Newt Gingrich Gets Free Rein To Embrace His Inner Fearmonger On Hannity's Show

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Newt Gingrich got to continue his Fox News Book Promotion Tour last night on Sean Hannity's show, pitching his new book, To Save America: Why Liberals Want to Eat Your Children, picking up where he left off on Sunday's gig with Chris Wallace.

Let's just say that Gingrich without the restraints of Wallace's, ah, probing questions is kind of like root-canal work without the benefit of anesthetics.

Unlike Wallace, Hannity was openly promoting Gingrich's story line, to wit, that President Obama and the evil liberals are going to destroy America by instituting a "secular socialist" state. Hannity could scarcely contain himself as they contemplated Obama's supposed deep-seated radicalism.

Hannity, you see, believes with Gingrich that "we are in a battle for the heart and soul of America -- in fact, the greatest battle since the Civil War."

Just in case there was anyone out there wondering when right-wingers were going to get around to declaring civil war on liberals.

There were lots of prime bon mots, but perhaps my favorite was this one:

Gingrich: By the early 1990s, I thought, you know, we've proven all the major tenets of modern American conservatism. And it never occurred to me that the hard left would just dig in, bury themselves -- in the academic world, in the news media, in the labor unions -- and now have come back more left-wing, more radical, more determined than ever.

See, this is what we call "projection". Because as we all know, and are still experiencing, the "major tenets of modern conservatism" have just been exposed as a complete sham, a mockery of modern governance, by the eight years of the Bush administration -- eight years in which conservatives destroyed the economy, destroyed America's standing in the world, and horribly impacted the global environment.

And yes, you'd think after that experience, conservatives would stand back in shock at the recognition of what they've done to the economy and mend their ways. Probably no one (except those of us who know them too well) would imagine that they would just bury themselves in the work of denying heatedly that they just brought the nation to its knees and become more determined than ever to seize the reins of power by any means necessary. Including trying to invoke a civil war.

But then, some of us know them better than that.