Here’s something that no one is talking about concerning tonight’s primaries: In my homestate of Missouri Prop C, the first legislative challenge to Obamacare exempting Missourians from Obamacare penalities, passed by 3-1 in every single county except Kansas City and St. Louis City. Rick Santorum took every single county in Missouri. Missourians don’t like mandates. Missourians, like folks from MN and CO, don’t like being strong-armed into the falsehood of “electable inevitability.”

That’s what we’ve been sold for the past six months. Tonight inevitability was rejected in three states.

Numerous talking heads discounted the “beauty contests,” especially Missouri’s, which holds a separate caucus for its 52 delegates in March due to state-level silliness. Coincidentally, these are the same folks, Karl Rove and Company, who seem to save their most favorable comments for Romney. Iowa was important until it was realized Santorum won. South Carolina didn’t matter because hey, they were all bigots and hillbillies. Only the states that went Romney seemed to count.

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General Electric owns 49% of NBC. General Electric’s Chairman and CEO is Jeffrey Immelt.  Jeffrey Immelt is a big-time Obama supporter, and if you’ve watched any one of NBC’s three news networks (or their entertainment endeavors), you know that NBC is the biggest billionaire-led, multinational corporation-owned Super PAC ever created, and it’s all in to get Barack Obama reelected.

It is within this context that you must look at everything NBC does in order to make sense of their behavior.

What Brian Williams did last night, with his fascist demand that the debate audience shut the hell up, was to ensure nothing exciting came out of the debate and — what do you know? — nothing did. Williams is obviously aware of the fact that the more excitement and attention stirs around the GOP, the more infectious that excitement might become, and that is not good for the news media’s Precious One — who will need the MSM in prime fighting form if he’s going to win a second term and, you know, ruin America.

Newt Gingrich, like many politicians (including Obama), feeds off  his audience, and over the course of this primary it has been the roar of audience approval that has made Gingrich’s counter-attacks against Obama’s Media Palace Guards so compelling. Clips of these counter-attacks have gone viral, which means that Gingrich’s message exposing the corrupt MSM is starting to penetrate beyond the GOP faithful.

Can’t have that. And without the crowd roaring their approval, Williams knows any kind of counter-attack against him would look different, less like a winning moment and more like an argumentative one. In other words, Williams wasn’t going to allow himself to get John Kinged or allow our side to look like fighters and winners.

Brian Williams is not a dumb man. He’s a very smart and savvy political operative for the left, and he’s certainly smart enough to look for any angle that might help his side.

And that’s what last night was really about.

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When the South Carolina primary results revealed a blowout victory for Gingrich, Romney supporters and the Establishment Apology Brigade responded by borrowing progressives’s talking points against the tea party. That a sizable chunk of tea partiers, independents, and women voted for Newt Gingrich doesn’t make them “racists,” as I have heard suggested, or “bitter clingers,” or any other pejorative favored by progressives and suddenly subtly adopted by establishment types.

I know and respect many of these individuals and I don’t begrudge them their passionate support of the candidate in whom they believe; rather, I disagree with their chosen tactics in attempting to undermine their opposition’s support.

We spent three-and-a-half years protesting for limited government and were called nazis, racists, bigots, etc. by progressives, many of them sitting lawmakers. The above-mentioned apologists were right with us in denouncing such tactics. Now suddenly they’re echoing them simply because the majority of grassroots do not share their choice of primary candidate? Their strategy is to browbeat and verbally abuse grassroots into lining up behind an uncertain and not “inevitable” candidate? Isn’t that what progressives have been doing to grassroots for the past several years? We were called racists and “bitter clingers” for not supporting Obama. Are we now suggested racists and “bitter clingers” because we don’t support Romney? How does that work?

Let me put it another way: it wasn’t OK to call tea partiers “racists and hillbillies” when they opposed Obama’s big government, but it is OK to call tea partiers “racists and hillbillies” when they oppose the establishment’s pick for primary candidate?

What sort of bass-ackwards logic is this?

