Really. The man is brilliant.

Over and over again, the same refrain: no matter what you think of Newt Gingrich, he's brilliant.

Maybe so. Maybe there's a method to the madness of a candidate who can't even staff his campaign with people smart enough to get him on the VA ballot. Of course, others didn't, either. In fact, only Mitt Romney and Ron Paul did. As far as I know, none of the other losers called for write-in votes, since they appear to have known (unlike Newt) that Virginia doesn't allow write-ins in its primaries. This adds up to a flaming mistake, followed by a proposed solution that would be illegal. Maybe, somehow, there's some kind of underlying tactical thing here, a brilliant scheme to accomplish ... something. If so, it's beyond my limited experience with tactics. Maybe someone else can explain it.

But ever ready with an asinine statement, drawn from his extensive study of history and massively limited understanding of it, Gingrich says that this was his Pearl Harbor. He doesn't say who played the part of Japan in this version. Whoever it was got in the first blow and destroyed all his battleships, but will eventually go down to defeat when up against his awesome industrial might. Or that's Pearl Harbor, anyway. Whether it works out for Newt quite that way remains to be seen. And of course, the guy who helped him come up with this dumbass analogy, campaign director Michael Krull, would be himself analogous to US admiral Husband Kimmel, who was Commander-in-Chief of the US Pacific Fleet at the time of the attack, and who was canned subsequently. Whether or not Kimmel deserved it, Krull certainly does -- or not, depending on whether you think it was another piece of Newt's alleged brilliance.