Posted on 01/29/2012 12:28:42 PM PST by jimbo123
Facing the unthinkable here just seven days ago — a second loss in a row to Newt Gingrich — Mitt Romney’s campaign team hatched a two-part plan to win in Florida: make Newt mad and Mitt meaner.
-snip-
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.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Even the New York Times can see and admit the strategy...Romney using the conservative media to attack Gingrich. I’m surprised they were willing to be honest about it, though.
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.”Yes, and I hope that none of us forget these many betrayals in support of Willard Romney. Romney can go straight to hell.
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It mentions that Romney had new advisors, one a Liberty University person who worked for the spiteful Michelle Bachmann, and others from the campaigns of George Bush, Mel Martinez and Charlie Crist.
Hell, I’m beginning to like Ron Paul, even though he makes my stomach turn... of the seven dwarfs, he’s Dopy, Mitt is Slimy and Newt is Doc and Sleepy tied into one.
Romney’s strategy to LIE and LIE about Newt jumped the shark last Thursday.
His only way to win is to LIE. Romney is phony, desperate and is disgusting. He is very similar to Zero in the way he is behaving.
Everything is staged. Even down to the last Debate, where Romney jumped off the stage to a group of people while having the CNN reporter right there. That was STAGED. Bringing in Romney supporters over local citizens for the debate was STAGED and coordinated.
This has to back fire on Romney. It is disgusting that he can’t take No for an answer. Free Republic will always be Anit-Romney and we will suggest Virginians vote for Ron Paul over Romney in the Primary.
ROMNEY and his band of thieves are LIARS.
I am curious about the nature of those "close ties."
There is a special place in Hell reserved for anyone and everyone who supports Mitt Romney.
May the fleas of a thousand camels infest their prayer rugs.
I won’t being “staying home” on election day because other Republicans are going to need my vote. Especially after the Obama commandos were allowed to do the redistricting here in Arizona using the illegals who were counted in the “census” orchestrated by Barry and the ‘RATS. Although those illegals headed for the tall cotton after SB1070 was passed, the redistricting commission pretended that they are still living here and gerrymandered their new districts in such a way as to give the ‘RATS the upper hand. I’ll just have to write in my selection for president. I won’t be “staying home”.
The cost of that rental? Their souls, perhaps?
Now we know that Romney
___________________________________
Its 2012
We told you that in 2007-08
where were you ???
I think what they got was not necessarily money, but the feeling that they were in with the in-crowd. It’s amazing what a little ego-stroking can do.
I love Mark Levin, but it looks like he was wrong about Drudge.
Here’s a video of Matt Rhoades, who is Drudge’s buddy at Team Romney. Does anyone know if Rhoades is gay?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4UJO0F6uMU
Matt Rhoades most likely has dirt on Mark Levin and told him to get with the program, or else.
Someone on another site he is engaged to his beard.
See, I tend to think anyone who approached Levin with that kind of stuff would be told exactly where to get off, and in no uncertain terms. I think Drudge is a friend of Mark’s, like he said, and he misjudged the whole thing. He might say something on tomorrow’s show.
Info on Matt Rhoades “fiance” Jamie Loftus here:
She used to work for Sarah Palin and recently given a civil servant job by Chris Christie.
http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/growls_over_christie_pa_pick_6Q8pPi2c3IrbtXEli065eJ
I was driving back from an oil patch job Friday afternoon when Mark took to defending Drudge and telling conservatives to lay off him. I was furious - at one time Drudge had 14 negative articles on his web page on Thursday. Whether it was Drudge or his underlings who put them up, it was another "carpet bombing" of Newt. Mark has been so right with his latest two books about the methods of the left to turn the US into a socialist Europe. Why he couldn't see that Romney's surrogates were using similar tactic with Drudge to smear and destroy Newt is beyond me, especially because he knows that Romney is no conservative.
Does Romney/Rhoades have dirt on Levin as suggested by jimbo123? Doubtful. Did Mark's support and friendship with Drudge cause him to overlook what happened? Probably. But as Mark has so often observed, conservatives are at war for the survival of our constitution and our country. For him to provide support to Drudge in this instance has to give us pause and ask what is going on?
Romney is desperate. He knows that if he doesn’t knock Newt and Santorum BOTH out fast, the one standing will have a greater percentage vote than him. That doesn’t even factor in Paul.
The early sellouts most likely did it for money.
