In the launch of this new Republican “Super PAC,” you get a taste of why — thanks to Citizens United and an emasculated Federal Elections Commission — 2012 will be the biggest election free-for-all since at least the Watergate-era reforms. Responding to watchdogs’ complaints that his new Super PAC is illegal even on the now-virtually-lawless campaign finance frontier, Republican uber-lawyer James Bopp growls (I’m imagining the chewed stubb of a cigar dangling from his lips): “The Supreme Court doesn’t care, and I don’t care, and the [FEC] doesn’t care. No one that matters cares.”

In a bold laying down of the gauntlet tonight on Fox News, Newt Gingrich banned Democrats from attempting to retrieve his Meet the Press quotes from the memory hole he’s spent the day consigning them to. And he formally decreed that “any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood.” Watch.

Examining the Gingrich wreckage this evening, I’m starting to wonder if we might simply be in the filming stage of Gingrich’s own version of “I’m Still Here”, the in-character ‘mockumentary’ Joaquin Pheonix and Casey Affleck made about Pheonix’s phony descent into personal and professional self-immolation.

Who’ll give me 3 to 1 that Gingrich shows up in Cannes next year clean-shaven and lucid recounting how he had everyone going?

Newt on the David Gregory interview: “I didn’t go in there quite hostile enough, because it didn’t occur to me going in that you’d have a series of setups.”

“I didn’t go in there quite hostile enough.” Nope. Me neither.