Deploying his smashmouth style of personal diplomacy, Newt Gingrich is again assailing the State Department as a “broken institution,” for its failures in implementing President Bush’s foreign policy. This isn’t Gingrich‘s first broadside.

In a speech last April at the American Enterprise Institute, the citadel of neoconism, he called for a purge of State, causing Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to retort: “It’s clear that Mr. Gingrich is off his meds and out of therapy.” It would be an amusing sideshow if this discredited politician didn’t reflect the thinking of so many in the Bush Administration.

A close associate of Donald Rumsfeld and a member of the multi-conflicted Pentagon Defense Policy Board, Gingrich is a stalking horse for Administration forces who scorn diplomacy and international treaties in favor of unilateralism, pre-emption and overwhelming military supremacy. Like the men he fronts for, Gingrich is a threat to world order, national security and American interests abroad.