Gingrich spent the next decade in the wilderness, but in a near-miraculous twist of the classic American redemption story, Gingrich’s quixotic bid for the presidency this year actually succeeded, for a time. For a few brief moments, he actually led the pack and felt confident enough to declare on national TV, “I’m going to be the nominee.” Of course, it all came crashing down eventually, as Gingrich’s rise was more a product of the comic weakness of the GOP field and its real front-runner than Gingrich’s strengths, but he still vastly outperformed all expectations and managed to redeem a badly-tarnished reputation.

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They're hoping you don't. And acting like it never happened (even though most of their words are just clicks away online.)

One by one — with the exception of holdout Ron Paul — the GOP also-rans have coughed up endorsements of their onetime rival. And as they do, they're pulling rhetorical backflips to distance themselves from their former harsh assessments of Romney.

Don't try this at home, folks. It takes a professional politician to pull it off with a straight face.

A sampling of the also-rans' anti-Romney rhetoric when they were candidates and their obligatory niceness after endorsing Romney.

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RICK SANTORUM

The former Pennsylvania senator still doesn't have trouble curbing his enthusiasm for Romney. He waited a month after dropping out of the race to endorse Romney, then emailed his tepid endorsement in the dead of night. He finally got out the E-word in the 13th paragraph of his 16-paragraph statement.

THEN:

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Tragic! For now we know that Gingrich won't even reach that steppingstone, the presidency of the United States, to his predetermined world-historical greatness. And yet he came so close: He was briefly viable at three separate points in this race, before, predictably, tossing it all away -- or having Mitt Romney's super PAC attack snatch it away from him. Let's recall these three Rises and Falls of Would-Be President Gingrich and share in our despair that the funniest possible presidential nominee, Newt Gingrich in 2012, was not selected in a national primary of his peers.

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But as gas prices have soared since the beginning of the year, the cost of a Republican primary vote has plummeted. A few months ago, campaigns were spending a fortune in ad buys and organizations in the small early states. In Iowa, Mitt Romney and the PACs affiliated with his campaign spent around $144 for each vote received. By Florida that number was down to $19. On Super Tuesday, only $2.89 was spent by each campaign for each vote cast nationwide.

Is the price of gas correlated to the price of a primary vote? I decided to chart the price fluctuations in gasoline against the price fluctuations of Republican voters since the Iowa caucuses, because the Internet loves charts and campaign finance. If you think filling up your car is expensive, try running for president! (That is probably something Mitt Romney will say on camera at some point this week.)

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Well, Newt Gingrich remaining in the race might be hurting Rick Santorum, but by no means would Rick Santorum be winning if Gingrich wasn't around. Give Santorum all of Gingrich's delegates, he's still losing to Mitt Romney. More realistically, as Nate Silver wrote earlier this morning, no Newt would mean more delegates for Rick and Mitt.

Still, Newt's excuse for remaining in the race (besides as a means of confounding the "elite" who are terrified of his multitude of big ideas) is that the GOP nominee needs to win the South, and only he can win the South. He is basically campaigning right now solely to win Mississippi and Alabama next Tuesday.

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Gingrich should not listen to them. At all. (Not that Gingrich listens to anyone, besides perhaps his wife, but still.) This editorial can be safely ignored for the following reasons:

First of all, everyone should always do the opposite of whatever a National Review editorial says to do. The opposite of what "The Editors" want is invariably the correct choice, morally and politically. If politicians always made "doing the opposite of what The Editors of the National Review want" a top priority, there would be universal peace and prosperity and kick-ass super-trains crisscrossing the nation.

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Superficially, the two men appear to have little in common. Gingrich, 69, is a lifelong politician and consummate Washington insider whose trajectory has famously taken him through three wives and three religious renderings: the Lutheranism of his birth, the adaptable Southern Baptism of most of his adult life, and now, a Bible-thumping new Catholicism.

Adelson, 78, born to Jewish Ukrainian immigrants in Dorchester, Mass., crawled his way out of the New England working class and, in addition to his vast wealth, is known for a stable and enduring second marriage to Miriam Ochshorn Adelson, with whom he has two children.

She is apparently the key to the one subject that links the two men, the country of her birth, Israel.

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And now, a word about a good American being demonized, despite being long dead. Saul Alinsky is not around to defend himself, but that hasn’t kept Newt Gingrich from using his name to whip up the froth and frenzy of his followers, whose ignorance of the man is no deterrence to their eagerness, at Gingrich’s behest, to tar and feather him posthumously.

In his speeches, Gingrich pounds away at variations on the theme like the piano player in a cheap Western saloon. He declares, “The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky,” or, “I believe in the Constitution, I believe in the Federalist Papers. Obama believes in Saul Alinsky and secular European socialist bureaucracy.”

It’s all quite clever and insidious, a classic lesson in how to slander someone who cannot answer from the grave, reminiscent of the tactics Gingrich used in those GOPAC memos back in 1996, when he suggested buzzwords and phrases to demonize opponents: corrupt, decay, pathetic, permissive attitude, self-serving and, of course, radical.

