Romney Owns The Schism

 

 That the attack on Newt’s Reagan bona fides came from someone who openly ran against Reaganism and against the conservative agenda in 1994 was an irony lost only on the pro-Romney Republican establishment and media."

 

Todah RABAH to Wiliam A. Jacobson for being willing - and so very able - to put this mess into words. I urge you to read it all - at Legal Insurrection:

 

Romney is winning his battles, but losing our war

If you asked me even a couple of weeks ago whether the Republican Party could heal from the wounds of this election cycle in time to unite against Obama, I would have said ”Yes.”

I’m not so sure anymore.  After the South Carolina primary the Republican establishment, and media supporters like Matt Drudge, launched Scorched Earth II on Newt, while pro-Romney pundits like Ann Coulter heaped scorn on the conservative and Tea Party voters who sided with Newt.

It may just be “not-beanbag” to the Romney campaign and its supporters, but people hear them loud and clear.

Two lines of attack have exposed a schism between the Republican political haves and have nots which will not easily heal:  The attempt to rewrite the history of the Reagan revolution and the embrace of Nancy Pelosi’s partisan ethics attack and blackmail.

As to Reagan, I have documented many times here how the story line espoused by the Romney campaign and its supporters was false.  Newt was an important part of the Reagan revolution, and was not anti-Reagan as various pro-Romney pundits claimed.

This line of attack on Newt was pushed by Drudge even as the individual charges highlighted at the top of Drudge were disproved one by one.

There was a backlash on Thursday and Friday among talk radio hosts and a variety of people who were in a first hand position to observe Newt’s interaction with Reagan, culminating in Sarah Palin’s Facebook post on Friday afternoon denouncing the neo-Stalinist attempt to rewrite history.

That the attack on Newt’s Reagan bona fides came from someone who openly ran against Reaganism and against the conservative agenda in 1994 was an irony lost only on the pro-Romney Republican establishment and media.

Romney’s attacks on Newt’s late 1990s ethics charge also were distinctly from the left, echoing the talking points of anti-conservative Democrats like Nancy Pelosi.  It took people like Byron York and Mark Levin to expose the truth that the charges were part of a Democratic Party vendetta, and that substantively Newt did nothing wrong and was vindicated.

But mostly, the Republican establishment and conservative media who howled with outrage when Newt and Rick Perry were seen (wrongly in my view) as attacking Romney “from the left” were silent, even as the Romney camp openly embraced Nancy Pelosi’s blackmail and ran ads featuring Pelosi threatening to reveal secret information about Newt after Pelosi already had backed away from the threat.

The embrace of Nancy Pelosi by the Romney campaign should have met with an avalanche of criticism from the Republican establishment, but almost nothing was said.

Romney is back at it in Florida, with a last minute and massive ad buy running a clip of Tom Brokaw from 1997 about Newt’s plea to a single ethics charge.  Romney not only attacked Newt again from the left in the spirit of Pelosi, but did so using a mainstream news media figure from a network notoriously hostile to conservatives.  Yet again, near silence from the Republican establishment and conservative media.

As Palin pointed out, this no longer is about Romney and Newt.  It’s a schism between the Republican political haves and have nots, with the have nots furious at the double standard applied to their candidate by the political haves.

The schism need not have occurred.  It entirely is an outgrowth of the way in which the Romney campaign and Republican political and media establishments have conducted themselves.

Continue reading at LI.

 

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

The Romney campaign has been a lie from the beginning. The claim that a man whose major accomplishments are that he ran a big business and that he "saved" the Olympics (would the world have come to an end had the Olympics not been "saved"?) qualifies that man to be president of the United States is itself a lie. The claim that Romney is a conservative is also a lie. And these two lies -- that he's qualified to be president and that he's a conservative -- have been undergirded by subsidiary lies -- chiefly the lie that Romneycare has virtually nothing to do with Obamacare. So the news that the Gingrich-was-anti-Reagan stories were also lies is hardly surprising; anyone who read Drudge a week ago, when the spate of Gingrich/Reagan stories first appeared, had to realize that these were orchestrated and choreographed tales that were suspiciously timed and almost certainly false. What all of this comes down to is the ugly fact that if the Republican party nominates Romney, it will have nominated more than a candidate -- it will have nominated a lie. Whether a party that attempts to foist a lie upon America deserves to win is a question every real conservative will have to struggle with.

[yeshiva son]

This is awful. I expected this kind of thing from the left - but from the right?? Romney got called on a straight out lie during the debate - and yet the "pundits" say that he won the debate? What planet are we living on? Are the people in Florida really eating up lie after lie after lie?