Newt #8

There's a new comedian on TV -- it's Newt's new stand up routine in which, as Jason Linkins of HuffPost puts it, "Newt Gingrich Switches Position on Position-Switching."

Today, Newt is getting even more tangled up in himself than he was yesterday. Yesterday, he was trying to explain the contradiction between his March 7th statement on FoxNews about Libya:

Exercise a no-fly zone this evening. ... We don't need to have the United Nations. All we have to say is that we think that slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable and that we're intervening.

. . . with his statement yesterday on the Today Show:

The standard [Obama] has fallen back to of humanitarian intervention could apply to Sudan, to North Korea, to Zimbabwe, to Syria this week, to Yemen, to Bahrain. . . . We could get engaged by this standard in all sorts of places. I would not have intervened. . . . I would not have used American and European forces.

So today, he tried to explain his obvious flip-flop by writing on his Facebook some gibberish about Obama should have done it the day Newt told him to do it "by this evening;" but, since he didn't, now it's too late and "there were a lot of other ways to affect Gaddafi . . . I would not have used American and European forces." But since Obama said "Gaddafi must go," he took these other (unnamed) options off the table; and so we shouldn't have done what we did when we did.

That about as much clarity as I can bring to what Newt actually wrote. But, you see, Obama "took those other options off the table" on March 3rd; and it was March 7th that Newt said "do it before this evening." So, the conditions he now says mitigate against intervening were also present before Newt's March 7th "cowboy moment."

The problem for Newt is that, when you don't tell the truth, you have to remember what you have said before.

Especially in the age of Google and Facebook. There is now a cottage industry active on the internet combing through Newt's previously stated positions and compiling a list of those on which he has flip-flopped -- like his saying in 2004 of John Kerry that his flipflop on the Iraq war funding disqualified him from being president: "You can't flipflop and be commander-in-chief."

Hang it up, Newt. You've disqualified yourself, by your own definition.

Ralph