I wonder how those twisty Teabagger brains are going to manage this one

In recent years we've seen the political climate on the right fully embrace the Idiocy Is Great doctrine of political discourse. As Barack Obama, the thoughtful, measured former Harvard Law Review editor brought his cool, cerebral, measured, thoughtfulness to the White House, it infuriated those whose crania resemble that of the lunkhead in the much-maligned Planet Fitness commercials who repeats over and over again, "I lift things up and put them down." (By the way, this anti-PF rant is pretty hilarious with its complaints about judgmentalism of bodybuilders while it talks judgmentally about those who aren't, but the whole Planet Fitness foofarah is a topic for another day.)

The Militant Idiocy Movement reached its apex with the rise of Sarah Palin, a woman so incurious and so celebratory of willful ignorance that she can't even string together a coherent sentence. But the combination of her schoolmarm-as-dominatrix looks and reassurance of those who are gray matter-challenged that being stupid is infinitely superior to things like, well, ideas, made her the darling of the right -- at least for a while.

The stupidity-as-virtue doctrine still has a stranglehold on the right, and we see it everywhere, from Palin to Louie Gohmert to Virginia Foxx to the Doublemint Twins of stupid, the Kings Peter and Steve, and so on and so on.

Enter Newt Gingrich.

Say what you will about the Lizard King, he's many things but he's not stupid. He's as crooked as the day is long and he's elevated hypocrisy to an art form, but he's not stupid. His little lizard brain is always cooking up something that can be called "ideas" (if you want to call them that), if only because the rest of his party is obsessed with birth certificates and terror babies and Scary Brown People and evil sluts who won't keep their legs closed and must be punished with the curse of motherhood, which is also what they profess to worship above all else. His "ideas" may seem "intellectual" by comparison to, say, John Boehner, but they're mostly about getting him laid or getting more money into his own pockets. But in the Republican Party, that's enough.

And like the dutiful little puppets they are, the Usual Suspects in the punditocracy are already dusting off their Newt Gingrich Is An Intellectual talking points from those halcyon pre-1994 days.

So what will the teabaggers, who thought they'd get to drink beer with George Bush and that they'd get to fuck Sarah Palin, make of a guy who for all that he's greedy and hypocritical, likes to sell himself as an ideas guy? I mean, on the right, is there anything that shows an ability to think out of the box than to excuse his checkered marital history by saying that he was Fucking for Patriotism? Will they embrace the part of him that taps into their Inner Crazy, or will the fact that he can speak coherently make them suspicious of him?

We will soon see.