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" (Optional soundtrack to this blog post...)      Well, mother of mercy, this seems finally to be the end of Newton Leroy. The Definer Of Civilization&amp;#039;s Rules And Leader (Perhaps) Of The Civilizing Forces finally hung &amp;#039;em up on Wednesday \u2014 and how nice it was of his former friends and fellow employees at Fox to mention so high up in that there story how deeply in hock his campaign is \u2014 thereby ending one of the longest goodbyes we&amp;#039;ve seen for a primary candidate in a very long time. But Fox wasn&amp;#039;t done with him. Not by a long shot.... With the candidate making his exit official Wednesday afternoon, a close look at his finance records reveals a free-spending machine that ran up a million-dollar debt in private jet flights alone, along with other services and benefits that left the unpaid bill at a whopping $4.3 million at the end of March, according to the latest filing with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The campaign says it has paid off $500,000 of that total, which still leaves a $3.8 million tab. And while huge amounts of money are still owed to a variety of vendors \u2014 some of whom might wonder when and if they&amp;#039;ll see their money \u2014 the campaign seems to have paid off all its bills to businesses run by Gingrich family members, as well as &amp;quot;reimbursed&amp;quot; the candidate himself with nearly half a million dollars.  In other words, good riddance, you deadbeat bastard, you. I underestimated how far out of favor with most of the conservative power structure Gingrich actually had fallen. Twenty years ago, he was the intellectual anchor of the movement, the Man Of The Moment, the fount of new and innovative conservative ideas. (Yeah, most of them were new and innovative ideas for how to call your Democratic opponent a dog-fondling Socialist weasel, but people played along with him.) Now, he broke and a joke. This has to be absolutely killing him. Willard Romney, a wealthy Yankee fop with only one real political idea in his head \u2014 &amp;quot;Me President Too Some Day&amp;quot; \u2014 is cake-walking to the nomination, and he&amp;#039;s doing it on the bones of Gingrich&amp;#039;s career. Moreover, there even is a new Man Of The Moment, a new fount of new and innovative conservative ideas, and he&amp;#039;s only been married once, and he&amp;#039;s getting the same level of mainstream Beltway journo-love that Newt and his T-Rex skull used to get. Paul Ryan is the new genius in town, and Newt&amp;#039;s the guy on the orange crate on the corner, showing everyone his old copies of Time magazine with the cover picture of a guy people barely remember. No more trips to the moon, gang. Zombie-eyed granny-starving is the new glory train. (Can I also remind everyone that when Newt Gingrich called Paul Ryan&amp;#039;s budget &amp;quot;right-wing social engineering,&amp;quot; he was in all senses absolutely correct. Had he stuck to that, had he really pointed out a different direction for his party to take, he wouldn&amp;#039;t have come off half as pathetic the rest of the way.) It&amp;#039;s not like the Gingrich campaign had any real impact, either, beyond the McCarthyite kind of tactics that won him South Carolina. He didn&amp;#039;t force any issues to the front the way Rick Santorum made everyone start talking about the Pill and the unauthorized sexytime. (That didn&amp;#039;t exactly work out all that well, but it forced an issue.) His great moments in the debates \u2014 and these were debates in which he was wrestling with intellectual titans like Herman Cain and Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann \u2014 came when he banged around the moderators. Everybody else took everything he said as unusually good entertainment, especially considering the other acts on the stage. But that Fox story today is the final echo of the coffin lid slamming down. He may still command some fat lecture fees. (He&amp;#039;d better, if those figures are right.) He&amp;#039;ll write a few more books that nobody will read. And he doesn&amp;#039;t even really seem even to have Fox as a place to land this time around. But maybe he&amp;#039;ll fool us all. Maybe he&amp;#039;ll go back to working on public-school reform with Al Sharpton. That would be the final conjurer&amp;#039;s trick for N. Leroy Gingrich, who defined no rules and led no forces, civilizing or otherwise. Maybe he&amp;#039;ll become the next generation of Republican moderate. I&amp;#039;d still buy a ticket to see that. (Photo Illustration by DonkeyHotey for The Politics Blog) "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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