The South Carolina results have more to do with a repudiation of Romney than a widespread preference for Gingrich as a candidate. This isn’t to say that there aren’t any tea partiers who support Gingrich–to the contrary. There is simply a general, “damn the man” sentiment when it concerns the GOP establishment, and it’s of the establishment’s own doing.

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If you didn’t watch tonight’s debate, let me sum it up for you: Why English as the official language in US? Your Thoughts on Terri Schiavo? When was America last great? Also, the Bush tax cuts didn’t work, explain to us why.’

Gingrich, who is usually good at rejecting false premises in questioning, punted and responded “it would have been worse without them.” Really?

… in May 2003 Congress accelerated the tax cuts to make them effective immediately. In addition to reducing marginal income tax rates, Congress also lowered the tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

It was at this point that economic growth took off. From May 2003 until December 2007 (when the recession caused by the global financial meltdown occurred) the economy created 8.1 million jobs, or 145,000 a month. By comparison, after the beginning of the 2001 recession and before the 2003 tax cuts, the economy was losing 103,000 jobs a month.

Bush tax cuts spurred growth and additionally stifled unemployment at 5.2% in the years following 9/11. Yes they worked. Gingrich should have answered better and the moderator asking the question should have been mocked on stage for presenting a presupposition as a legitimate, beyond reproach question.

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From Drudge:

Marianne Gingrich has said she could end her ex-husband’s career with a single interview.
Earlier this week, she sat before ABCNEWS cameras, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned… MORE… Developing…

She spoke to ABCNEWS reporter Brian Ross for two hours. Her explosive revelations are set to rock the campaign. But now a “civil war” has erupted inside of the network, an insider claims, on exactly when the confession will air!

ABCNEWS suits determined it would be “unethical” to run the Marianne Gingrich interview so close to the South Carolina Primary …

… A decision was tentatively made to air the interview next Monday, after all votes have been counted.

I don’t even know the content of this interview or what further revelations she could have on Gingrich, but unless it involves cross-dressing, drug trafficking, or other salacious details, I’m going to feel completely let down.

We all know that Newt Gingrich cheated on two of his three wives. He cheated on his wife Jackie, who had cancer, with Marianne Gingrich, the woman who gave an interview to ABC. If the details are simply that he was unkind to her or didn’t treat her right, well, surprise! You were the mistress! You helped break up a marriage and thus forfeited your right to be outraged when the next mistress usurped your spot as the new wife. I have no pity for the “other woman.” I guess that’s why I find Marianne Gingrich’s late-to-the-game interview so odd. Could there be any bigger bombshell than the story of their union?

That being said, ABC’s decision to drop this interview after the votes are counted in South Carolina has just been thwarted as the first shoe has been dropped. Everyone now expects the other one; they know that something is going to come out about Gingrich’s second marriage because of the Drudge headline. How will this affect voting? How will it affect fundraising? And will the details of the interview sufficiently match any loss of support that Gingrich may receive as a result?

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It seems the onetime political news website Politico is edging toward a Daily Kos-like experience. January 14th we see yet another step in Politico’s journey toward left-wing extremes with a fake poll that claims that no one in South Carolina likes the tea party movement. Did I mention it was a “Facebook poll?”

The headline ways it all, really: Facebook/POLITICO poll: South Carolina users cool to tea party. If the fact that this “poll” is just some posting on a Facebook page doesn’t make you laugh at its validity, the hilarity continues as Politico goes on to treat this silliness as real news.

“Almost two-thirds of adult Facebook users in South Carolina say they aren’t fans of the tea party, according to a Facebook poll conducted today with POLITICO,” the “news” website begins.

Come on. Does anyone imagine that Politico reached “almost two-thirds” of the Facebook uses in South Carolina? Does anyone even imagine that Politico reached even a representative number of Facebook users in South Carolina? Was there any scientific method at all to this or was it just some posting that a handful of South Carolinians saw on Facebook? Bet you can guess.

But let’s not let science get in the way of a good liberal meme, OK? Politico has decided that everyone in South Carolina hates the tea party movement and that is that, you see?

