At the age of 10 I saw American’s greatest magician, Blackstone, make an elephant disappear from the stage of the National Theater in Greensboro, N.C. Last week we all saw another magician, Newt Gingrich, make something much larger than an elephant disappear: namely, an ABC interview with his second wife, Marianne. We were promised that interview would end Newt’s political career.
What happened to it? Where did it go? On Thursday night, Jan. 19, Newt demolished CNN, CNN’s debate host John King and – in an expanding web of thrilling and righteous destruction – the errant, arrant and arrogant, hatchet-wielding, biased, far-left media themselves. In less time than it took the still-remembered champ Joe Louis to demolish his German opponent Max Schmeling, Gingrich turned them all into a smoking crater.
I understand the CNN game. Just as Russia thought it was going to have an easy conquest of tiny Finland and Italy thought it would have an easy Greece and the assembled Arabs thought they’d have an easy Israel, John King opened the final South Carolina debate by solemnly detonating the Sleaze-Bomb – something like, “Your second wife, in an interview with ABC accused you of wanting an open marriage.” King fully expected Gingrich to fidget uncomfortably and offer a simpering re-affirmation that he’d “made mistakes” and “come to God.” Little did he expect Gingrich to smite him with the hammer of Thor. Newt sprang the length of his chain and sank his fangs into the hapless hide of, not just poor John King, but CNN, ABC and that whole rotten underbelly of the media. And the audience, including Romney supporters, went joyously insane.
The power of each measured syllable of Gingrich’s denunciation of CNN’s opening a presidential debate with allegations of a desire for sex-on-the-side was magnified into infinity with America facing a peace in Iraq gone bad, a war in Afghanistan going badly, a war with Iran looming, unemployment twice what they’ve got the guts to admit and a $14 trillion debt. And John King begins by asking about a candidate’s desire for an open marriage! In that “magician’s moment,” Newt Gingrich won the debate, the primary, quite likely the nomination and possibly the presidency.
Gingrich was in no mood to take prisoners. When John King desperately tried to wiggle out by protesting, “It wasn’t our network that did that interview!”, Newt chased him into his spider-hole. “John,” he said, “You CHOSE that to open with.” Two thoughts: Churchill said, “The Germans are always at your throat or at your feet.” Not even the World-War-II Germans could get from throat-to-feet as quickly as CNN’s John King. The other thought was the rampage of the teenage “wilders” in New York’s Central Park who left a fortunately-still-alive-and-recoverable female jogger for dead after a merciless attack. One of those young defendants when caught wailed in tones reminiscent of John King, “I didn’t do anything. I just held her legs!”
The infamy of our leftist media should be jack-hammered into America’s soul. Former presidential candidate John Kerry had a marital upscuddle. Did a major network plot to have that revealed two days before a major primary? Where was the outrage when Dan Rather tried to destroy President George W. Bush with phony documentation? The cessation of pain is a blessing. ABC’s George Stephanopolous should write a thank-you note to Newt Gingrich and John King for taking the spotlight and scorch-light away from his own insipid attempts to turn ABC’s debate into a trap for Mitt Romney.
Americans! Conservatives! Fair-minded folk everywhere. Please, HANG ON TO THIS VICTORY. Don’t let it become “One day on the campaign trail.” Lift it high. Let it be our Lexington-and-Concord, our Guadalcanal, our bust-out from the Bulge, our Mount Surabachi, our Battleship-Missouri-in-Tokyo-Bay.
Will the media elite be deterred by their defeat at Gingrich’s sharpened tongue-point? Farm boys learn not to relieve themselves upon electrified fences.
There was a moment when I felt pity for John King. For the first time in American history the entire crowd was roaring hatred, NOT at what a candidate had just said, but at what a media-type had just asked. Poor John, I earlier called him “hapless.” He was also hopeless and helpless. The crowd at his back was merciless. Will the John Kings of the leftist media straighten their ideological neckties, take a sip of water and behave correctly to conservatives? Stay tuned.
Again, not as a Gingrich supporter, but as a media-member grown ashamed of his colleagues, please don’t let this devolve into “Oh, yeah. I remember. Gingrich got in a good one!” Hoist that moment aloft as a “Six-Day-War that took less than two minutes.”
I don’t mean to paint my shameful colleagues as Nazis, wartime Japanese or vengeful Jihadists. They’re catastrophically misguided Americans. If elemental fairness can’t make them behave better to conservatives, maybe a few more Gingrich moments can.
A young conservative intern naively asked if the Stephanopolouses-Diane Sawyers-John Kings feel guilty and abusive mistreating conservatives to the limit of their ability to do so.
I hope I wasn’t being abusive when I told her, “Baby-doll, sharks don’t think they’re worth making movies about. They’re just having lunch.”
