Summer of bizarre news leaves country ready to believe anything

Latest Molly Ivins:

Quick, who would be worse [as Secretary of State]: Paul Wolfowitz or Newt Gingrich? Yep, that's the list, and even your worst nightmares didn't prepare you for that one, did they?

Wolfowitz, one of the leading neo-con hawks who got us into this horrible mess in Iraq, is such a clumsy diplomat that he not only couldn't get our old ally Turkey to let us use its bases during the war, he actually implicitly threatened them with a little regime change in their own country by way of a military coup -- all the better to bring democracy to Iraq, of course. One is reduced to whimpering plaintively, "PLEASE give me a break."

It is truly hard to tell whether Newt Gingrich as secretary of state is a more horrible prospect than even Wolfowitz. That silly, hypocritical blowhard, that ridiculous pseudo-intellectual with a nasty streak a mile wide. You may have forgotten Newt's advice to Republicans before the 1994 congressional elections, but I haven't. That was the infamous memo from his political action committee, GOPAC, saying that the R's should describe their D opponents -- no matter who they were or what their records -- as "sick," "pathetic," "bizarre," "twisted" and "traitor." If you want to know when and why civil political discourse in this country broke down, try that memo.