Today is my birthday. At midnight, I turned 38. 40 is coming for me, I can feel it.

And just in time for my special day, the news cycle has served me a nice big slice of cake. And it’s in my favorite all time flavour : Republican pain!

And the ice cream on the side : it’s the pain of a dipshit from the past, Newt Gingrich, whose barely a week old Presidential campaign has already crashed on the rocks of his own inability to speak in public without saying something completely stupid.

And boy, did he top himself this time. He appeared on heavy duty respectable Sunday political interview show Meet the Press, and just happened to both disparage Paul Ryan’s evil Libertarian social engineering budget, and endorse universal mandate health care!

And that’s bad enough right there. You want the Republican nomination and you go completely against the key piece of legislation the Republicans are defending right now in Congress, one that is extremely unpopular with the general public because of its attacks on Medicare and programs for women and children and one supported by all but four Republican Congressmen? And then you are surprised when this makes the whole rabid dog pack turn on you and rip you apart with their eager, slavering jaws?

And the thing is, it’s not a bad policy statement in and of itself. He said he didn’t like right wing social engineering any more than left wing, and said Ryan’s budget was too radical. That is a perfectly acceptable moderate libertarian view on the matter.

But I don’t know what Republican party he thought he was addressing during these fatal moments, but it sure wasn’t that sorry lot that makes up the American Right right now. Maybe there was a time when there was space for a little public dissension amongst prominent American conservatives, but George Dubya “Dissent Means The Terrorists Win” Bush and the massive cognitive dissonance demands on the public conservative psyche supporting such an embarrassing and incompetent leader placed on it have long closed that gap and then welded it shut with an acetylene torch.

Now, the slightest bit of off-message messaging gets brutally punished, as is always the case when the aforementioned cognitive dissonance load makes the people carrying it feel extraordinary pain in the brain whenever anything stimulates it. When your psyche is basically now a big red throbbing sore the size of Texas because of all the cognitive dissonance you are suppressing, the slightest breeze makes it howl with agony, and you find yourself desperately hunting down any opposition with the same sort of manic fervor that a desperately sleepy person shows in hunting down that dripping faucet keeping them awake.

Into this scenario comes Newt’s remarks, which is, in this analogy, like suddenly starting up a full brass marching bad right next to our sleepy friend’s eardrum.

That said, if he had simply made the remarks and stuck by them, asserting his right to have his own opinion and staking out his territory as a less-crazy-than-average conservative who appeals to the Republicans who are not happy with how things are going, that would have allowed him to retain some honour and dignity, and might even have given him a chance to stay in this Presidential race as an outsider candidate.

But of course, that sort of honor and integrity and character is completely foreign and alien to the modern American Right. So immediately after the interview, he starting backpedaling, and now, quite paradoxically, he’s claiming that asking him what he thought of something was some kind of gotcha journalism and that anyone who accurately quotes said interview is actually lying.

To me, the funniest part of this for us who remember the 90’s is that people are even vaguely surprised that this is what happens when Newt talks. I clearly remember his rapid rise to prominence…. and his even more rapid disappearance. The moment he became Speaker after successfully executing his Contract On America, he started saying bizarre stupid shit in interviews that made the whole Republican party look bad, and lo and behold, suddenly, you stopped hearing from him entirely.

He is obviously a guy best suited for intellectual behind the scenes leadership. Put a microphone in his face, and he makes Quayle seem like the picture of poise and gravitas.

And with him cutting himself off at the knees, and Huckabee and Trump bowing out, the Republican race shedding frontrunners at a furious pace.

I can’t wait to see who stumbles next.