THE BARREL HAS NO BOTTOM, PART 9/11. Oh Jesus. Newt Gingrich (via National Review, condensed by Soup:

What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predicative model for his behavior. This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.

I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating — none of which was true. In the Alinksy tradition, he was being the person he needed to be in order to achieve the position he needed to achieve. He was authentically dishonest.

[Obama] is in the great tradition of Edison, Ford, the Wright Brothers, Bill Gates — he saw his opportunity and he took it. The American people may take it back, in which case I may or may not be the recipient of that, but I have zero doubt that the American people will take it back. Unlike Ford, the Wright Brothers, et cetera, this guy’s invention did not work.

I think Obama gets up every morning with a worldview that is fundamentally wrong about reality. If you look at the continuous denial of reality, there has got to be a point where someone stands up and says that this is just factually insane.

There are two possible explanations:

1.) Gingrich was drunk, or on some drug.

2.) Gingrich is very well aware that he is widely despised by the extremists who have taken over the GOP, and has been waiting for the right moment to redeem himself in their eyes by saying a bunch of crazy shit about Obama of the sort that they say every day. He knows they're stupid enough to go for it, particularly if he sticks in a signifier like "Alinsky," to which these nuts respond like Cleveland audiences respond to a rock star yelling "Cleveland."

Maybe both of these explanations are right; though I doubt his gorge rises easily, even a hardened player like Gingrich may not be completely at ease with with the Gathering of the Juggalos that is the current GOP, and his use of "factually insane" may indicate that he was, with the aid of spirituous beverages or weed, reaching for whatever concert metaphor he could remember that might be appropriate to such a crowd, and finally settled on Cypress Hill's "Insane in the Membrane."

(Also, his "I may or may not be the recipient of that" suggests that he had to be high.)

Unquestionably Gingrich has upped the ante for all the squares at the top. Now Mitt Romney must appear at some state fair on a makeshift stage, holding two cylinders, one marked FASCISM and one marked COMMUNISM, and ram them suddenly together, whereupon in a puff of smoke an effigy of Obama will appear and be set upon by local yahoos bearing sticks who will break him open to get at the candy and prizes inside. (It'll be much easier for Tom Tancredo, who will just have to tell his crew that Obama is a goldurn Messican.)

UPDATE. Commenters remind me that Gingrich was riffing off an impenetrably awful article by incomprehensibly employed Dinesh D'Souza, who blames Obama's social-ma-listic policies on the old Ooga Booga ("Luo tribesman" and all that). "It's really a great innovation in birtherism," says one Guest; "we can't claim the son of a bitch is Kenyan anymore . . . so we'll just say the dead father he never knew is actually running the country. It's so much crazier than birtherism I'm proud of D'Souza for having that kind of imagination." Well, I wouldn't go so far as to call it "imagination," though since de Quincey at least there has been argument as to whether hallucinations qualify.