Warning! Warning!

For a bunch of reasons, I hope former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is not the Republican nominee for president. One of those reasons is that, despite the many shortcomings he has that make him unsuited for the job, he is not so completely unqualified as to make me skip going to the polls on Election Day. I could justify bidding my ballot bye-bye if my choices were between, say, President Obama and Herman Cain, or between President Obama and Ron Paul. If any of those three men is in the White House in January 2013, ain't nobody gonna be able to blame me for it.

But unfortunately, Newt's not quite that bad. He's bad, alright, but voting is a responsibility and he's not bad enough to make me shirk it. So if he becomes the Republican nominee, I may be forced to vote for him, unless there is some third-party choice, and I don't think anyone who put up with him in the mid-90s wants to vote for Newt Gingrich.

The main reason, though, is the prospect of the presidential debates that we would see. I know some conservative folks are salivating at the prospect of Gingrich, verbally adept and quite good at the ol' rhetorical thrust-and-parry hack-and-slash, debating the President, who does very well with prepared remarks but can get a little flustered when trying to think and speak on his feet. Not I.

What worries me is the presence of two of the modern American political scene's most massive, over-inflated egos and thinnest skins in the same room with each other. On the one hand, we have a man who gave the Queen of England -- a woman whose living memory contains listening to none other than Winston Churchill rally his nation when it stood alone against the Nazi might -- an iPod with his own speeches on it and who actually said of his view of one of his own achievements, "I try not to pat myself on the back too much." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might disagree about the President's claims.

And on the other hand, we have a guy who really believes that the news cycle and polling flavor of the month culture it's created translates into an actual chance that he will be the nominee, and who said out loud in front of microphones that his being required to exit Air Force One by a rear ramp contributed to the 1995 government shutdown.

Putting those two forces in a room together is madness -- we have no way of knowing what might happen if they somehow interact wrongly. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen are all unspectacular elements, but combined in the correct amounts they make highly unstable nitroglycerine.

And given that the debate will be extensively covered by the media, there is the likelihood of the presence of many somewhat smaller but still dangerously expanded egos that could also be set off if the Obama-Gingrich meeting goes wrong. We could witness a disaster of biblical proportions.