Newt Gingrich spent some time today kissing the ring of reality TV star and goofball birther Donald Trump. Meanwhile, establishment conservatives like George Will are recoiling in horror watching these clowns hijack the conservative movement.

This past weekend, George Will actually suggested that conservatives ought to take a second look at Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman given the prospect of Newt or Mitt Romney as the GOP nominee. Yes, he’s desperate. Rick Perry sounds like George W. Bush after downing a 12-pack, and Huntsman is stuck in single digits in the polls after trying to run as a moderate.

But Will has to turn somewhere, as he has no use for flip-flopper Romney and he can’t stand Newt. With his usual rhetorical flair, Will eviscerates the former Speaker:

Gingrich, however, embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive. And there is his anti-conservative confidence that he has a comprehensive explanation of, and plan to perfect, everything.

Granted, his grandiose rhetoric celebrating his “transformative” self is entertaining: Recently he compared his revival of his campaign to Sam Walton’s and Ray Kroc’s creations of Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, two of America’s largest private-sector employers. There is almost artistic vulgarity in Gingrich’s unrepented role as a hired larynx for interests profiting from such government follies as ethanol and cheap mortgages. His Olympian sense of exemption from standards and logic allowed him, fresh from pocketing $1.6 million from Freddie Mac (for services as a “historian”), to say, “If you want to put people in jail,” look at “the politicians who profited from” Washington’s environment.

His temperament — intellectual hubris distilled — makes him blown about by gusts of enthusiasm for intellectual fads, from 1990s futurism to “Lean Six Sigma” today. On Election Eve 1994, he said a disturbed South Carolina mother drowning her children “vividly reminds” Americans “how sick the society is getting, and how much we need to change things. . . . The only way you get change is to vote Republican.” Compare this grotesque opportunism — tarted up as sociology — with his devious recasting of it in a letter to the Nov. 18, 1994, Wall Street Journal (http://bit.ly/vFbjAk). And remember his recent swoon over the theory that “Kenyan, anti-colonial” thinking explains Barack Obama.

Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how. Conservatism, in contrast, is both cause and effect of modesty about understanding society’s complexities, controlling its trajectory and improving upon its spontaneous order.

Most people would agree with Will, as Newt is widely regarded as a mean-spirited buffoon. But in today’s Republican Party, the fear and loathing caucus calls the shots, and contempt for Obama and the left is by far the most important quality. In that area Newt is unmatched and he has a long track record, so his flaky deviations from conservative policies are more easily forgiven by those eager to see someone stick it to Obama in the debates.

Perry is toast, so Will won’t get his wish there. As for Huntsman, Will and other writers like Erick Erickson of RedState.com have been pointing out how conservative Huntsman is when it comes to policy. Yet Huntsman shows more contempt for the far right than he does for Obama, and that’s why he’s been going nowhere. Perhaps he can change the tone of his campaign, but he has mocked conservatives for not believing in global warming, and stuff like that will make it difficult for him to win GOP primaries.

I think Will is stuck with Mitt or Newt.

Big news!! What a shocker!!

Naturally, many people thought this was baked into the cake from the beginning. Donald Trump is a publicity whore. We all knew that. What we didn’t know was how stupid he could sound when he opened his mouth about topics other than real estate, reality TV or beauty pageants.

He completely embarrassed himself, probably doing great damage to his brand along the way. He also did some damage to the Republican Party, showing how gullible many GOP voters can be when it comes to topics like the birther issue. We saw how a carnival barker could shoot up in the polls just by running his mouth, and the rest of the field came across as very weak in the process.

Fortunately, Trump was humiliated by President Obama before he made his inevitable announcement that he wasn’t running. Even prospective GOP voters finally saw through his bullshit as his poll numbers plummeted after Obama released his long-form birth certificate and then had Osama bin Laden killed.

Good riddance . . .

With characters like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, we’ve been referring to the lunatic fringe of the potential Republican primary field as the confederacy of dunces. Many conservatives seem to have lost their mind when it comes to President Obama, so much so that they will rally around buffoons like Palin and Bachmann.

In order to appeal to the growing lunatic fringe, you have otherwise sensible candidates like Mike Huckabee joining in with idiotic comments about Kenya. We expect this garbage from bomb-throwers like Newt Gingrich, but hearing Huckabee go off the deep end is further evidence that the right wing has serious problems.

Now we have Donald Trump joining in on the idiocy. He’s now gone full birther, saying that he’s very “concerned” over whether President Obama was born in this country. Trump has always been a self-promoting charlatan despite his obvious success as a real estate mogul, but this is truly embarrassing.

The GOP establishment is rightfully terrified by the prospect of any of these dunces drawing real support in the primaries. It will be hilarious to watch, and these GOP “leaders” are getting what they deserved, as they embraced Sarah Palin and her anti-intellectual gibberish when it suited them, and now they have to live with the mass hysteria she and her ilk have whipped up on the right.

At least someone at CNN has some journalistic integrity left. Next, they need to get rid of Dobbs.

CNN President Jon Klein wrote an email last night to “Lou Dobbs Tonight” staffers telling them the Obama birth certificate story is “dead,” TVNewser reports.

“It seems this story is dead,” Klein wrote, “because anyone who still is not convinced doesn’t really have a legitimate beef.”

CNN focused on the additional information that all Hawaii records are now electronic, so they don’t produce paper copies of “original” birth certificates.

Will this end the story? Don’t bet on it. The level of hatred on the right for Obama is reaching a fever pitch.

UPDATE: A civil rights organization is demanding that CNN remove Lou Dobbs from the air.

Since Barack Obama announced his candidacy for President, we’ve seen the lunatic fringe on the right push the limits of idiocy. Since his election, the levels of insanity on the right have grown exponentially.

The “birther” movement has set a new standard, even by the standards of the loony right wing. They make the teabaggers looks like sober economic scholars.

Naturally, Jon Stewart, the most trusted newsman in America following the death of Cronkite, has a field day with this one.

Pay particular attention to his smackdown of Lou Dobbs, who brings up “questions” surrounding Obama’s place of birth several days after a guest host ON HIS OWN SHOW completely debunks the asinine story. Further proof that Lou Dobbs is a complete buffoon. Why is this clown still on CNN?