Las Vegas Gleaner

Brian Sandoval hopes Rick Perry is the new Rick Santorum

To reiterate... Jones Vargas government affairs representative Brian Sandoval, who moonlights as Nevada's governor, knew Rick Perry before the rest of America was exposed to the Texas governor's childish yammering, idiotic blithering and retrograde bigotry. And yet Sandoval endorsed him anyway.

Alas, Republican judgment is an oxymoron -- even with respect to a former judge like Sandoval, evidently -- and a potentially significant smattering of low-information wingnutted hawkeyes (an endangered species only in their own minds) may be on the verge of echoing Sandoval's reckless conclusion: A critical mass of American media, convening in Des Moines to ring in the New Year and obsess about horserace horseshit, are collectively moving toward the consensus that Perry could shockingly finish third in Tuesday's caucuses.

Nothing could be finer for Nevada and the nation than for Mousse in Boots to translate an Iowa surprise into a respectable New Hampshire finish and build enough momentum to actually win in South Carolina.

If Romney is allowed to wrap up the nomination early, his production team can immediately pivot to designing and manufacturing General Election Mittens, which is bad. But as long as Romney's right flank is potentially vulnerable to an assault from Perry's relentless Sharron Angle impersonation, Willard, too, has to bring The Crazy. Which is good.

Of course, even if Perry actually wins Iowa, the New Hampshire primary is a full week later, and seven days is far too long for Perry to be in the spotlight without catastrophically imploding yet again. So never mind. The most overrated thing in Nevada is still Brian Sandoval. And the next truly interesting development in the 2012 presidential campaign will not be the results of some caucus or primary, but the release of Mitt Romney's tax returns.

UPDATE (irrelevant): Mousse in Boots announced over the weekend that he'll skip New Hampshire no matter what happens in Iowa, but the supecalifragilistic Des Moines Register poll suggests there is no last gasp for Perry after all anyway. So it's all moot -- except of course for the part where the governor of Nevada thought a simple-minded bigot should be president.

The best counter-factual stories of 2011

In Nevada as in the nation, the public policy storylines of 2011 ranged from the predictably disheartening (yet another inept Nevada legislative session) to the profoundly nauseating (the misguided obsession with the federal debt while totally ignoring the economy).

So instead of dwelling on deranged, incompetent and/or cynical elected officials and their comprehensive failure to address a single significant issue in a productive let alone meaningful way -- the stuff of a standard year-in-review column -- your Gleaner (just like Newt Gingrich!) has taken refuge in counter-factual narratives of things that might have been. In CityLife.

They'll start more dumb wars, your future they'll screw, it's Megalomaniac One and Megalomaniac Two

Sheldon Adelson is not just a bitchy little area megalomaniac whose lavish funding and garrish McCasinos provide aide, comfort and sustenance to Nevada's professional right-wing extremists. He's also the 16th or whatever richest person in the solar system. According to America's officially accepted system of weights and measures, that makes him A Great Man.

Newt Gingrich, meantime, is the only being on earth who possesses the integrity, character, wisdom and vision necessary to save Western civilization from the secular left or creeping socialism or schools without urchin janitors or whatever it is that the narcissistic grifter has proclaimed the greatest existential threat to the human race on any given day. Just ask him.

So naturally these two puffed up roly-polies love to cuddle, as McClatchy reported the other day...

Gingrich's American Solutions for Winning the Future, which he shuttered in July, shelled out at least $8 million for the chartered jets in which he hop-scotched the nation for public appearances while weighing whether to enter the 2008 and 2012 presidential races.

The committee's acceptance of huge cash donations — including $7.65 million from Sheldon Adelson, a pro-Israel, billionaire Las Vegas casino owner, and more than $2 million from five energy companies — has sewn concerns that Gingrich would be beholden to his benefactors if he won the White House.

The phrase "sewn concerns" is objectionable, in that it suggests there is still some doubt as to whether Gingrich would sell America's nuclear launch codes and his third wife to North Korea if the price was right.

Anyway, the McClatchy story goes on to explain how Adelson is probably the most extremist pro-Israel jillionaire in the history of ever who sort of makes Netanyahu look like an appeaser.

Then McClatchy reporter Greg Gordon followed up in an appearance on the venerable Amy Goodman's show, and connected a couple of the more obvious dots.

"And perhaps it is no surprise, after all these donations from Adelson, totaling $7.65 million, that Gingrich has recently spoken against a—he talked about the Palestinian people as an 'invented people,' and he talked about moving the embassy on his first day in office, the U.S. embassy to Israel, from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which would be an extremely provocative move to make in the Middle East."

So your Gleaner apologizes. For months, maybe a year, I don't know, I've been chortling at Nevada Republicans for being totally ignored by their presidential candidates and having no impact whatsoever on GOP presidential politics.

But it turns out that if it wasn't for Sheldon Adelson, Super Nevadan, there wouldn't even be a Newt Gingrich presidential campaign.

In the unfathomable event that Gingrich actually wins the Republican nomination, Democrats should move their national convention to Las Vegas, to the non-union Venetian, in recognition of all that Adelson will have done to assure Barack Obama's reelection.

UPDATE (important): The phrase "sewn concerns" has violated the sensibilities of several (well, at least three) readers, who have commented or emailed to note that the correct word should be "sown." McClatchy wrote "sewn" but your typically inattentive Gleaner should have caught it, and didn't. Ergo, the offending mistake will now stand for time immemorial as a reminder of the dangers inherent in just cold cutting and pasting willy-nilly without so much as a a by your leave. Diligence!

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/12/19/133526/did-gingrich-bend-campaign-laws.html#storylink=cpy