President Newt to Re-Right History - Every Week!

Although he's not quite there yet, Newt Gingrich has a presidentially grandiose plan for History. Like most of his Republican peers, Newt wants to go back to the past. In his case, of course, he wants to take American society and its government back to 1802, even before there was a Nevada to caucus.

More personally, however, he only wants to return to his glory days of the early 70's academia when he was a Mash teacher--a semi-pro, in fact--lecturing on Geography-based History at the College of West Georgia and Map Repair. There his most daring course as a Wolfie, “Mason and Dixon Were Not Straight Enough” was famously, and wrongly, criticized by Liberals and West Virginians.

Candidate Newt is faced with the difficult task of feverishly rewriting rewritten history on the fly, mostly in the pearly teeth of his supporter Sarah Palin's literate revisionismitis.

Unlike Sarah, Newt is an acknowledged expert in such things and knows how to re it right.

For example, in the undiscipline of Middle Eastern Geography, as evidenced by his Biblical History From 1517 course. Newt is truly unparalleled. It is narrowly believed that he, alone among candidates, has endorsed this Blog's sage use of Proximania in lieu of the histrionically inaccurate term “Palestine” and Firstians for always-there Israelis and Laterians for the non-existent Palestinians.

There is likely zero truth to the disappointing rumor that Newt advocates this Blog's own One Again Proximania Solution, to be implemented by Crazy-Gluing individual Firstian and Laterian Proximates together (at their shoulder-to-shoulder) into a single united Proximate. This geographically inspired effort would render Proximate punches fully self-inflicted and not very hard, ultimately leading to happy fist-bumping and an alphabet someone can actually read.

All this erudition aside, as President, Newt would bring more to the bully lectern than any president since Bill Clinton's Oval Office tutoring. For President Newt and America, his Geographical History on-line course would be enlightening and efficient, doubling, perfectly, as a foreign policy.

With the help of modern technology—Google Earth from an iPad, thrown onto a whiteboard via an LCD projector--and a Sharpie, Newt could redraw borders willy-nilly, as he expertly remembers them or wishes them to be.

The syllabus for the first semester of 2013, released yesterday to Miami voters, indicates that new borders for Cuba are the first lesson.

And those hangmen beardy stick figures? They are just Newt's doodling.

Newt Decrees Ultimate GOP Fall Back

Over its entire personhood, this Blog has wondered how much further its Republican chum wanted turn back their clocks. Beyond, that is, the usual, depressing November hour.

For Pat Buchanan, it was surely back to beginning of “Father Knows Best”.  But back to the 1949 radio or 1954 TV version?

For Antonin “Scaly” Scalia, it was 1788, when the Constitution was being written without anyone's authorization.

For Rick Perry... Uh. (Whisper) The Magna Cum... Carter. 1215. That's it!

Anyway, the wonderment is over.

Relax. It's not that far.

In the eye of Gingrich, that time reboot is a relatively modern 1802.

Ever the historian of record for any Christian Family-After-Family Values Party, Newt pandered back to 1802, this during what was--you hope to God--the last Republican pre-Iowa posture test. The clock face cracked at 1802.  This date was necessitated by Newt's bold plan to place the Personhood Doctrine right up there with the Bible and the Constitution, no matter what Scaly and the Supremes may say.

The Personhood Doctrine, more liberal than that of Newt's new boss, the Pope would even consider, finally establishes for all-time that the right to a separate lawyer begins when an human egg is fertilized. Even on a unisex toilet seat.

To put the Supremes in their place, Newt harkens back to, perhaps, the most famous American Biblical editor and slave-owning race-blender, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson invented the razor cut and later added pasting, the combination of which he perfected, without an iPad, in rejiggering the Bible, along with any other books and documents that needed his help.

In 1802, Tom Jefferson and his number one Democratic-Republican--ah, the good old days, eh, Newt--flunky, Jimmy Madison cooked up a plan to extend the vacation of the Supreme Court way beyond two weeks and have their newly elected majority in Congress roll back the judicial clock to the the near- Scaly 1789. This very pre-Walmart rollback seemed fair to Tom since he and Sally Hemings were mostly in Paris and could hardly be blamed for that year's Judicial Act. Fair or not, there were, as there always are, nay-sayers.

One such was Billy Marbury, whom this maneuvering deprived of the political job he had been promised by John Adams, who ended up with a better TV movie than Tom or Jimmy ever got, unless you count when Yul Bryner proved he could do more than dance and tick off Moses by doing “The Buccaneer”, in which Jimmy let the British burn the White House. And the Capitol, not that he cared all that much.

Jimmy Madison, not Yul Bryner.

