Robots From Socialist Future Hound Eternal Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich

Every political party needs an intellectual guru, and 1990s nostalgia act Newt Gingrich is the "Ideas Man" for the GOP establishment when he’s not playing Pearl Jam and Cardigans covers. Some consider Newt a great thinker, perceptiveabout history and full of "American Solutions for Winning the Future." This is because 2010 America doesn’t really have thinkers. Instead we have policy nerds and op-ed page n’ teevee boredom-mongers, all of them “intellectuals” because, uh, they go on the teevee and type the op-ed page. They also occasionally write books like Newt’s violent robot novel To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machines,  er, we mean, MACHINE, a tale of socialist robots sent from the godless future to kill Ronald Reagan’s ghost.

The book is cleverly disguised as one of those breezy but long policy proposals that some people mistakenly call “books” and others comically call “think pieces.” But your reviewer can confirm that Newt is an avant-garde weirdo, because the book is secretly a sci-fi novel.

THE PLOT: The year is 2010. America is in dumb ruins. Into this crumbling, toxic hellscape rumbles something called “Obama’s secular-socialist machine.” Its nature is unclear at first, but it obviously means us harm.

Which of Obama’s secular-socialist machines is Philip K. Newt talking about? Surely not the robot planes that socialistically blow up Afghans. And probably not the government UFOs you see wheeling above our western deserts from time to time. Newt clarifies:

[T]he secular socialists believe the only reliable institution is a bureaucratic, centralized, supremely powerful government. Their answer to virtually every problem is higher taxes, more spending, and bigger bureaucracies, because they don’t believe Americans can be trusted to make the “right” decisions ....

Powerful politicians will impose their will on an exhausted, submissive citizenry, who will look to government bureaucrats for guidance and permission to succeed in life. Naturally, there will be no place for God in this new, purely secular society.

.... The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.

Ah, that sounds bad . As you might guess, these secular-socialist machines were sent from the future by intergalactic space tyranny A-CORN. Their orders: Locate the spirit of our nation’s founder, Ronald Reagan, and kill it. Or at least trap it in one of those boxes from Ghostbusters , because the S-S machines need to avoid a Tea Party insurrection in the future. Understandable, really, because nobody wants to spend the future getting yelled at by a swelling population of rancorous old people.

 
 So how does Newt get the socialists off this muthafuckin’ plane? I shan’t spoil the ending! Though I can confirm that the last pages are a prose poem in which every sentence begins with “Bravery is ...” and then “You lead ....”

Newt’s dystopia would make a fine graphic novel (possibly written and drawn by Wonkette’s own Benjamin Frisch?). Or at least a movie with an all-DEVO soundtrack. Imagine Newt throwing Church-and-Capitalism grenades at the secular-socialist robots while “Freedom of Choice” blares through THX speakers. No? Maybe an all-Kraftwerk soundtrack, then, to please the classy machines out there.

Newt is correct that America needs fixin’, what with all the bear carjackings and oily pelicans and Google space-robots redrawing the globe and all those great publishers just cold dying all the time with no one to replace them. We just didn't know that the source of these horrors is an army of secular-socialist robots. Thank God we have Newt to write us the Truth!

What else did we learn here? Two things:

1) Newt Gingrich still insists on being called “Speaker Newt Gingrich,” if the back flap is anything to go by.

2) The Speaker-for-Life should flee the Earth in a spaceship, so we can get on with building the REAL secular-socialist machine: a huge network of energy-generating bikes that people will furiously peddle all day, for pay, to power our villages and cities (the suburbs will be abandoned to the bears, for Formula 1 practice). Three great challenges to America -- unemployment, sketchy energy, and obesity -- all solved forever. Excelsior!

  To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine   by Newt Gingrich, Regnery Press, 356 pages. 

SPEAKING OF MACHINES  If there’s a book you’d like to see reviewed by Wonkette World o’ Books, use your email machine to send suggestions to greer.mansfield@gmail.com. Any book having anything to do with the Politics is welcome, though we obviously lean towards the Shameful and Appalling. All operatives will be credited/shamed for their brilliant ideas.