We have witnessed something very disturbing this week. The Republican
establishment which fought Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and which
continues to fight the grassroots Tea Party movement today has adopted
the tactics of the left in using the media and the politics of personal
destruction to attack an opponent.
We will look back on
this week and realize that something changed. I have given numerous
interviews wherein I espoused the benefits of thorough vetting during
aggressive contested primary elections, but this week’s tactics aren’t
what I meant. Those who claim allegiance to Ronald Reagan’s
11th Commandment should stop and think about where we are today. Ronald
Reagan and Barry Goldwater, the fathers of the modern conservative
movement, would be ashamed of us in this primary. Let me make clear that
I have no problem with the routine rough and tumble of a heated
campaign. As I said at the first Tea Party convention two years ago, I
am in favor of contested primaries and healthy, pointed debate. They
help focus candidates and the electorate. I have fought in tough and
heated contested primaries myself. But what we have seen in Florida this
week is beyond the pale. It was unprecedented in GOP primaries. I’ve
seen it before – heck, I lived it before – but not in a GOP primary
race.
I am sadly too familiar with these tactics because
they were used against the GOP ticket in 2008. The left seeks to single
someone out and destroy his or her record and reputation and family
using the media as a channel to dump handpicked and half-baked campaign
opposition research on the public. The difference in 2008 was that I was
largely unknown to the American public, so they had no way of
differentiating between the lies and the truth. All of it came at them
at once as “facts” about me. But Newt Gingrich is known to us – both the
good and the bad.
We know that Newt fought in the trenches during the Reagan Revolution. As Rush Limbaugh pointed out,
Newt was among a handful of Republican Congressman who would regularly
take to the House floor to defend Reagan at a time when conservatives
didn’t have Fox News or talk radio or conservative blogs to give any
balance to the liberal mainstream media. Newt actually came at Reagan’s
administration “from the right” to remind Americans that freer markets
and tougher national defense would win our future. But this week a few
handpicked and selectively edited comments which Newt made during his
40-year career were used to claim that Newt was somehow anti-Reagan and
isn’t conservative enough to go against the accepted moderate in the
primary race. (I know, it makes no sense, and the GOP establishment
hopes you won’t stop and think about this nonsense. Mark Levin
and others have shown the ridiculousness of this.) To add insult to
injury, this “anti-Reagan” claim was made by a candidate who admitted to
not even supporting or voting for Reagan. He actually was against the
Reagan movement, donated to liberal candidates, and said he didn’t want
to go back to the Reagan days. You can’t change history. We know that
Newt Gingrich brought the Reagan Revolution into the 1990s. We know it
because none other than Nancy Reagan herself announced this when she
presented Newt with an award, telling us, “The dramatic movement of 1995
is an outgrowth of a much earlier crusade that goes back half a
century. Barry Goldwater handed the torch to Ronnie, and in turn Ronnie
turned that torch over to Newt and the Republican members of Congress
to keep that dream alive.” As Rush and others pointed out, if Nancy
Reagan had ever thought that Newt was in any way an opponent of her
beloved husband, she would never have even appeared on a stage with him,
let alone presented him with an award and said such kind things about
him. Nor would Reagan’s son, Michael Reagan, have chosen to endorse Newt
in this primary race. There are no two greater keepers of the Reagan
legacy than Nancy and Michael Reagan. What we saw with this ridiculous
opposition dump on Newt was nothing short of Stalin-esque rewriting of
history. It was Alinsky tactics at their worst. (Continues here)
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