Somewhere in the last couple weeks, I started to feel sorry for Newton Leroy Gingrich. All through the Florida and Nevada contests, the trappings of a presidential campaign fell away, and the battle between Mitt Romney and Gingrich became something primal and cruel: It was the eternal struggle between nerd and jock.

Romney displayed, for the first time this year, something akin to a human emotion—enjoyment—as he turned Gingrich's (true) claims that Romney invested in Fannie and Freddie into (also true) attacks on Gingrich for investing in Fannie and Freddie. His campaign giddily mocked Gingrich for fantasizing about a moon base, they trashed him for ethics violations, and, mind-bogglingly, they tut-tutted him for negative campaigning (while trashing him). The blitzkrieg routed Gingrich's brainy outcasts at every turn, and the electorate joined in on the stomping; Republicans never met an underdog they didn't want to repeatedly introduce to their heel of their boot.

Watching men in their 60s reverting to high-school archetypes was uncomfortable. Romney tossed Gingrich's shirt up, twisted his nipples, slapped a raw red handprint onto the middle of his big white belly, and then pantsed him on national television, and all poor Newt could do was pout and prance and whine about the unfairness of it all...

(Keep reading.)