Via Andrew, here’s a press release from Clemson University announcing results of their final poll before tomorrow’s primary. Romney has collapsed:

“We expect a reaction by the electorate to the personal revelations about Gingrich to be registered on Saturday, however, we do not think it will be substantial enough to erase the lead Gingrich has over Romney,” said Clemson University political scientist Dave Woodard.

“Our head-to-head matchup of the candidates has consistently shown Mitt Romney competitive. The margin for Romney has evaporated this week, and we believe that Gingrich — who led our December poll with 38 percent to Romney’s 21 percent — will win the South Carolina primary,” he said.

Among poll respondents who had chosen or were leaning toward a candidate, this third Palmetto Poll showed Newt Gingrich (32 percent) leading the field over Mitt Romney (26 percent), up slightly from a month ago. Ron Paul came in third (11 percent), about even with his December poll rating. Rick Santorum remained in fourth place (9 percent), despite a significant jump over his ranking last month.

Andrew says Santorum’s low ranking suggests that Evangelicals in SC are breaking for Newt. Yep. Twenty percent of SC GOP voters remain undecided, but Newt’s got the momentum. Romney missed several opportunities to hit hard at Newt in last night’s debate, and Newt scored big with the base by attacking the media.

So, if Newt upsets Romney in SC, what does that do to Florida, where the next voting will take place, on January 31? Romney will have only one a single state, the extremely unrepresentative (for Republicans) New Hampshire, in his home region. He will have lost Iowa, and lost South Carolina. Once Romney gets the stink of loser on him, it’s going to be hard to scrub off.

From a long, fascinating, video-clip-filled post about youth culture in the final decades of the USSR, this bit:

Sir Rodric Braithwaite, who used to be Britain’s ambassador to Moscow, has written a wonderful book called Afgantsy. It tells the story of the Soviet invasion through the eyes of those who took part, and that includes the thousands of aid workers and civilian advisers that also went in. Their aim was to try and build ‘socialism’ in Afghanistan, just as thousands of westerners would later try and build ‘democracy’.

Braithwaite quotes a Soviet youth adviser called Vladimir Snegirev who went to Afghanistan. In March 1982 he describes watching the Afghan New Year celebrations in the Kabul Stadium, and how they express the dream of creating a new world.

“There is a striking contrast which is only possible here: many of the women on the terraces conceal their faces under the chador – a primitive, medieval superstition; but parachutists are landing in the stadium and they are women too, who grew up in this country. The chador and the parachute. You don’t have to be a prophet to foretell the victory of the parachute”

For Snegirev it was the ageing and corrupt Soviet leadership  under Brezhnev that was the problem. He later wrote of the optimistic vision that Afghanistan seemed to offer:

“Were it not for our sclerotic leadership, people like Brezhnev, everything would work out differently. That’s what I thought, that’s what many people my age thought. When we arrived in Afghanistan we began to do what we had prepared ourselves to do for the whole of our previous lives.

In Afghanistan it was as if time had gone backwards, but now a power had arisen in this land which wanted to drag the people out of their superstition, to give children the chance to go to school, women the opportunity to see the world directly, instead of through the eye slits of the chador. Was that not a revolution? The battle of the future against a past already condemned?”

Adam Curtis, the post’s author, then posts a clip from a Soviet-era documentary showing liberated Afghan women in the Kabul Stadium celebrating the liberation brought to them by Soviet socialist invaders. He then posts a 2002 film clip from the very same stadium, showing Afghan women celebrating all that American democratic invaders have done for them to change their culture.

Hmm.

Read the whole thing.  I think the comparison between the Brezhnev and post-Brezhnev USSR, and contemporary America, is facile and seriously overdone, but not entirely without merit. The Afghanistan section is worth thinking about every time you hear Mitt Romney or one of his confreres open their mouths about foreign policy and America’s mission civilisatrice.