Sixty-two percent of those surveyed said they are “not at all supportive” of the tea party, compared with 20 percent who were “somewhat supportive” and 18 percent who were “very supportive.”

Of those surveyed, women were slightly less supportive of the tea party. Just 35 percent were either “somewhat” or “very” supportive of the movement, compared with 42 percent among men.

Politico does admit that this poll has some, er, limitations.

The results only represent the sentiment of South Carolina users on Facebook, not registered voters or likely GOP primary voters that tend to be more reliable barometers of primary elections. The Facebook poll, for instance, doesn’t exclude Democrats or independents.

How many Facebook respondents were Democrats? How many were white, black, or Asian? How many were actual voters? How many really lived in South Carolina? How do we quantify these results? Who needs scientific controls on a poll, anyway?

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Take note, South Carolina. We know that Mitt Romney has been on all sides of basically every issue, but the broader concern here is:  are conservatives tired of stressing about and being duped by northeastern so-called Republicans and their mostly liberal voting records–leading to political survival in Democrat states.  But, seriously, is anyone else tired of this? And again, I ask,  why is a government-run healthcare lover a GOP frontrunner? Name recognition, gaining independent voters, and anyone but Obama, I get that, but come on already. Romney? I’m not buying the media hype over who can beat Obama.

From Jonah Goldberg:

Romney, the son of a politician, has been running for office, holding office or thinking about running for office for more than two decades. “Just level with the American people,” Gingrich growled. “You’ve been running … at least since the 1990s.”

For some reason, Romney can’t do that. Or at least it seems like he can’t. His authentic inauthenticity problem isn’t going away. And it’s sapping enthusiasm from the rank and file.

Goldberg is right, but the underlying theme that voters need to be reminded of is that during so many important debates from healthcare, jobs, Wall Street Reform, confirmations, recess appointments, to taxes the culprits to invoke cloture or side with the Democrats typically are the same:  Senators Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe,  and Scott Brown–the trifecta of RINOs. All from the northeast, too.  See where I’m going with this?

Frankly, Romney, who the mainstream liberal media would like to see win the nomination, has yet to unite the GOP base.  His used car salesman pitch simply rubs people the wrong way.  We’ve seen this over and over again–even John McCain pointed this out and won in 2007’s primary–and now supports him–that should speak volumes to my point.  Romney has always been dogged by this and this is why we have such a large ‘Not Romney’ camp on the right side of the aisle.

The GOP is also paying the bitter price for not having anyone in line to succeed GW Bush.  The party’s internal tug of war will be an historical teachable moment and prepare the party for future elections.  The one saving grace is that, while the Democrats have Hillary, they have no one to succeed her at this point in time.  I say Hillary because she seems to be the only power broker left untarnished by Obama–even though she is an Alinsky kinda girl.

Additionally, the GOP presidential candidate will have a two-pronged mission as the nominee:  to beat the MSM and Obama.  However, enlightened voters now know for sure the media is mostly state-controlled, Obama was never vetted, and that his radical leftist ideology drives his policies, appointments, and regulations out of the mainstream.

Furthermore, the MSM needs Romney to offset Obama.  The formula is quite simple: RomneyCare is to ObamaCare as Obama’s rhetoric is to Romney’s rhetoric all of which cancel each other out according to how the media sees it.

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- CBS studio team “Tebows”: After a miracle finish on the first play of overtime to give the underdog Denver Broncos a stunning win over the Pittsburgh Steelers, the analysts and anchors at CBS Sports had only one response.

- CNN “Early Start” tries to prank Chuck Nice by calling him at 3am Pacific time, calls and wakes up wrong person. MEanwhile, Nice watched the whole thing happen on television, live.

- Charles Payne drops an F bomb on Fox!

- Bill O’Reilly defends Gateway Pundit, as does Rush. Our previous piece on the subject: What Is More Racist®?

