My favorite whipping boy declares for 2012.

Over the years, there have been more than a few people I have delighted in treating as whipping boys (damn near anyone in the George W. Bush administration) and some whipping girls (Hillary Clinton chief among them), but at the top of the list is Newt Gingrinch. Among all those people, he is, in my opinion, the biggest amoral, reprehensible, self-centered, hypocritical asshole.

Seriously.

And now he has decided to once again run for President.

I can't stand Donald Trump. I didn't think it possible, but his antics the last few months have made him an even bigger buffoon than he was before. And yet I would rather have him as President than Newt.

Seriously.

In December 2006, Newt was contemplating running for President in 2008, and that prompted me to write a 7-part series entitled "Newt Gingrich--what a swell guy!" Here are the links to that series:

• Newt Gingrich--what a swell guy! (Part 1: book deals and hypocrisy) (December 4, 2006)
• Newt Gingrich--what a swell guy! (Part 2: money and the Contract with America) (December 4, 2006)
• Newt Gingrich--what a swell guy! (Part 3: the ethics charges) (December 11, 2006)
• Newt Gingrich--what a swell guy! (Part 4: the family man) (December 12, 2006)
• Newt Gingrich--what a swell guy! (Part 5--ego and personality) (December 18, 2006)
• Newt Gingrich--what a swell guy! (Part 6--more proof that hypocrisy is his SOP) (December 23, 2006)
  
• Newt Gingrich--what a swell guy! (Part 7--the new guardian of free speech) (December 27, 2006)

I followed that up in March 2007 with Newt Gingrich admits past infidelity, but swears he's no hypocrite.

And just when I thought I was done with Newt for a while, last summer he started sending out signals that he was going to run in 2012, so I did a review and update on his abject lack of character.

And while I was writing that post, Newt had to go and spew all sorts of inaccurate and inflammatory bullshit about the so called "Ground Zero Mosque." I responded with three posts:

• Newt Gingrich on the NYC mosque
• More on Newt and the NYC mosque
• One more post on Newt and the NYC mosque

Here's what I wrote in the opening of the first of those posts: "His statements about the Muslim community center and mosque are complete bullshit and show what a bombastic, self-serving douchebag he is." And then I proceeded to back that up in a big way.

And now Newt is running for President again.

Josh Marshall had some interesting initial observations over at Talking Points Memo:

Jon Alter and David Corn are on Hardball right now working their way through Newt Gingrich's history of ferociously crazy and borderline eliminationist rhetoric going back 30 years. And it's almost comical: because watching, you can sort of see that they are defeated by the sheer volume of completely clownish and wildly intemperate statements. Where do you possibly start?

In recent history we know Obama as crazed machete-waving Luo tribesman, and the secular socialist, anti-colonialist version, the constant comparisons of Democrats to Nazis and Gulag operators.

But for me it all goes back to that epic moment on the eve of the 1994 GOP congressional blowout when Gingrich took that horrible tragic example of the Susan Smith murders -- the young woman who murdered her little kids down in South Carolina -- and used it as an example of the results of Democratic social safety net programs and the need to vote Republican to keep crazy young mothers from murdering their children and blaming it on black men. It was somewhere around then when he said that Democrats were "traitors" and the "enemy of normal Americans."

At some level this is what I almost admire about Gingrich -- in the face of the universe, in almost every waking moment, he announces that he is balls-up to shame. It just ain't his bag. 'Admiring' isn't the right word. It's more like the way that even though I don't like slasher films I can sort of get that there's a level of art or gory sublimity to it. And that's Gingrich, not a politician or even a mere huckster, but something much more than that, a right-wing performance artist who for a critical decade or so overlapped with the real world of electoral politics and ascended to the highest echelons of power. The almost appealing slasher barging in on the carefree picnic day of our political life.

In many ways, Josh summed up Gingrich, but I urge everyone to check out the links Josh provided for many more details about what Newt has been doing lately. This guy will never change.

During the 2008 campaign, I was on a mission to show people why Hillary Clinton should not be President. I will do the same regarding Newt for 2012.