Fox News medical correspondent Dr. Keith Ablow counsels that Newt Gingrich’s three marriages might make him a better president. I’m not making this up. Excerpt:

1) Three women have met Mr. Gingrich and been so moved by his emotional energy and intellect that they decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with him.

2) Two of these women felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married.

3 ) One of them felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married for the second time, was not exactly her equal in the looks department and had a wife (Marianne) who wanted to make his life without her as painful as possible.

Conclusion: When three women want to sign on for life with a man who is now running for president, I worry more about whether we’ll be clamoring for a third Gingrich term, not whether we’ll want to let him go after one.

4) Two women—Mr. Gingrich’s first two wives—have sat down with him while he delivered to them incredibly painful truths: that he no longer loved them as he did before, that he had fallen in love with other women and that he needed to follow his heart, despite the great price he would pay financially and the risk he would be taking with his reputation.

Conclusion: I can only hope Mr. Gingrich will be as direct and unsparing with the Congress, the American people and our allies. If this nation must now move with conviction in the direction of its heart, Newt Gingrich is obviously no stranger to that journey.

Oh for frack’s sake. At some point, you have to wonder when shamelessness crosses the line from character defect to psychopathology. If only Dr. Leo Spaceman were a Republican, he could have a lucrative career on Fox.

Ross Douthat puts his finger precisely on what I cannot stand about Newt Gingrich and his success among GOP primary voters. Excerpt:

I have, for my sins, watched Gingrich make his pitch across what feels like seventeen thousand Republican primary debates, and I am at a loss to identify the “big ideas” and “big solutions” that he is supposedly campaigning on. Yes, he has an implausible supply-side tax plan, but you never hear him talk about it. He has technically signed on to some form of entitlement reform, but you never hear him talk about that, either. Instead, so far as I can tell, his “idea-oriented” campaign consists almost entirely of promising to hold Lincoln-Douglas-style debates with President Obama, grandstanding about media bias and moderator stupidity, defending his history of ideological flexibility much more smoothly than Mitt Romney, and then occasionally throwing out a wonky-sounding notion (like, say, outsourcing E-Verify to American Express) that’s more glib than genuinely significant. His last-minute momentum in South Carolina, which last night’s debate did nothing to derail, has been generated almost exclusively by the politics of ressentiment: If he wins the Palmetto State primary, it will be because conservative voters don’t much like the mainstream press, and Gingrich has mastered the art of taking tough questions and turning them into dudgeon-rich denunciations of the liberal media and all its works.

Read on in Ross’s long post to read him talk about how Rick Santorum, whatever you think of him, has actually run a campaign of substance, not preening gestures and blustery, talk-radio-ready self-righteousness. Check out this passage from a 2005 Boston Globe piece on the traditionalist conservative historian John Lukacs:

But even when pressed, Lukacs has difficulty finding any good words for populism, American-style. To him, the rise of right-wing populism here is troubling because it means that the conservatives no longer serve as a shield against the dangers of mass politics. Instead, ”conservative” has come to mean simply ”antiliberal.”

”Nationalism is a very low and cheap common denominator that unites people,” he says. ”It is hatred that unites people. People take satisfaction from the idea that we are good because our enemies are evil. This is a very American syndrome but it is also universally true of mankind.”

”In this country the Republicans are the nationalist party,” he continues. ”That’s why they won the election — on the basis of symbols. I think the importance of economics in people’s political choice of vote is vastly exaggerated. We live in such an age of intellectual stupidity that people use the wrong terms. People think this is a ‘cultural issue’ or a ‘moral issue.’ These are half-truths.”

Although Lukacs has won his share of esteem in a career that spans more than five decades, he now finds himself oddly isolated as someone who criticizes the Republican party from a traditionalist vantage point.

”What is there traditional in George Bush?” he asks with exasperation. ”Nothing. Nothing.”

