Newt ... NEWT!! GAAAAaaaaaaa

So I'm driving home from work yesterday and the news comes on the radio ... and this story assaults my ears/brain with a great vigor ... yes, a vigor so great that I'd call it a "Vigah."  Shook me to to "Co-uh."

Newt Gingrich, courting voters in Florida’s NASA-heavy “Space Coast,” pledged to build an American lunar colony within eight years if elected president.

“By the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American,” he said. According to Gingrich, the base would be used for “science, tourism, and manufacturing” and create a “robust industry” that would grow “precisely on the model of the airlines in the 1930s.”

The speech was a direct challenge to Mitt Romney, who has accused Gingrich of favoring big government with his past proposals for lunar exploration and colonization.

“I’m not in favor of spending that kind of money to do that,” Romney said in an Iowa debate last month. More here:

Well, at first blush, I'm going to have to agree with Romney on this one.  I mean, here we are, in the greatest recession/depression in history and Gingrich talks about squandering more money.  And I thought, "what in the hell is that guy doing?"

So I start wondering, is it possible we can actually make money building a lunar base?)  If so, someone is going to have to explain it to me in terms better than "velcro, teflon, scratch-resistant glass."

I'm all for satellites and honing the technology for that because we need and use that stuff, but a lunar base?  Oh, hell no, not with my curp.  Luckily, his bluster doesn't really count because the house of representatives has the power of the purse and can decide not to spend the curp on stuff like this.

My point is that I had just gotten to the point where I was rooting for him and he pulls this kind of a stunt.  Sheesh.

UPDATE: This morning I learned that a bunch of conservative writers are attacking Newt.  That makes me like him more.