My Cat Is Now Elderly

says the vet. The reason this is relevant is that Athena was not alive when Newt Gingrich held a political position. In fact, I had all my teeth and was in my forties then.

Have we had someone so far removed from their political time ever make a comeback? Richard Nixon lost the governorship of California in 1962 and then came back with the New Nixon in 1968--eight years after he had lost the presidency to JFK. John McCain lost the GOP nomination to George W. Bush in 2000 and came back in 2008 but he had retained his seat in the Senate. Harold Stassen ran every four years after he stepped down as Governor. The reason he did this was to receive an annual stipend from the Johnson Wax family, which depended on his constant presidential campaign.

Thrice-married Gingrich has hinted at running for President ever since he resigned as Speaker of the House. Every time his various business entanglements have thwarted his plans. As I wrote, he would run this year if the Republicans re-took the House. But even now his little business empire is holding him up. Today was to be the announcement of his setting up his exploratory committee. But his spokespeople have constantly walked this back.Apparently,Newt doesn't have his act together to file the necessary papers with the FEC. So now they are saying he is "exploring" the possibility of running.

The rumor triggered an immediate reaction from Tom Coburn,who declared that Gingrich was the smartest person he has ever met but that he has the morals and character of an ally-cat. Coburn served in the House during Newt's speakership and remembers the ethics and sex scandals. Unfortunately for Newt, alot of conservatives can recite chapter and verse everything he ever did wrong. Newt married his high school teacher first. Then he left his second wife during her illness. More precisely on the operating table. His business acumen got him into ethics trouble in the House when he signed a mega-book contract without registering it and continued to receive royalties from his history lectures circulated on DVDs.

Since leaving his office, he has maintained his parking spot at the House and created a little policy empire, which ferries him across the country on private jets. Yesterday Fox News terminated his contract as a contributor because he seems to be running for President unlike Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee. In the last two years Newt has been hanging around with Glenn Beck's favorite Christianist David Barton, the man who has been instrumental in the Texas schoolbook scandal and who argues there is no separation of church and state in the consitution. Newt has been on the hustings trying to build an alliance with the Christian Right. In fact, David and his Texas cohorts got Newt a spot in the American history textbook. Newt has been "annointed" in a ceremony conducted by gay-baiter Lou Engle,the mastermind behind the Kill the Gays bill in Uganda.

How this will all play out will be interesting. Newt was a Southern Baptist until his recent conversion to Catholicism. He claims he converted so he could attend church with his third wife--Callista. As part of his new faith, he and his wife made a documentary on how John Paul II defeated Communism in Poland single-handed, neglecting to mention Solidarnosc. Among Southern Republicans, Gingrich is the second choice after Mike Huckabee. And the South will determine the GOP nominee.

In preliminary polls, Gingrich would do slightly worse than McCain against Obama. Newt has always been a favorite of the Beltway pundits because he's always go for a quote. His latest fad is the embrace of Dinesh D'Sousa's take on Obama as someone who wants to secularize America--which any modern society already is--and who has an anti-colonial mentality. Gingrich has already said that he would emphasize religion in his campaign. One of Gingrich's toughest critics is Sarah Palin, who portrays him as an egotist and a member of the dying Republican establishment. Republicans now say that John Boehner could get away with the shutting down of the Government because he is not as "feared as Gingrich by the American public." In the current debate, Republicans are quick to mention how Gingruich scared everyone, not your warmest endorsement. Even among the teabaggers, Gingrich polls in single digits.

But Morning Joe's darling, Mike Huckabee, who until recently was seen as a possibility, went off the rails into birthism. Huckabee went further than any major Republican into a whole narrative about Obama being raised in Kenya (he wasn't) and how he returned the bust of Winston Churchill because he had been raised by a father (he wasn't) who viewed the British unfavorably. Huckabee then went on about the Mau-Mau rebellion. One blogger noted that if you grew up a Southern Baptist, you read the Cross and the Switchblade in which American black gangs were referred to as Mau-Maus. Huckabee tried to correct his faux pas by saying that he really meant to say that Obama was brought up in Indonesia, where he grew up next to madrasss and that he didn't belong to the Boys Scouts like the rest of us. So now we have Obama as a foreigner and Muslim. Then Huckabee continued to correct to say that Obama doesn't have a normal American upbringing like people in the Rotary Club, which actually does have a strong presence in Indonesia.

This was Huckabee trying to reach the basest of the base Republicans. Make no mistake this was beyond intentional. Huckabee was trying out a narrative that he hoped would be the dog-whistle campaign among the Christian Right. Already we have been the Huckabee of Judea urging Israel to annex all lands of ancient Judea and only a few weeks later saying that abortion would be the central issue to his candidacy if he decided to run.

I'm still dubious that he will run. People like Huckabee, Thune and Jeb Bush are all backing away from a 2012 fight and want to see what's left after the dust clears for 2016. In a normal political climate, you could actually see a coronation of Mitt Romney as the establishment choice to appear centrist. But with the teabaggers and the changed rules for the primaries,it's anyone's guess.

So why did Newt decide to run? Simple, he figures that if we elected a man named Barack Hussein Obama, then someone named Newton Leroy Gingrich could get elected.