When Newt Gingrich's spokesman, Rick Tyler, sent a statement to The Huffington Post about the former House speaker's troubled presidential campaign, it reverberated around the political and media worlds. Why? Well, objectively speaking, the statement is incredible: sprawling, medieval and fairly novelistic, it recasts Gingrich as some sort of epic warrior, battling the media elite as well as several mixed metaphors.
As a refresher, here is the statement that Tyler sent to HuffPost's Michael Calderone:
The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment's cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won't be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.
The unusually vivid intensity of the statement prompted many raised eyebrows, but nobody paid tribute to it with the same gusto and enthusiasm as Rachel Maddow. On her Wednesday show, she called it "the best thing in the world today," and said that it had brightened what had been a dreary, grumpy day around the office.
But Maddow went further. One of her producers actually made a collage/Photoshop-style picture book called "The Epic Of Gingrich" to accompany the statement. As Maddow read it, the "book" scrolled across the screen, and it was nothing short of wonderful.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy