Charlie Pierce continues to rock. On Gingrich:

How Newt Gingrich, former congressman from Bugtussle, former deposed speaker of the House, became a sage on issues of war and peace is something for our small minds to ponder. He’s attached his name to a series of ghastly historical novels. He likes to get up before banquets full of his fellow chickenhawks — Gingrich pioneered the Cheney option of family-based dodging of actual military service a couple of wives ago — and wax bloodthirsty. Why, at the last foreign-policy debate, the Definer of the Rules of Civilization said:

“We need maximum covert operations to block and disrupt the Iranian program, including taking out their scientists, including breaking up their systems…. All of it covertly, all of it deniable.”

Brilliant tactics there, Clausewitz. Commit murder overseas, but do so in such a covertly covert and super-deniably deniable way that everybody forgets that you promised to do it in public while you were running for president. Nobody in Iran will ever figure any of this out and, say, use it to rally support for the very regime we are trying to destabilize. Newt Gingrich’s credentials on national security are the same as his credentials on almost everything else — self-bestowed, firmly rooted in his own intergalactic egoism, and largely made up of bromides that would be laughable if they came from a person who’s less toweringly arrogant about expressing them.

Heh.