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This morning on our CNN panel Will Cain and I discussed the “angry Newt narrative.” The question centered around Peggy Noonan’s latest column wherein she calls Gingrich an “angry little attack muffin“:

Right now Mr. Romney’s taking a beating. He’s everyone’s target, and in a way that speaks of something beyond the usual campaign ferocity. There’s something else going on, a taunting: “If you’re so inevitable how come I’m not afraid of you?” Newt Gingrich, angry little attack muffin, called Mr. Romney a liar.

This is why it has taken Republicans until New Hampshire to vet their leading candidate (and they didn’t vet him in 2008, either): criticize Mitt Romney and you’re called a meanie. Most of the people I’ve witnessed using this argument have been in politics longer than I’ve been alive, so unless the landscape has changed recently and I missed the memo, politics is still a bloodsport. No one is calling Romney an “angry little muffin” for doing exactly what Gingrich is doing; the difference is that Romney has a frillion groups and admirers doing it for him so he can keep his mitts clean and appear above the fray. If the tactic seems familiar, it’s because Barack Obama is famous for it. I’m not comparing Obama to Romney, just simply pointing out that they happen to share more in common besides health care.

The base is crying out for someone, anyone in this primary to stop pretending that Romney doesn’t have the gubernatorial record that he has. Those who pretend it doesn’t exist only kneecap themselves. They criticize ads from primary opponents which address Romney’s record. Instead of asking “Is this what the oppo will look like?” they howl over Gingrich quoting a NYT article.

Most media, and even the candidates themselves, coddle Romney at every debate and behave as though less offensive baggage from other candidates is somehow worse than socialized health care at the state level. I may have had my differences with Gingrich on different issues before, but this much I know: he’s not auditioning for a VP job in the event of a still uncertain Romney nomination.

Newt Gingrich is doing what the GOP would do, if they were smart, and testing the mettle of these candidates before the Obama machine does with good ol’ fashioned primary politics.

Breitbart.tv’s Larry O’Connor caught up with Mr. Shakespeare, Lawrence O’Donnell.

“Romney is the one they don’t want. They know they can beat anybody else. Romney, they think they can beat, but it’s a harder road.”

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A narrative growing around former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is that he avoids right-of-center news outlets. A few weeks ago, the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis stood by a piece the Romney camp disputed that took issue with the fact that only left-wing news outlets received any attention on one particular conference call. And in recent months both Brett Baier and Chris Wallace of Fox News have made an issue over the Governor’s apparent reluctance to show up for a grilling on their respective shows (though Romney did eventually make an appearance with both).

Today, the Daily Caller repeats a familiar refrain:

Romney last week granted one-on-one interviews in Iowa to both MSNBC and the Huffington Post, among the best-known sources of news for liberals in the country. In recent weeks, he also gave interviews to The Washington Post, The New York Times and Politico.

It’s a peculiar strategy for someone who has had trouble convincing conservatives throughout this race he’s one of them.

The Romney campaign runs a tight ship when it comes to media access. Unlike other candidates who can be more open at campaign stops, Romney will only answer questions from reporters during organized media availabilities. …

Romney’s campaign has refused multiple times over the last year to provide the former Massachusetts governor for an interview with The Daily Caller.

There is, I think, an important difference between a candidate and an elected official. If you’re president of the United States or the local dog catcher, you have an obligation to meet with the press, even the hostile press. You are, after all, representing all of the people once you take office. A candidate, though, is a different story. Their job is to win as many votes as possible and, yes, to manipulate the media to their own advantage. In fact, how well a Republican candidate does or doesn’t manage the media frequently means the difference between a loss or a win. Democrats, of course, almost always have the media wind at their backs.

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“Uh.”

—–

Allen: “These are members of your staff.”
Perry: “You got a name?”
Allen: “Who say –”
Perry: “You got a name?”
[pause]
Allen: “You won’t listen to –”
Perry: “You got a name?”
Allen: “Uh.”
Perry: “If you don’t have a name to tell me this individual said this, then I don’t take that as a corroborating source

If Mike Allen’s source(s) are protected, he should say so. But he doesn’t.

