Newt Gingrich is raising some eyebrows for pledging Wednesday: "By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American."

It's sort of like President Kennedy's inspiring pledge to put a man on the moon in ten years, only more Gingrichian in its grandiosity, and not just because he's assuming he'll win not one, but two elections in addition to conquering Earth's lovely, but barren satellite. But we know what's really behind this campaign pledge: Never forget that Gingrich once wrote about the imagined pleasures of intercourse on the moon in his 1996 book To Renew America, "Imagine weightlessness and its effects and you will understand some of the attraction." Yes. Imagine.

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