Yes, he's imperfect.  Who's not?

But compare Gingrich to Obama.  G has a Ph.D. in history (something the leftist media always forgets to tell us) and has written 20 books, some of them good ones, all expressing a deep understanding of the unique American experiment and the U.S. Constitution.

Obama thinks the Constitution is some kind of white imperialist plot designed to keep the victims of the world down and oppressed.  That's why he did those deep bows to medieval tyrants like President Hu (the terror-master of Tibet), the figurehead emperor of Japan, and the desert-king of Arabia, King Abdullah of the house of Saud.  No American president in history -- ever -- has physically and symbolically bowed down to medieval tyrants.  Never.

Thomas Jefferson sent the U.S. Marines to Tripoli to fight the Barbary pirates.  Obama has tried desperately, over and over again, to make nice with horrific fascist regimes, notably the nuclearizing mullahs of Tehran, who are about to explode their first Ego Bomb.

It's not just Israel that's in their sights, but America and Europe.  That's why they just had a mob of Basiji thugs trash the British embassy in Tehran.  That's why, you may remember, the thugocracy over there makes all the schoolchildren chant "Death to Israel!  Death to America!"  Every single day for the last thirty years.

This is not a bunch of rowdy football fans at a game.  It's not a game at all to the Shi'ite martyrdom regime.  It's a deadly earnest war ideology, which is why they just tried to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States.

So here's Obama trying to play footsie with the Saudis; the Khomeinist regime; and soon, the Muslim Brotherhood bosses of Egypt, Syria, Gaza, Lebanon, and many another failed state in the ME.

Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, grew up as an Army brat.  He's lived, studied, and practiced American history and politics all his life.  We know what side he's on.  So does he.

The basic beliefs of a president are the single most important thing about him.  Newt can also articulate his beliefs very well, because he's talked, taught, and written about them every single day of his life.  And he survived in the snake pit of Washington, D.C. and even won the House for the GOP for the first time in forty years.

If anything, Newt talks too much.  It's an academic habit -- throwing out an idea that might or might not work, and which has nothing to do with actual policies.  In politics, that's a bad habit.  Newt is a policy wonk, and I believe he will quickly propose a personal Health Savings Plan to take the leavings of dictatorial ObamaCare and turn it into something conservatives could live with.  No dictatorial death panels, no crazy ten-trillion-dollar funding scheme, no payoffs for votes.

On immigration, I might not agree with G.  It turns out, however, that the practical impact of illegal immigration (a very repulsive thing in itself) is diminishing.  The reason is Mexican demographics.

Michael Barone (one of the best political scientist/commentators around) explains why.

The Pew Hispanic Center, analyzing census statistics, has estimated that illegal Mexican entrants have been reduced from 525,000 annually from 2000 to 2004 to 100,000 a year in 2010.

"The flow has already stopped," Douglas Massey of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton University recently told the New York Times. "The net traffic has gone to zero and is probably a little bit negative."

One reason is the deep recession and slow economic recovery here in the United States. Tens of thousands of construction jobs, once plentiful in high-immigration states, have disappeared. Foreclosures on mortgages that should never have been granted have been especially high among Hispanics.

State laws, like Arizona's law requiring use of the federal e-Verify system to check on immigration status of new hires, have clearly had some impact. And the cost of crossing the border illegally has sharply increased.

The Pew Hispanic Center estimates the 2010 illegal population at 11.2 million, down from the 2007 peak of 12 million and just about the same level as it was in 2005. It's probably lower today.

Even more important, things have changed in Mexico. Its birth rate has fallen from 7 children per woman in 1971 to 3.2 in 1990 and 2 in 2010, barely enough to prevent population loss.

Mexico has finally become a majority middle-class country, former Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda argues in his recent book "Manana Forever?" Mexico has more cars and television sets than households now, most Mexicans have credit cards and there are almost as many cell phones as people.

[Read more at the Washington Examiner.]

I don't like systematic violations of immigration laws.  I particularly don't like the corrupt way the Democrats have been scheming to buy votes from illegals and sabotaging any efforts to enforce the border.  I agree with Gingrich that none of us want to see a brutal and inhumane solution, where somehow ten million illegals will be put on buses going south -- men, women, babes in arms.  That's not going to sell with the American people, and the Demagogues will demagogue it to death.  It's not the solution.

