:satire:

____ Newt Gingrich, calling his fast rise in the polls 'disorienting', suggested that his supporters starve his campaign of cash and just let it 'whither on the vine'.

"I jumped by a factor of three in a month," Gingrich told reporters after a screening of his film "A Pity Upon a Hill". "I feel almost disoriented. This is a lot."

Asked why the former republican speaker is considering ending his campaign so early in the election, Gingrich bristled.

"I do no campaigning of any kind. I never have," he said. "A very important point I want to make. I have never done campaigning of any kind," Gingrich told Fox News Channel this week. “Voters had a chance to come and be in a meeting with someone who had been speaker of the House, who understood Washington, who understood history," he said. “And we would swap ideas."

Pressed for what he intended to do with the money already contributed to his election effort, Gingrich responded defensively.

"I didn’t take it," Gingrich said. "The funds weren’t paid to me as a candidate. They were Gingrich group's earnings, not my earnings," he said. "Over a period of months, voters paid Gingrich group, which has a number of employees and a number of offices, a consulting fee just like you would pay any other consulting firm."

"What's happened is we've grown a consulting industry, so that instead of having the old-time big city machine bosses, we now have these consultants," he said.

Reports surfaced today that the real reason for Gingrich's pique and anxiety had to do with a refusal of his staffers to offer him a seat on the plane they used to bolt from his campaign when they discovered the candidate and his wife Callista had taken a luxury cruise to Greece while they were toiling away in New Hampshire.

Gingrich responded to the staff mutiny yesterday by threatening to fire all of his professional campaign workers and replace them with poor kids.

"This is something that no liberal wants to deal with," Gingrich said. "Core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization against children in the poorest neighborhoods, crippling them by putting them in schools that fail has done more to create income inequality in the United States than any other single policy. It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid.

"You say to somebody, you shouldn't go to work before you're what, 14, 16 years of age, fine. You're totally poor," he said. "Most of these campaigns ought to get rid of the unionized workers, have one master and pay local students to take care of the campaign. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride . . ."

How would he respond to those who would criticize his use of child labor to run his dubious presidential campaign, Gingrich offered that, "I'm just a very hard-working business person with a $500,000 line of credit at Tiffany’s."

“I think I represent the wing of America that believes that hard work and success is good, not bad, and I'm happy to answer for it.”