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Chris Matthews looks as though he’s broadcasting his show out of a bar which is apropos, as it takes a few to before the average sane American can tolerate it. Matthews and the panel deliver the top-notch political punditry for which MSNBC is known: calling candidates (in this instance Rick Perry) in the party opposite them stupid.

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Howard Fineman pretends to know what’s best for the tea party and plays into the hands of the establishment by issuing back-pats for Mitt Romney.

Newsbusters notes:

The show did not delve into whether the GOP candidate had a legitimate complaint about Virginia’s ballot access laws which will only include the names of two Republican presidential candidates on the ballot for the state’s March 6 primary.

Yes, apparently it’s “megalomania” to be upset when ridiculously stringent rules for ballot legitimacy are changed mid-game (a must-read post on this). Basically, the rules for the Virginia’s primary ballot access are more complicated than those of Whack Bat:

Perry wasn’t called names for objecting to VA’s oddball rule change most likely because he isn’t nearest to Romney in the polls. Newt Gingrich is a larger-than-life beltway candidate, but he’s not the establishment’s choice for this race. They’re squarely behind Mitt Romney this time [my emphasis]:

“A lot of us who normally would have been in this presidential race a long time ago, have been waiting for Christie to make a decision,” said Georgette Mosbacher, a Republican uber-fund-raiser and former finance co-chair of the Republican National Committee who was among a group of Republican bundlers hoping to convince Christie to enter the race. “I think tomorrow, we’ll be contacting one another and probably put something together with Romney.”

That oldie-but-goodie afore-linked article, by the way, gets better the further down you read. Like here, when they tried justifying soul sales:

“The speech I gave to my conservative friends was, if you pick somebody who makes you 100 percent happy, you only get 47 percent against Obama,” said Catsimatidis. “We have to capture the middle in order to win and make a change in this country. Ninety percent of them stood up and said, ‘You’re right.’”

What good is principle if you sacrifice it to win? You’re not winning on your principle because you didn’t enter that horse in the race; you’re winning on a compromise of that principle. You can tell yourself that it’s a “strategy,” a strategy to inch us ever closer back to that place of simple government conservatism, if doing so makes you fall asleep easier at night. Compromising your principle to present less of a difference between yourself and your opponent isn’t a strategy, it’s forfeit. You’re not winning on your merits, you’re winning on theirs. It’s almost as if the establishment’s strategy was devised entirely by the Democrat opposition: be more like the other guy to win. Be Democrat-lite. That serves Democrats, not Republicans. The GOP establishment thinks that you won’t notice if they dress it up with a shiny red “R” by the name. It’s not like the Devil can quote Scripture or anything, right?

It’s frustrating to see so many Republicans simply throwing up their hands and throwing in the towel for Romney because they have such low political self-esteem. That’s what this is: it’s a self-esteem problem. We think we can’t do any better than what we have right now and we lack the self-confidence to try.

The right has an inferiority complex (or we’re sadists) and people like Howard Fineman and the MSM can’t get enough.

The battle for conservatives isn’t the general (have you seen Obama’s approval ratings?), it’s the primary. The first and best blow that The One can deliver to the GOP is by nudging the establishment to nominate a candidate that cancels out his own faults. Nominate a guy who drafted the blueprint for nationalized health care and you remove health care ammunition from your stores in the general. Nominate a guy weak on immigration and you remove that weapon from your arsenal. There isn’t a bogeyman against which the DNC can pit Obama; aside from congress–whose own approval rating is tanking so it’s useless–their second best choice is to make unnoticeable the difference between Obama and the GOP nominee.

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If I have to do one more piece on correcting Tommy Christopher’s silly bias, I’m going to start charging Mediaite for copy-editing.

