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WASHINGTON – Harry Reid tweets Lady Gaga while Newt Gingrich is truly gaga.

The 67-year-old
former speaker, who has a talent for overreaching, is more unbridled
than ever. He’s decided he’ll do or say anything to stay in the game –
even Palin-izing himself by making outrageous, unsubstantiated comments
to appeal to the wing nuts among us.

The conservative
who fancies himself a historian and visionary did not use his critical
faculties to resist his party’s lunacy but instead has embraced it,
shamelessly. He has given a full-throated endorsement to a dangerously
irresponsible and un-Christian theory by Ann Coulter-in-pants Dinesh
D’Souza.

Gingrich praised
D’Souza’s article in Forbes, previewing an upcoming book called “The
Roots of Obama’s Rage.” Newt told The National Review Online that it
was the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about
Barack Obama” and said D’Souza shows that the president “is so outside
our comprehension” that you can only understand him “if you understand
Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.” Newt added: “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.”
So the smear artists are claiming not only that the president is a
socialist but that he suffers from a socialism gene.

“Our president is
trapped in his father’s time machine,” D’Souza writes in Forbes,
offering a genetic theory of ideology. “Incredibly, the U.S. is being
ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This
philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world
for denying him the realization of his anti-colonial ambitions, is now
setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in
his son.” Playing into the bigotry of birthers and haters who paint
Obama as “the other,” D’Souza writes that the president was raised
offshore, spending “his formative years – the first 17 years of his
life – off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan,
with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.” The ominous-sounding time
in Pakistan was merely a visit when Obama was a college student.

Gingrich, who
ditched two wives (the first when she was battling cancer; the second
after an affair with the third – a House staffer – while he was
impeaching Bill Clinton), now professes to be a good Catholic.
Evidently the first two wives don’t count because he hadn’t converted
to Catholicism. He even had a big Catholic conversion Mass here with
his third wife, Callista, celebrated by a retinue of priests and church
leaders.

But he is downright un-Christian when he does not hesitate to visit the alleged sins of the father upon the son.

Some of Newt’s old conservative friends worry that he has gone “over the ledge,” as one put it.

If it wasn’t so
sick it would be funny. It’s worse than a conspiracy theory because
this conspiracy consists of a single dead individual. The idea that
there’s something illegitimate about anti-colonialism on the part of a
Kenyan man in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s is stupid. And it’s inconsistent
to accuse a president who’s raining drones on bad guys in Pakistan,
Somalia and Yemen of having an inherited anti-colonial ideology.

It’s also low.
D’Souza and Gingrich are not merely discrediting the president’s
father’s ideology. They’re discrediting his character and insinuating
that the son inherited not just his father’s bad ideology but a bad
character, too.

Newt has always
displayed an impressive grandiosity. Who can forget the time during his
congressional heyday when he declared himself a “defender of
civilization, a teacher of the rules of civilization, arouser of those
who form civilization … and leader ‘possibly’ of the civilizing
forces”?

And he who thinks
Obama is too messianic said in 1994: “People like me are what stand
between us and Auschwitz. I see evil all around me every day.” This
fear mongering is ugly. D’Souza and Gingrich employ the tactics the
Bush administration used to get us into Iraq – cherry picking,
insinuation, half-truths and dishonest reasoning.

If the
conservatives are so interested in psychoanalyzing father and son
relationships, why didn’t they do so back when W. was rushing to avenge
and one-up his father by finishing what Daddy started with Saddam?

On their website,
Callista and Newt tout “Gingrich Productions” and promote an
apocalyptic movie with the same kind of scary music that Fox uses,
suggesting that the Obama administration is weak in the war against
“radical Islam.” The movie and the website are called “America at
Risk.” It’s Newt and D’Souza and their ilk who put America at risk.

© 2010 New York Times