I spent a terrific hour yesterday interviewing my late sister Ruthie’s oncologist for the book I’m writing about her. It was an amazing time. He said that Ruthie was one of the most extraordinary patients he’d ever seen, and he credited the spirit and confidence with which she met her cancer with extending her life far beyond the norm for her type of cancer. When she was diagnosed, he said, he would have given her three to six months. She lived for 19 months, and lived richly, with joy. The doctor, who has been an oncologist for 25 years, was emphatic that her inner disposition had everything to do with this.

Which is not, of course, to diminish the power of chemotherapy, only to say that in his judgment, chemo alone couldn’t have helped her live as long as she did. Ruthie endured heavy, heavy chemo. I remember her telling me at one point that the cost for a particular medicine was something like $9,000 per dose — and she received a dose every two weeks. (I might have the details wrong, but the point is, the medicine that kept her alive cost some jaw-dropping amount). The doctor told me that Ruthie’s cancer was so serious that in her case, it was never a matter of curing it, only a matter of extending her life for as long as possible. Now, she had good insurance, which covered these treatments. But they were very, very expensive. Megan McArdle takes up the morality of new but pricey treatments. Excerpt:

Is spending $50,000 to give a pancreatic cancer patient an extra 5-9 months of life a wasted expenditure, or a medical advance? On the one hand, 5-9 months isn’t very long.  On the other hand, for a typical pancreatic cancer patient, you’ve doubled their lifespan, which seems like  a very long time indeed.

If we get better cancer treatments–which is what everyone says they want–we’re probably going to be asking those questions a lot.  And either way, we aren’t going to like the answer.

True. If it’s you, or your sister, it’s very hard to put a price on the length of one’s days. My father would have sold everything he had to have given her one more week; in fact, he said he would do so, if it came to that, and I believe him. And yet, death will come for us all. Ruthie’s oncologist talked for a while about how fear of death harms the lives of cancer patients, diminishing their survival rates, and quality of life. At what point, though, do we say, “It’s not worth it to spend all this money to give Mrs. Jones an extra five months?” At what point does Mrs. Jones say that about herself? What about an extra four months? An extra three? You see how this goes. There are no good answers. But answers are required in real life.

UPDATE: A couple of you have sent me this terrific New Yorker article by Dr. Atul Gawande, on the difficult medicine has figuring out how to treat terminal patients who can’t be cured. Excerpt:

Our medical system is excellent at trying to stave off death with eight-thousand-dollar-a-month chemotherapy, three-thousand-dollar-a-day intensive care, five-thousand-dollar-an-hour surgery. But, ultimately, death comes, and no one is good at knowing when to stop.

The subject seems to reach national awareness mainly as a question of who should “win” when the expensive decisions are made: the insurers and the taxpayers footing the bill or the patient battling for his or her life. Budget hawks urge us to face the fact that we can’t afford everything. Demagogues shout about rationing and death panels. Market purists blame the existence of insurance: if patients and families paid the bills themselves, those expensive therapies would all come down in price. But they’re debating the wrong question. The failure of our system of medical care for people facing the end of their life runs much deeper. To see this, you have to get close enough to grapple with the way decisions about care are actually made.

Andrew Rosenthal is onto something:

[N]o other candidate in the race expresses the kind of visceral, full-bodied disgust with President Obama that Mr. Gingrich does. No one else can even come close to the kind of withering ridicule that Mr. Gingrich employs.

… The crowd was convulsed with laughter and cheering by that point. No other Republican candidate can make a crowd laugh so hard, and it is difficult to imagine either Mr. Santorum or Mr. Romney using the cheap Mickey Mouse line. But it’s exactly the kind of rhetorical device used by right-wing radio talk show hosts for hours every day, and Mr. Gingrich is smart enough to know it and ape it.

The idea is not simply to show where Mr. Obama has gone wrong as president, but to fully discredit him as a person, and play into the article of faith among many Republicans that he has no legitimate claim to the White House. (Mr. Gingrich, for example, said Mr. Obama has no understanding of the meaning of “commander in chief.”) It also explains why Mr. Gingrich has played into racial animus more eagerly than any other candidate.