Christopher recently wrote a post attacking Rush Limbaugh and later Ann Coulter for criticizing Romney at CPAC and then “praising” him; her remarks were used in a recent Democrat attack ad. He writes this of me:

Now, this is not a knock on Coulter so much. She’s certainly not the first conservative commentator to do a Linda Blair when it became convenient. Big Journalism Editor Dana Loesch praised Mitt Romney (and voted for him) in 2008, only to turn around and scrub the evidence four years later so she could claim she was against Romney in 2008, and still is. Rush Limbaugh went from calling Romney the “embodiment” of the conservative stool, in 2008, to saying “Mitt Romney is not a conservative” in 2011.

Quickly, because there are more important things to do: I didn’t “scrub” any “evidence.” In fact, I’ve never deleted a single post. It’s all still there. Christopher’s bias leads him to omit this discussion I had of the situation, wherein I discussed voting for Romney as a strategy to eliminate John McCain in the 2008 primaries. I felt at the time that McCain was more dangerous than Romney. McCain worked to regulate free speech with McCain-Feingold. That had a national impact. Romneycare was socialism at the state level. One had national implications, one did not. Perhaps I should write this post in pictures so that Christopher can understand the strategy. I say that with love and hugs.

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**UPDATE: Romney camp responds to Hot Air

**UPDATE II: Matt Lewis added the Romney camp’s reponse to his story but stands by his original report.

**UPDATE III: Red State’s Moe Lane has more in an update of his own: “the queue is the Romney campaign’s problem.”

“Isn’t it pretty stupid politics,” the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis asks. That’s obviously a rhetorical question, and not one motivated by sour grapes. Lewis wasn’t on the call:

As you probably heard, some Mitt Romney surrogates hosted a conference call today to attack Newt Gingrich. Because Romney is attempting to win a Republican primary — and cast Newt Gingrich as unacceptable to conservatives — you probably assume that center-right journalists or conservative bloggers got to ask some questions, right?

Wrong. Here’s the list of reporters and media outlets who were permitted to ask questions:

JOHN DICKERSON, CBS NEWS
MARK HALPERIN, TIME
LLOYD GROVE, THE DAILY BEAST
EVAN MCMORRIS-SANTORO, TPM
DAVID CORN, MOTHER JONES
PHIL RUCKER, WASHINGTON POST

DaTechGuy adds:

Stupid isn’t the word here. You are trying to make the case you are more conservative than Newt Gingrich and you not only exclude Conservatives from questions but you take questions from flipping Mother Jones and Talking Points Memo? This is an insult to every conservative news outlet, new media site and blogger out there.

And people complained about the way Herman Cain treated friends, but perhaps the Romney Campaign doesn’t consider conservatives friends.

It’s important to emphasize that it wasn’t Governor Romney himself on the phone. Still, they were his surrogates.

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There have been a great number of debates this primary season. Some have been more interesting than others. Some have been soporific and a few have had some exciting moments. While there may be those who take issue with how some of these debates have been formatted, none of them have been truly ridiculous. That is, until now.

On December 27^th the ION Television network (formerly PAX) will be hosting a debate. It’s being billed as the last major debate before the Iowa Caucuses. The ION network claims to reach 99 Million viewers. I’m not sure how many will actually tune in when they realize what is involved.

The debate is being sponsored by everyone’s favorite birther Donald “The Donald” Trump, and Newsmax, considered to be one of the premiere Republican-leaning/conservative media outlets. The fact that Trump is involved should be a warning sign that things are not going to be as … well, straight as some of the other debates. That’s when things go absolutely wacky, for lack of a better turn of phrase.

As with all the other debates to date, it has been deemed necessary to have the Main Stream Media involved, even in this, which seems to be a prime opportunity for unleashing the power of the alternative media. This might have been okay if the organizers had gone for some personalities who have some credit in more conservative circles, perhaps Jake Tapper or Andrew Malcolm.

As mentioned, the folks in charge went in a completely different direction. The head of the debate staff is one Eason Jordan. Now, that name might be somewhat familiar to some readers. He has received 4 Emmys, 2 Peabodys and is the first living person to receive the Livingstone Award’s “Special Citation For Outstanding Achievement.”

He also admitted to covering up Saddam Hussein’s atrocities in Iraq for the privilege of access to the regime.

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