Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Now this is the Newt Gingrich I remember. The dark prince who perfected the politics of personal destruction at GOPAC and unleashed his minions, like Karl Rove and David Bossie, et al., on the world to forever debase our politics.
Forget New Hampshire. GOP presidential primaries are decided by down-n'-dirty mud wrestling in South Carolina (just ask John McCain). And Newt promises to go nuclear on "Mittens" Romney in South Carolina.
The Newt Gingrich-backing SuperPAC (Winning Our Future) has a half-hour documentary about "Mittens" Romney's record at Bain Capital, Romney's raison d'être for his campaign (Romney speaks French!) for which it has bought air time in an attempt to destroy Romney in South Carolina. Here is the trailer for the documentary:
Capitalism made America great – free markets, innovation, hard work – the building blocks of the American Dream. But in the wrong hands some of those dreams can turn into nightmares. This film is about one raider and his firm and how they destroyed that dream for thousands of Americans and their families – Mitt Romney and Bain Capital.
So who is paying for this Swift Boat-style advertising on Gingrich's behalf? Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo reports Newt’s Friend Antes Up:
Last night I saw a link on Twitter to the news that Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino mogul had given $5 million to a Gingrich-backing SuperPAC to run a brutal series of ads against Mitt Romney in South Carolina. (The ad campaign will be based on snippets from a half-hour swift-boat style ‘documentary’ about Mitt’s time at Bain Capital.) I knew this was big if for no other reason than the fact that $5 million thrown at a relatively small state like South Carolina over little more than a week is enough to totally change the calculus of a race. After all, the whole story of Iowa is that Romney’s backers had enough money to crush Gingrich with a massive bombardment of negative ads. Gingrich simply had no money to respond.
But there’s much more afoot here.
The first part of the equation is that Sheldon Adelson is not just some rich guy. He’s one of the richest men in the country. . . For all practical purposes, his funds are unlimited. Giving another $5 million or $10 million would be just as easy as the first. And he’s in the habit of giving lots of money — political money, issue money, lots of money to Jewish causes and causes tied to the Israeli right. So check off the boxes for both the ability and the propensity to give and keep giving if he and Gingrich decide they want to keep this going.
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In any case, why would Adelson be trying to take Romney out now? . . . The only real answer I can see is that this is personal. As we’ve already noted, Gingrich seems propelled now by a sort of incandescent rage against Romney, who he sees as not only crushing his supposed shot at the presidency but also having the effrontery to claim that he, Romney (truly a phony conservative if there ever was one) is the real conservative and not Newt. For someone like Newt, not only with all his vaunted pretension and self-regard but no little claim to being a major figure in the history of modern American conservatism, how galling must that be?
It’s always been part of who Newt is (anybody like him) that it’s impossible to separate the personal from the historical. Newt isn’t an ordinary politician. He’s an historic figure. If he’s pissed or hurt, it’s not a matter of just being mad or angry. The target of his anger must be something or someone so bad and awful that defeating that person is something of an importance that wholly transcends Newt’s personal interests. This is how the guy thinks.
So it’s personal for Gingrich (which means it’s also world-historical). And since it’s personal for him it’s personal for Adelson too.
Just remember when you are pissing away your hard-earned money on gambling in Las Vegas casinos, the money you lose (because the house always wins) eventually goes to guys like these.
UPDATE: You should check out romneygekko.com at Mitt Romney and Bain Capital | Romney-Gekko 2012