That kind of thing works. There are thousands of voters here who want to hear the president called indistinguishable from Goofy, who want a candidate to make the kind of jokes they hear on the radio. And there is only one candidate who is happy to give them what they want.

Gingrich is not running for talk radio president. He is running for president of the United States. Rick Santorum nailed the biggest problem with Gingrich last night when he said that Newt would be the kind of nominee who’d make you afraid to open the morning papers for fear of what he had just said. To call him inconstant and unreliable is to put the kindest possible spin on it. Yes, he’s an entertainer. Do we want an entertainer for our president? Whatever Romney’s and Santorum’s flaws, I would not worry that either man would be a rash kook. Gingrich has given ample reason in his public life to fear that from him. But so many Republican voters, ginned up by talk radio’s standards, don’t seem to care.

All of this came to mind this morning also when reading this account of the two Italian captains.  Capt. Schettino is the wild man who deserted his ship after it began to sink. Capt. De Falco is the sober-sided mariner who famously ordered him to get his cowardly butt back on board the ship and do his duty. Look, I’m not saying Newt is a Schettino-like coward; there’s no reason to say so. Here’s what I’m reminded of:

Though knowledge of the personalities of the two men is perfunctory at best, the Italian news media easily tagged them as distinctive Italian stereotypes: Captain Schettino as the flashy daredevil and rule-breaker; Captain De Falco as the upholder of duty and respectability, who is often overlooked in a nation easily taken in by more boisterous — and usually sneaky — behavior.

… The lesson to learn from the shipwreck, Mr. Severgnini said, was that Italy could move from a “my way” mentality to “another way.”

“We don’t want to become Swiss, but there are thousands of serious people in Italy,” he said, referring to the Swiss reputation for Calvinist work habits. And they should prevail over the ones “who may not command a ship, but manage to wreck their families, their work, or their country, and then run away.”

Newt fashions himself a political daredevil, which is true if the measure of political leadership is the ability to say grandiose and outrageous things, and to say them well. In practice, a President Gingrich would be a lot closer to Captain Schettino. It’s all very amusing until the ship hits the rocks. In a general election, No-Drama Obama would fare pretty well against Gingrich, I’m thinking.

David Brooks has an interesting column recounting Romney family history, and how the culture of the Romney family may have shaped Mitt Romney’s relentless work ethic. Excerpt:

Mitt Romney can’t talk about his family history on the campaign trail. Mormonism is an uncomfortable subject. But he must have been affected by it.

It is a story of relentless effort, of recovery and of being despised (in their eyes) because of their own success. Romney himself experienced none of this hardship, of course, but Jews who didn’t live through the Exodus are still shaped by it.

Romney seems to share his family’s remorseless drive to rise — whether it’s trying to persuade the French to give up wine and join his church, or building a business, or being willing to withstand heaps of abuse in pursuit of the presidency.

Brooks says that Romney doesn’t have the character flaws usually associated with great wealth, and that this Richie Rich issue is “a sideshow.” These paragraphs above suggest that if there weren’t such a strong prejudice against Mormonism in this country, the story Mitt Romney could tell about his family’s pioneer story, and perseverance in the face of persecution and ruin, would be awesome.

If Romney were a Jew, he could tell this story and we would all admire it immensely, because it is admirable, and because America has, thankfully, become far more tolerant of Jews over the past century. But he is a Mormon. As you know, I’m not a Romney fan, or, in a theological sense, any sort of enthusiast for Mormonism, but it’s a damn shame that the man has to be quiet about this history, in which he ought to be able to take public pride. I don’t agree with the theological precepts of Mormonism any more than I agree with the theological precepts of Judaism — which is to say, I agree with some of them in both cases, but find them both to be radically flawed, for obvious reasons — but if folks and their families have lived in an upright way, have demonstrated that, especially over generations, then why would we consider their religion disqualifies them from leadership in this secular republic?

