The Fascist Octopus, Having Sung Its Swan Song, Needs to Retire

This from Dr. Dr. Professor Krugman, posted on the 19th -- please follow link to original
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The Fascist Octopus, Having Sung Its Swan Song, Needs to Retire

Orwell wept. His famous examples of careless writing — the fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot has been thrown into the melting pot — must exit the stage in the face of Newt Gingrich’s press secretary:

The Gingrich camp thinks the punditocracy’s got it all wrong. When asked by The Huffington Post about media coverage this past week, Gingrich press secretary Rick Tyler fired off a response blasting the political and media elite.

“The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding,” Tyler wrote. “Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.”

I’m late to this: the whole blogosphere has already gone wild over machine-gun-toting, cocktail drinking sheep, not to mention smoking dusty tweets. But it remains an instant classic.

I never thought I’d miss Newt Gingrich — and maybe I won’t have to; such people are amazingly resilient. But anway, between this and Gingrich’s earlier declaration that anyone who quotes him correctly is lying, he’s been giving great entertainment.

Now you may ask, how did a once-powerful figure become such a clown? But that’s the wrong question: what you see now is what he always was. The real question is why so many media figures pretended, for so long, not to notice.