Last week was absolutely brutal for GOP presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich, even after getting big endorsements from the likes of Rick Perry and former Senator Fred Thompson and winning South Carolina. After some good reporting by The New York Times (shock!), it's clear that Mitt Romney's campaign used tactics often deployed by liberals to attack Newt Gingrich. It was effective, but the strategy also gave insight into Mitt Romney's true character: he will lie, steal and cheat to become president. It was repulsive to see this happen in the Republican Party, but it's proof that the establishment is scared to death about losing their control in Washington. What has surfaced since the coordinated attacks is that everything was planned, using allies for support to smear Gingrich with lies.
As disgusting as it was, last week we saw conservative figures assault Newt Gingrich in a coordinated campaign through lies, such as that he's not a Reagan conservative, Reagan didn't like Newt and that he hasn't done anything for the conservative movement. Again, it was utterly disgusting. Unfortunately, most of this was led by the Drudge Report, one of the most trafficked websites on the internet. For 72 hours, he blasted Newt Gingrich headlines, all of which were lies, while hiding the rebuttals. To be clear, Newt has done more for the conservative momvement than all of the pundits combined. And they hate him for that.
Yesterday on NBC's Meet the Press, Fred Thompson attacked the Romney campaign for "unseemliness and overkill" in his attacks against Newt. Thompson endorsed Newt last week and faced the same attacks when he ran for president in 2008 from Romney. In fact, any candidate that gets close to Romney becomes a target. Look no further than Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann last year when they surged in the polls. All of sudden, Perry's rock in Texas became an issue; Bachmann reportedly had migraines; Herman Cain was accused of having affairs. At first, these looked like the tactics of David Axelrod and the Obama and Chicago machine, but now we know it was Romney's campaign.
Thompson's comments were reported by Politico:
Romney's "modus operandi, basically, is to play Mr. Nice Guy until somebody gets close to him," Thompson said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "And then he unleashes his attack machine. And that's what happened in Iowa and it's what's happening in Florida."
Thompson said that a story in Sunday's New York Times depicts "Romney's staff ... patting themselves on the back, talking about how mean and down they are. How they've got Matt Drudge in their back pocket. And how Romney is in on all of it."
For months, Drudge has been running a steady stream of pro-Romney and anti-Gingrich stories on his website, Drudge Report.
The comments made by Thompson were reaffirmed in The New York Times article:
A team of some of the most fearsome researchers in the business, led by Mr. Romney’s campaign manager, Matt Rhoades, spent days dispensing negative information about Mr. Gingrich, much of it finding its way to the influential Drudge Report, which often serves as a guide for conservative talk radio and television assignment editors and to which Mr. Rhoades has close ties.
The effort hit a peak by Thursday, when the site was virtually taken over by headlines assailing Mr. Gingrich, whose advisers said they eventually gave up on trying to persuade the Drudge staff to spare them, acknowledging, in the words of one aide, that “very little can be done.”
We fully expect this from liberals, but not even phonies who pretend to be conservative. The attacks by the Romney machine on Gingrich are repulsive. Enough is enough out of the self-proclaimed progressive and independent. Mitt Romney is the GOP version of Obama and he cannot be our nominee.
Justin Credible is a contributing editor for Habledash.