Then again, I would vote for a wise and virtuous atheist over a rash and morally inconstant Christian any day of the week. The wise and virtuous atheist may not ultimately get to heaven, while the rash and morally inconstant Christian certainly may. But this is not heaven, this is earth. And in this country, our kings, thank God, are not priests.

Well, that wasn’t much — the Marianne Gingrich interview on Nightline, I mean. The open marriage thing is shocking, but I thought there would be more. She came off as flaky when Brian Ross brought up the FBI ethics investigation she underwent on suspicion of bribery, back when she was married to the Speaker of the House. Her nervous laugh about it was unsettling, and might have undermined her credibility with some viewers.

This Newt-is-a-sleaze anecdote is news, but it’s not new news — and that, plus her own squirreliness, makes me conclude that this thing won’t have legs. Especially after Newt’s I-am-outraged attack on the news media tonight. Demagoguery? Sure. But effective at stopping any potential fallout from the Marianne interview, which turned out to be pretty weak tea.

You want more on Newt’s dismal character? Read Esquire’s 2010 interview with Marianne. Much more revealing. Excerpt:

“Newt always wanted to be somebody,” she says. “That was his vulnerability, do you understand? Being treated important. Which means he was gonna associate with people who would stroke him, and were important themselves. And in that vulnerability, once you go down that path and it goes unchecked, you add to it. Like, ‘Oh, I’m drinking, who cares?’ Then you start being a little whore, ’cause that comes with drinking. That’s what corruption is — when you’re too exhausted, you’re gonna go with your weakness. So when we see corruption, we shouldn’t say, ‘They’re all corrupt.’ Rather, we should say, ‘At what point did you decide that? And why? Why were you vulnerable?’ “

In an updated (January 19) reflection on that interview, writer John Richardson says:

The real problem is that the marriage dispute is actually the most forgivable part of Gingrich’s behavior. Love makes fools of us all, etc., and liberals who believe in parole and rehabilitation really should think at least once before they snicker at the religious folks who have decided to believe in Newt’s remorse for his past behavior. But the story Marianne told in Esquire went much, much deeper — a story of wildly erratic behavior that went back to the very first night they met, full of manic ups and downs, secrets and betrayals and passionate reconciliations. More important was his behavior in Congress, the ferocious and manic drive that accomplished much (for better or for worse, depending on your point of view) but collapsed in a breakdown so severe his own Republican peers had to force him out of power. Or the story about his midnight visit to Bill Clinton, immediately followed by Gingrich backpedaling on the Clinton impeachment. Or her ultimate conclusion about his financial ethics and the truly grotesque amount of lobbying he has done since he left Congress — that he chose corruption.

But focusing on the divorce makes it easy to dismiss Marianne as just a bitter ex-wife — the marital version of “disgruntled employee.” This would be really unfortunate. … The real story is that Newt Gingrich is so deeply conflicted and strange, so erratic and unreliable, so scheming and secretive, that he’s way too much like a character out of Dostoevsky than a politician should ever be.

Define it out of existence:

The proposed changes [by the American Medical Association] would probably exclude people with a diagnosis who were higher functioning. “I’m very concerned about the change in diagnosis, because I wonder if my daughter would even qualify,” said Mary Meyer of Ramsey, N.J. A diagnosis of Asperger syndrome was crucial to helping her daughter, who is 37, gain access to services that have helped tremendously. “She’s on disability, which is partly based on the Asperger’s; and I’m hoping to get her into supportive housing, which also depends on her diagnosis.”

The new analysis, presented Thursday at a meeting of the Icelandic Medical Association, opens a debate about just how many people the proposed diagnosis would affect.

The changes would narrow the diagnosis so much that it could effectively end the autism surge, said Dr. Fred R. Volkmar, director of the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine and an author of the new analysis of the proposal. “We would nip it in the bud.”