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May 3, 2012

Buh Bye, Newt

I'm gonna miss ol' Newt.  The guy's been a consistent source of entertainment, running the gamut of content from his deadpan "Yes" when asked if he was calling Willard a liar, to the way he projects himself into the future and talks about how all the numbers make it impossible for him not to get the nomination, or how we'll have a permanent moon base by the end of his 2nd term.  There's nobody more fun to watch - kinda like some kid on YouTube who does a ballstand when he tries to jump his bike off his mom's porch - it's a little retch-inducing, but I just can't turn away.

It's pretty easy to see why this guy gets 50 large for a speech.  It's a polished performance, and it doesn't matter that it's the classic sales-y yarn that any good huckster learns how to spin - if you do it right, you can get 'em to believe almost anything.  Just make sure you put plenty of plausible sounding goals together with some techno-jargon, place it all far enough in the "future" so the vision is a bit misty and soft-focus, but not so far as to be out of reach.

The message: "Newt has this vision because he's amazing.  I do not have this vision (because I am not amazing), so I need to work really hard to make up for not being amazing like him."

Translation: Newt has some ideas, but no fuckin' clue how to make any of it work, so I get to bust my ass to make it work for all of us.  I also get to pay him large sums of money for the privilege of working my ass off and making him rich, and while I get a little something in return, it'll only be enough to keep me interested, but not enough to make me independent of a guy like Newt, and never enough to be considered his equal."



One other quick note:  At about 16:30, Ol' Newt laments the nastiness of the tone of the rhetoric in congress.  I wonder how it got that way.



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