To Newt, Billy Marbury's annoyance with Tom and Jimmy is where time stopped. You have seen this time-freeze thing before on TV, all the way back in '61 when the next stop was “The Twilight Zone”. Newt, himself, manipulated time recently when he began ticking the Palestine clock with the day after the Ottomans took over Jerusalem's best parlors.

To Newt, Tom “De-Biblist” Jefferson and Jimmy “Burn Baby” Madison proved his concept that Congress can do whatever the hell the current President or Speaker (rarely both) wants it to do.

Sorry, Newt, but even your clock has to start again. When it does, Billy Marbury sues Jimmy Madison and gives Chief Justice John Marshall a really sweet case with which to smack Tom and Jimmy around... for a couple centuries. Marbury v. Madison is, for those other than Newt and, maybe, Scaly, the most important judicial document in American HISTORY.

Hey, Newt! Landmark!

Not the tour map.

History!

Okay, okay. Newt. Put down that razor.

Enough with the DNA Already

Don't get me wrong.  I like DNA.  It is very handy if you want to grow some skin cells after a sunburn or want to keep your hair (and good luck with that).  Of course, DNA also runs cancer but no one or thing is perfect.

Which brings me to Enough Already.

Bio 101 helped me understood why my wife looked more like a cute Genny Khan than Lara Flynn Boyle or a Megan Fox tattoo when she (not Megan) was photographed at age two.  Her young looks caused some consternation at home until the milkman proved to be Irish, too.  The whole family came to laugh that DNA weirdness off, but Nina did burn the picture.

I have twin sisters who liked their original DNA so much, they each kept a copy when they split up for the first time.  It may (emphasis supplied) explain why they liked the same dozens of shoes so much they wouldn't share them as readily as a single allele when the split up the second time, packing for college.

DNA, more recently, really soared when it managed to get half the blacks in Southern Illinois out of Joliet.  They got to got there largely because all blacks look alike to the whites in most parts of Illinois.  DNA fueled the Innocence Project which got some guys out in Texas before George Bush could get his hands, or syringes, on them.  Can't argue with that.

Even though I like civil liberty as much as anyone born before the Patriot Act, I don't care if the Feds want to have a Q-tip swab bank with every American, Illegal and Islamist radical in it.  DNA is sort of like Television and the Internet... and the Q-tip for that matter:  It was not invented until after the ink had faded to fuzzy on the Bill of Rights, so it is not protected from the Scaliaists by the Fourth Amendment. 

DNA and television are joined at David Caruso's hip.  We wouldn't have had the original "CSI" without DNA and where would David be now.  Outside of Prime Time, DNA helps catch rapists and killers whether they the raped or killed years ago or last week.  Depending on who you are, that is great or very troubling news.

But all that is over, now, for me.  I can't sleep and not because I am very troubled.  Yesterday, I found out The Big O is practically a twelth cousin of Big Brown (perhaps explaining the nickname connection).  The Hawaiian whose very father came from Kenya and who lived in Indonesia is related to a comman Massachusetts fellow who probably had never even seen Rhode Island until he drove that lame green pickup down I-95 to Washington DC.  And just in time to conjure the long-dead filibuster, at that.

Please, stop with the DNA already.  Everyone seems to want to trace their DNA back to... well, I'm not sure we all have the same agenda on that score.  Even before gene sequencing, I knew that I was related to half of St Paul, Minnesota (not, mind you, Minneapolis, my mother insisted) and most likely all of Transylvania.  I did not make the latter up, but might have if I had had the chance.

Some great, if obviously liberal and scientific, documentaries on PBS or the History Channel chased DNA all around the damned place.  It was hard and time-consuming because the chase required jamming an electron microscope along with cameras into the bed of a green pickup.  Mitochondrial DNA leads us back to an "Eve" in, by the way, Kenya ("The Big E"?).  Not Massachusetts.  The Y Chromosome project traced most of us guys back to Central Asia, but that may be because Genghis Khan was all over the place, too, and spilled more DNA than your neighborhood milkman.

And how the Big E thing work?  All of her kin descended from her, so where did the guys find the right girl?  In the same neighborhood bar?  The same hut, even?  Didn't we used to fear that beautiful cousin because inbreeding leads to genetic abnormalities like two-headed babies with different colored hair, unstoppable hemorrhaging, and hideous mental defects.  (Finally, Congress explained!)

Genghis Khan, I can live with.  I sort of did quite happily for a long time, at least photographically.  Being related to the Kenyan Big E is fine by me, too.  But I will, and hereby, do draw the line at being a cousin of either Newt Gingrich or Megan Fox.

For very different reasons.