She turned him into a newt. But he didn't get better.

Newt's back in the news!

The former speaker, his eye on a 2012 presidential run, said that as he thought more about the felling of the Wall 20 years ago Monday, he began "to understand a message of faith, a message of salvation, the centrality of the cross in this whole fight."

Ah, yes, the old "I want to run for President so here comes a hard turn to the right" trick.

And it wasn't just about 20th-century Europe. "I am tired of secular fanatics trying to redesign America in their image," he announced.

Nice follow up! He fears for the poor beleaguered religious majority, once again under siege.

Further, he said, "I believe the most important question in the United States for the next decade is: 'Who are we?' Are we in fact a people who claim that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights?" Or, are we "just randomly gathered protoplasm -- and lucky for us we're not rhinoceroses -- but that in the end our power is defined by politicians and their appointees? Once you decide on this, almost everything else gets easier."

This is, of course, just a bunch of verbal diarrhea. He throws a partial quote from the Declaration of Independence as if that's a choice. It is, in fact, possible to believe that human beings have inalienable rights without any kind of deity sanction.

And then he throws a gratuitously stupid creationist crack in there. Yes, us randomly gathered protoplasms are lucky we're not rhinoceroses. Sheesh.

From there, the speaker turned from faithless communists to godless liberals. "There is a secular-left model of reality which cannot tolerate the thought that state control fails, that tyranny is evil and that a liberated human being whose rights come from God is the centerpiece of the human future," he said. In fact, he added later, he felt so strongly about this that "I'm trying to get a poster done. It's going to have a series of Polish crosses that form a cross."

More utter nonsense. Liberals don't believe that tyranny is evil. Rights come from "God" and that's the centerpiece of the human future. What does any of that even mean?

I do like his idea of an awesome cross-filled poster, though! I hope it glows funkily under black light. That would rule!

And then his audience decides to join in the stupid.

A man in the audience stood up to say that over the past nine months, the Berlin Wall "is being reconstructed right here" by Obama and congressional Democrats. "At the end of four years, is it not likely that a lot more people will be rediscovering God through tyranny?"

Obama has gone out of his way to be bi-partisan, to try to work with Republicans, and they have repeatedly, time after time, spit on his outstretched hand. But he's the one constructing a wall. And of course, extraordinary rendition, warrantless wiretapping, starting two wars, torture - none of these constitute tyranny. Tyranny is an attempt to lower health care costs and provide insurance coverage to millions of uninsured Americans.

Orwell would totally understand.