In the case of Saul Alinsky, most of the crowd knows nothing about the target except that they’re supposed to hate him. And why not? There’s the strange foreign name – obviously an alien. One of them. And a socialist at that. What’s a socialist? Don’t know -- but Obama’s one, isn’t he? Barack Hussein Obama, Saul Alinsky – bingo! Two peas in a pod, and a sinister, subversive pod at that.

But just who was Alinsky, really? Born in 1909, in the ghetto of Chicago’s South Side, he saw the worst of poverty and felt the ethnic prejudices that fester, then blast into violence when people are crowded into tenements and have too little to eat. He came to believe that working people, poor people, put down and stepped upon, had to organize if they were going to clean up the slums, fight the corruption that exploited them, and get a handhold on the first rung of the ladder up and out.

He became a protégé of labor leader John L. Lewis and took the principles of organizing into the streets, first in his hometown of Chicago, then across the country, showing citizens how to band together and non-violently fight for their rights, then training others to follow in his shoes. Along the way, Alinsky faced down the hatred of establishment politicians, attacks both verbal and physical, and jail time. He was a gutsy guy. Outspoken, confrontational, profane with a caustic wit, one journalist said he looked like an accountant and talked like a stevedore. He had a flair for the dramatic, once sending a neighborhood to dump its trash on the front step of an alderman who was allowing the garbage to pile up. Or immobilizing city hall, a department store or a stockholders meeting with a flood of demonstrators demanding justice.

One thing Newt has right -- Saul Alinsky was a proud, self-professed radical. Just look at the titles of two of his books – “Reveille for Radicals” and “Rules for Radicals.” But a communist or socialist he was not. He worked with them on behalf of social justice, just as he worked alongside the Catholic archdiocese in Chicago. When he went to Rochester, N.Y., to help organize the African-American community there after a fatal race riot, he was first invited by the local Council of Churches. It was conscience they all had in common, not ideology.

As far as his connection with Barack Obama, the president was just a kid in Hawaii when Alinsky died, something you would expect a good historian, as Gingrich claims to be, to know. The two men never met, although when Obama arrived on the South Side of Chicago as a community organizer, some of his grass-roots work with the poor was with an Alinsky-affiliated organization.

But that’s how it goes in the fight for basic human rights. Alinsky’s influence crops up all across the spectrum, even in the Tea Party. Get this: According to the Wall Street Journal, the conservative holy of holies, the one-time Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, Dick Armey, whose Freedomworks organization helps bankroll the Tea Party, gives copies of Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” to Tea Party leaders.

Watch out Dick – you could be next on Newt’s list, although, curiously, in his fight against the wealthy Mitt Romney, Gingrich himself has stolen a page from Alinsky’s populist playbook. After Romney beat him in the Florida primary, Newt insisted he would continue the fight for the nomination and shouted, “We’re going to have people power defeat money power,” a sentiment that was Saul Alinsky through and through.

Alinsky died, suddenly, in 1972. At the time, he was planning to mount a campaign to organize white, middle-class Americans into a national movement for progressive change, a movement he vowed to take into the halls of Congress and – his words -- “the boardrooms of the megacorporations.”

Maybe that’s why Newt Gingrich has been slandering Alinsky’s name. Maybe he’s afraid, afraid that the very white folks he’s been rousing to frenzy will discover who Saul Alinsky was – a patriot in a long line of patriots, who scorned the malignant narcissism of duplicitous politicians and taught everyday Americans to think for themselves and fight together for a better life. That’s the American way, and any good historian would know it.

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It hasn't gotten any notice since Adelson became a player in presidential politics, but it turns out that the trove of diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks contains an interesting anecdote about how Adelson aggressively promoted his casino and hotel business in the Chinese territory of Macau -- and a run-in he had with the central government in Beijing.

First, some context. The news broke last March that Adelson's Las Vegas Sands Corp. is under federal investigation into whether it has complied with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The act makes it illegal to bribe foreign officials to obtain business deals.

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The Republican Party is split between its two personalities: Predatory finance capital and angry white male faux-populism. That's trouble enough. Add to that Gingrich's fury at Romney's bottomless pockets full of nasty ads, and this is a party headed for a crack-up.

November's still a long way away, but it's hard to imagine President Obama losing Florida after the slime-fest we've just witnessed. Both Gingrich and Romney are seeing their negatives go up as the campaign goes on, while Obama's approval rating continues to climb. I think the president is largely responsible for his ratings rise, because he's brought the fight to the GOP since the debt-ceiling debacle.

But one thing Romney clearly had going for him when the race began, in the face of Tea Party suspicion about his conservative credentials, was that voters viewed him benignly. Between revelations about his tax rate plus his Bain Capital work, and Gingrich's relentless attacks, Romney's losing the main thing he had going for him, his generic affability. In November, polls showed Romney beating Obama by 13 points in Florida; recent polls give Obama the edge, 44 to 36 percent. If the hate-off continues, it will hurt him in November, and not just in Florida.

