This man wants to be president

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich twice called on the United States to attack North Korea and Iran Thursday because the United States has only attacked "one out of three" of so-called "Axis of Evil" members by invading Iraq. He also claimed that Muslims are trying to install Sharia law on America and said that the "War on Terror" should have been a war on "radical Islamists" instead.

Update: David Corn has more:

Gingrich likes to pose as a serious thinker and idea man, but his embrace of such melodramatic hyperbole is more befitting a cartoon character. But Gingrich has always undermined his attempts to be seen as a statesman by immature bomb-throwing. After the 2008 campaign -- during which he originated the GOP's "Drill, Baby, Drill" initiative -- he positioned himself as a post-partisan player, declaring that he wanted to promote a "tri-partisan" approach to politics that would bring together Democrats, Republicans, and independents. He denounced the Republican Party for releasing an ad attempting to tie Obama to disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, decrying "the sort of negative attack politics that the voters rejected in 2006 and 2008." Yet now -- after the Tea Party explosion has made attack politics rather popular on the right -- Gingrich is willing (and eager) to engage in the most foul of attacks: accusing the president of purposefully endangering the country because he and his crew prefer America's enemies. This is the worst form of calumny.

Gingrich's use of such poison -- and his abandonment of "tri-partisan," let's-work-together rhetoric -- is no shocker. He's not a man of high-minded consistency. When he was House speaker in the 1990s, he led the family-values GOP during its impeachment crusade against President Bill Clinton (for lying about a sexual affair with intern Monica Lewinsky) -- wasting much time and energy that could have been used to address challenges facing the nation, such as the troubled health care system, flat wages for middle-income Americans, and the nation's dangerous dependency on fossil fuels. At the same time, Gingrich was carrying on an extramarital affair of his own.