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Like a child who wants to play by his own set of rules, Newt Gingrich is threatening to withdraw from future debates if audiences aren’t allowed to be actors in the play he’s staging. I wish the networks would call his bluff by using no audience at all.

Modern political “debates” aren’t debates at all. They’ve become some kind of weird mishmash that’s halfway a free-for-all and halfway a joint news conference.

Since Gingrich’s entire strategy is based on running against the news media, he counts on the audience to roar with approval when he attacks — in order to influence the audience at home, just like a laugh track in a sitcom. In a very real way, he is staging a show, not debating ideas.

In Monday night’s debate, NBC News insisted that the audience stay out of the contest and just let the candidates answer questions. Now Gingrich is mad that he can’t have his way, so he’s threatening to pull out. If you ever had any doubts about the insufferable narcissism of the man, this should make it very clear.

Watch his interview with Fox News and see if you can’t imagine a spoiled little boy threatening to take his ball and go home when the other kids won’t let him make up his own rules.

When Jake Burris got home with his four kids Sunday night, his 5-year-old son got a shock when he reached the porch. The family’s cat was dead — its head smashed and its eye hanging out — and some sick person had scrawled “liberal” on the side of the body with a marker.

Burris is the campaign manager for Ken Aden, a Democrat who is running against Republican U.S. Rep. Steve Womack in Arkansas’ Third District. Police are investigating as a case of animal cruelty. (You can see a picture of the dead cat at this blog, but I’m not posting it here.)

Aden has pretty much no chance of winning. Arkansas’ Third District is overwhelmingly conservative and Womack received 72 percent of the vote in 2010. Although Aden is certainly pushing his views, this isn’t a hotly contested seat that could go either way. To put it more bluntly, Aden doesn’t have a chance.

Still, someone is taking the race seriously enough to murder a family’s pet cat. Why?

In the two decades I’ve worked in politics, I’ve known people cold-blooded and evil enough to do this sort of thing if they calculated that it would give them a political advantage. Almost anybody who’s been in the business for very long has known of certain sick individuals who you can call on for dirty tricks. There’s a slimy underbelly to the system that’s so evil that nobody wants to believes it’s there. So when I hear a story such as this, I know that I’ve known people who would have been capable of doing it.

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What if the United States has just spend almost a decade in Iraq — wasting trillions of dollars, killing thousands of Americans and killing maybe as many as 100,000 Iraqis — and accomplished absolutely nothing? A new report from Human Rights Watch suggests that might be the case.

The Middle East director for Human Rights Watch told the Washington Post that the Iraqi government installed by the United States through its accepted democratic processes seems to have a lot in common with the dictator we supposedly freed Iraqis from.

“Iraq is quickly slipping back into authoritarianism as its security forces abuse protesters, harass journalists and torture detainees,” said Sarah Leah Whitson. “Despite U.S. government assurances that it helped create a stable democracy, the reality is that it left behind a budding police state.”

Before the United States invaded Iraq, we were given conflicting stories about why. The administration of George W. Bush talked darkly about the certainty that Saddam Hussein’s regime had “weapons of mass destruction.” When U.S. troops invaded, Bush talked about bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq. The things happening in Iraq today show the folly of “nation-building” and they also show the fallacy of assuming that democracy has to lead to individual freedom.

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