Alright, it was cute when Republican base trolled us with the Trump, Bachmann, Perry, and Cain surges and collapses (surglapses, we'll call them, or perhaps anti-boners), but throwing Newt Gingrich onto the heap of other Potemkin candidates after he was leading by 20 points everywhere like a week ago, this late in the process, is cruel.

Some of us here had just, just begun to think that we might see a Newt Gingrich presidential nomination in 2012, the sort of enjoyable nightmare you witness in only the best Hollywood pictures. But now they all hate him again, and his current trajectory indicates that he'll land somewhere between 48th and 76th place, just behind the write-ins for "ALGER HI$$."

Public Policy Polling, which now finds Gingrich in third place in Iowa after he held a consensus double-digit lead there about four minutes ago, shows us just how rapidly the Leader (Possibly) of The Civilizing Forces is reacquainting himself with Iowa caucusgoers:

Gingrich has now seen a big drop in his Iowa standing two weeks in a row. His share of the vote has gone from 27% to 22% to 14%. And there's been a large drop in his personal favorability numbers as well from +31 (62/31) to +12 (52/40) to now -1 (46/47). Negative ads over the last few weeks have really chipped away at Gingrich's image as being a strong conservative- now only 36% of voters believe that he has 'strong principles,' while 43% think he does not.

And nationally, the Gallup daily tracking poll shows Gingrich dropping 10-ish percentage points from his peak about 10 days ago. Expect other polls this week to show similar movement! Because it seems like the most severe of his many fatal problems — that he's an insane motherfucker who makes Richard Nixon's production values look award-worthy — maybe isn't something he's working on improving? This is a thing that happened on television yesterday:

SCHIEFFER: Let me just ask you this and we'll talk about enforcing it, because one of the things you say is that if you don't like what a court has done, the congress should subpoena the judge and bring him before congress and hold a congressional hearing. Some people say that's unconstitutional. But I'll let that go for a minute.

I just want to ask you from a practical standpoint, how would you enforce that? Would you send the capital police down to arrest him?

GINGRICH: If you had to.

You can't pin the blame here on one stupid demographic. But it's old peoples' fault. No, shut up, old people, we're not picking a intergenerational blog fight for kicks this time — you deserve this one. This one is backed by math! When Gingrich was around 40% in the polls everywhere, his boost came largely from seniors — the ones who would be most likely to remember his catastrophic tenure as House Speaker. And yet they didn't, because now after just a few basic attack ads raising approximately .000000001% of the terrible, public information about Newt Gingrich, he's in free fall. What the hell, gramps? Read a magazine or something.

[Image via AP]