There are some fairly obvious answers.  Make expulsion mandatory for convicted criminals -- and, if possible, send them to Mexican jails, because Mexico doesn't want them running around on the streets, either.  There's also an empty prison in Guantánamo that's ready to use, complete with hundreds of untouched Korans.  Turn the illegals who are here into guest workers, without giving them U.S. citizenship.  Set some kind of requirements for achieving U.S. citizenship.  Pay the Mexican government to police their side of the border for us.

Has Gingrich had dubious personal troubles in the past?  Yes.  Has he fixed them?  Looks like it.  Do we know that for sure?  No.  Grow up.  This is reality.

Has Gingrich been a de facto lobbyist in the past?  Yes.  Is his lobbying comparable to the simple fact that 80 percent of phony-baloney solar energy projects were tossed in the laps of Obama's biggest donors?  Not even close.

There's not a single scandal in the Republican years that comes even close to the massive, institutionalized, Chicago-style corruption of Obama and the O'gang.

George W. Bush was not an articulate president, though I think his moral core is Lincolnesque.  Gingrich might be too articulate for his own good.  But conservatives of all types will enjoy having a president who can articulate our basic values, and do it with conviction.

Obama has no particular moral core; he has a hard-line radical left ideology, which is not the same thing at all.  Psychologically, Obama shows all the signs of a huge personality disorder: narcissistic personality with a malignant edge, depression whenever his approval numbers go down, and a big oppositional-defiant streak.  I'm sorry for the psychobabble, but you can look it up.

Narcissists get better in two ways, mainly.  One of them is having healing relationships with others.  The other is to get beat up by life a certain amount, which happens free of charge to all of us.  Obama just had his first three years of real life, courtesy of the U.S. voter, and he hasn't changed one single piece of his own rigid mental dogmatism.  Usually presidencies are shaped by events.  This one shows no signs of even recognizing massive policy failures -- not in the economy, and not in the phony Arab Spring that keeps killing people and bringing radical Muslims to power in a region of the world that doesn't need more war.

Once Iran goes nuclear, the Saudis will buy their nukes off the shelf from Pakistan.  If Iran tries to launch ICBMs toward Tel Aviv, they first have to fly over Saudi Arabia.  The same is true for cruise missiles and jets.  How will the Saudis feel when they see missiles getting launched on their American-built radars, all heading their way?  The Saudis may rage against Israel, but they have had a thousand years of war against the heretical sect in Tehran.  Prince Bandar recently built a huge mansion overlooking Aspen, CO.  I wonder why.

The only solution is to ensure that Iran's missiles will never be launched in war.  Once they're in orbit, you've got fifteen minutes to zero hour.

The best way to stop that is to destroy the missile bases, the way some sort of sabotage just blew up the large missile base near Tehran, killing the chief of Iran's missile program in the process.  In the worst case, an American no-fly zone could knock down all the planes and missiles during the launch phase, when they are moving slowly against gravity.  The U.S. Navy and Air Force did that with Saddam and Gaddafi.  We know how to do it.

Statesmanship means anticipating dangers years ahead, and making sure you never have to face do-or-die threats like these.  Statesmanship has been completely lacking in the face of emerging bizarro regimes armed with nukes, especially among the Demagogues.  North Korea has been supplying Iran and teaching folks there how to tunnel deep down and surround their enemies with thousands of missiles in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Gaza, and soon, Egypt.  Pakistan is another major proliferator.

The United States has done nothing effective.  Europe is a lost cause.  The Russians and China have been following suicidal policies (Russia is just an hour's flight from Tehran).  They just want to beat the West to the oil.

Obama was going to bring peace and love to the world, remember?

The American people have been suckered by the Chicago Machine and its current favorite, Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.  As a result, we see a much more dangerous world, and a much weaker America.  Europe is in crisis with its own socialist dream world, which is predictably breaking down.  The whole Arab crescent from Morocco to Iraq is threatened with internal rebellions from radical throwbacks to the miserable past.  Turkey is now doing something called "neo-Ottomanism."  But nobody in the world has fond memories of the Ottoman Empire -- not its centuries of rule by murder and mayhem, and not its regular progroms against Jews, Christians, and even against Muslim heretics.  (The Sunni radicals of Turkey hate the Shi'ite radicals of Iran, right next door.)

Light a nuclear match to that combustible mixture, and we're back to the frozen depths of the Cold War.  If we are lucky.

Do we need a good president in times like this?

You betcha.

Can Mitt do the job?  Maybe.

Will Newt do it?

Yes, about as well as anybody could.