Overkill

As a former player in the MSM arena, I continue to be flabbergasted by the propensity of today’s strapped publishers to waste vast quantities of ink, airtime and man-hours shooting at paper tigers when such resources could, Lord knows, be put to far more productive use.

Case in point: The New Yorker’s Katie-bar-the-door takedown of Newt Gingrich in the lead column of its most recent issue. It’s as though a recklessly extravagant one-percenter had so much ready cash burning a hole in his pocket, he had to exhaust it all in one fell swoop or burst.

You’d think that an editor as savvy as Hendrik Hertzberg, or an avatar as seasoned to the fickleness of shifting political winds as Eustace Tilley, would recognize that Gingrich has about as much chance of being elected president as Kim Kardashian has of scoring the Pope to officiate at her next wedding.

Neither is it likely that anyone who reads The New Yorker would ever vote for, or needs to be convinced not to vote for Mrs. Gingrich’s precocious boy, a contender as much a victim of his own hubris as of Mitt’s Super-PAC.

So, why the overkill? It’s almost as though they know the guy is about to go into eclipse, and they want to fire off all the juicy negatives they’ve been saving up before they become worthless currency in the ongoing press wars.