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Maddow asked Tyler about some of Gingrich's racially coded attacks on President Obama, and Tyler went off. He began by comparing the Republican and Democratic platforms of 1856 and finding the Democratic platform was racist, and that was about the last true thing he said. From claiming Democrats "abort [black] babies" to charging that African-Americans need the movie "Red Tails" because they don't have any positive role models, it was the GOP id unleashed. Watch at your peril.

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To sum up:

If the list is constrained more simply to the states where filing deadlines have not passed, the total delegates open to a late entrant drops to 1157. After Tuesday, when Kentucky's (and Indiana's petition -- see footnote 17 above) deadlines pass that total will drop below 1144 to 1066.

A candidate needs 1,144 delegates to win the Republican presidential nomination.

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Gingrich persists because it's a dependable applause line, and because his political fortunes keep rising. Compare that to September, when Mitt Romney attacked then-candidate Rick Perry for calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.” Perry backtracked, insisting that he only wanted to bolster the program and ensure its solvency. But in his 2010 book “Fed Up,” Perry made his opposition to Social Security clear, calling it “a crumbling monument to the failure of the New Deal.” Scrapping entitlements is a core tenet of contemporary fiscal conservatism, but most of the time politicians only get away with attacking the most vulnerable ones: Medicaid, food stamps and welfare cash assistance, which are means-tested and thus associated with the black (read: undeserving) poor, although whites make up a far greater share of food stamp recipients. Government welfare programs with Teflon political defenses — Medicare and Social Security — are nearly universal entitlements and thus associated with “regular” (read: white) Americans.

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On Thursday morning, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush joined the conversation with a Washington Post Op-Ed in which he suggested four ways the GOP can lure back Latino voters, including a recommendation that the party cast immigration as “an economic issue, not just a border security issue.” That afternoon Michelle Obama raised the stakes in the electoral fight for Latino votes with a “Let’s Move” national fitness agenda stop at Tampa’s Goya food processing plant, where the first lady touted the USDA’s new “Mi Plato” program, lamented the shortage of supermarkets in Latino neighborhoods, and applauded the National Hispanic Medical Association, the National Council of La Raza, and the League of United Latin American Citizens for their community nutrition efforts.

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So it comes as a bit of a surprise that a top anti-poverty advocate in Washington credits Gingrich with saving an important federal program designed to help the poor.

The episode in question dates back to Gingrich's time as speaker of the House in the 1990s. During his tenure, Gingrich delivered a $100 million -- or more than 25 percent -- budget boost to Community Action Agencies (CAA), which use federal dollars on a range of locally controlled community projects designed to help address the causes of poverty.

Federal money to the CAAs goes to projects on education, job training, nutrition and the like. That infusion of money was an about-face from 1995, when the new Republican majority in the House had proposed eliminating funding for Community Action Agencies after they took power under Speaker Gingrich.

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Gingrich took the stage with his Florida prospects dimming by the minute. Polls earlier in the week had shown him opening a significant lead in the state over Mitt Romney, but by Thursday afternoon there was clear evidence that Romney – boosted by sharp attacks against Gingrich that have been amplified by many influential conservatives and by a massive television blitz – had reversed the tide. So Gingrich was in obvious need of one of his trademark debate moments, something to recapture the base’s excitement, dominate the free media and overcome the many powerful forces arrayed against him.

The problem was that Gingrich’s debate moments, which slowly elevated him to contender status last summer and fall and which helped revive his campaign in South Carolina last week, have had an organic quality to them. Certain ingredients – like rowdy, partisan audiences and clumsy moderators and media panelists – are helpful, if not essential. But as Gingrich himself recognized in a Newsweek interview back in December, there’s just no forcing the big, defining moments.

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Yet no responsible Democrat should be pleased at the prospect that Gingrich could get the GOP nomination. The future of America is too important to accept even a small risk of a Gingrich presidency.

The Republican worry is understandable. “The possibility of Newt Gingrich being our nominee against Barack Obama I think is essentially handling the election over to Obama,” says former Minnesota Governor Tom Pawlenty, a leading GOP conservative. “I think that’s shared by a lot of folks in the Republican party.”

Pawlenty’s views are indeed widely shared in Republican circles. “He’s not a conservative – he’s an opportunist,” says pundit Joe Scarborough, a member of the Republican Class of 1994 who came to Washington under Gingrich’s banner. Gingrich doesn’t “have the temperament, intellectual discipline or ego control to be either a successful nominee or president,” says New York Republican Rep. Peter King, who hasn’t endorsed any candidate. “Basically, Newt can’t control himself.”

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On Sunday, the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln moved through the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most heavily trafficked oil export route, on schedule and without incident. While the carrier had transited the strait numerous times before, it did so on Sunday amid a series of threats from members of the Iranian government in response to a tightening of international sanctions against Iran’s oil exports.

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