Getting Away With It 2

Republicans, having bitten on the "don't read them their rights" idea, are desperate to figure out why the shoe bomber case is different than the Christmas bomber case, and failing miserably.  Last night Tom P. Baxter, business visionary Newt Gingrich told Jon Stewart that the shoe bomber is totally different because he's an American citizen...which is, alas, not exactly what people would consider true, what with him being a Brit and all.

At any rate, Kevin Drum asks: 

How does he get away with saying stuff like this? Reid was a British citizen, born in London, and radicalized at the Finsbury mosque. This is Wikipedia level stuff. But guys like Gingrich get away with repeating this nonsense over and over even though they must know they're lying. Amazing.

I don't really know what "getting away with it" means.  Newt Gingrich has been one of the least popular politicians in America for over a decade (to be fair, he seems to have surged up to not especially unpopular in the last round of polling, last year).   Partially because Republicans seem to have very low standards about their rejected politicians, and have a habit of encouraging people such as Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Ollie North, and G. Gordon Liddy to be their public spokespeople, the Republican Party isn't very popular. 

It is true, of course, that Newt "gets away with it" to the extent that Republicans keep listening to him, or at least they don't object to him speaking for them, and that they allow him to make money by selling himself to them.  But he (and they) don't seem to be fooling anyone with respect to the topic at hand here (terrorism), and they just were clobbered in two consecutive election cycles. 

Suggestion to liberals: when a conservative acts like a buffoon on national TV, try "ain't it pathetic that they don't have better?" instead of "how are they getting away with it?"