible enough to serve as a reason to forget those embarrassing scenes, should Perry ever actually look any smarter than he did then. Alas for him, he has yet to make any appearance anywhere in which he has looked intelligent. But Republicans have to nominate somebody, and if they really can't stand Mitt I think Perry is still a more likely choice than Newt. George Will endorsed Perry in the same column in which he savaged Gingrich, which, along with the back pain excuse, smacks of a coordinated attempt to put Perry back in the race, especially when you remember that Will's wife is a Perry adviser.