The holdouts most likely were blackmailed.
we will suggest Virginians vote for Ron Paul over Romney in the Primary
It’s clear that Team Romney and Matt Rhoades have had this in the works for a long time.
I would be really interested in the dirt that Matt Rhoades and his opposition research unit has collected on all of the “conservative” media and politician sellouts that have shown themselves over the past few months.
I’m sure the threat of releasing opposition research dirt on the front page of the Drudge Report is enough to get any “conservative” to jump on the Romney train.
Anthony Pellicano might be in jail, it looks like his spirit is alive and well.
As John Harris of the Washington Post first reported in October 2006, Drudge has an unusually close relationship with a senior Romney strategist, Matt Rhodes
http://www.observer.com/2007/matt-drudge-crusading-against-mike-huckabee
Matt Drudge outed as gay by David Brock and Alec Baldwin, denies it but admits he goes to gay bars:
http://gawker.com/5200009/drudge-i-do-not-love-sex-with-men
Ann Coulter Named Honorary Chair Of GOProud, Republican gay group:
http://www.mediaite.com/online/ann-coulter-named-honorary-chair-of-goproud/
Romney Personally Issued Marriage Licenses to 189 Same-Sex Couples:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=48457
Talk’s cheap and so is the new york times.
Follow the money, honey.
What a vile person! How will we ever get good decent people to run for any office if they have to crawl through a republican slime pit to get to the democrat slime pit?
Huh?
You don’t believe that Willard is smearing Newt?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/us/politics/22drudge.html?pagewanted=all
The early advantage on their side, in the view of several Republicans, seems to have gone to Mitt Romney, who hired the former Bush political aide who had been the central party’s prime point of contact with Mr. Drudge, Matthew Rhoades. His status was solidified after the 2004 election at a steakhouse dinner in Miami with Mr. Drudge, who for all his renown in politics is a somewhat spectral presence who rarely agrees to meet with political operatives or journalists and who did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.
(snip)
Senior aides in the Bush war room, run by Steve Schmidt, a veteran Republican communications aide, insisted on vetting any information to be fed to Mr. Drudge so as not to annoy and overwhelm him with items he might find unworthy. And, these officials said, when the approval was given, the main point of contact was usually the Bush aide who was closest to Mr. Drudge, J. Timothy Griffin, now a consultant to the campaign of Fred D. Thompson, the former Republican senator from Tennessee.
(snip)
Before Mr. Griffin left politics to work as a military lawyer in 2005, he had a dinner with Mr. Drudge and Mr. Rhoades to solidify Mr. Rhoades’s new place as the main Drudge Report contact for the central party. That dinner was first reported in the book “The Way to Win,” by Mark Halperin and John F. Harris, published last year.
As the Bush political team dispersed among the Republican candidates this year, some of Mr. Rhoades’s former colleagues came to regret his special relationship with Mr. Drudge. Former aides to Mr. McCain said in interviews that they had cursed Mr. Rhoades’s name daily this year as Mr. Drudge ran a series of photographs making Mr. McCain look old and other items, like one wrongly raising the possibility that a bump he took to the head in Iraq was cancer.
Drudge has become as mainstream as any media ever was.
“People always ask, ‘So what does Matt Rhoades look like?’” said Kevin Madden, a friend and former Romney spokesman. “I always say, ‘When he wants to meet you, he will call you.’ He is Keyser Soze.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyser_S%C3%B6ze)
For Rhoades, this mystique is politically useful, and he’s not about to dispel it.
“Now that he has a job that he could get famous in,” said Steve Schmidt, his old partner in the Bush-Cheney war room, “it’s the furthest thing from his mind.”
On a recent afternoon, the Romney campaign refused to let a reporter into its three-story headquarters in Boston’s North End. Rhoades was also off-limits. Senior Romney advisers agreed to talk — albeit bloodlessly — about Rhoades in an empty Italian restaurant across the street.
Rhoades is a good manager, a loyal worker and a smart guy, they said. He speaks daily with Romney, gives instructions on how to best manage the stripped-down budget and exudes quiet self-confidence.
(snip)
“This is a very message-driven race,” said Beth Myers, Romney’s closest aide, who served as campaign manager in 2008 and hired Rhoades. “And that is right in his wheelhouse.’’
(snip)
Colleagues later credited Rhoades with significantly damaging Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) by characterizing him as a Francophile flip-flopper. (Rhoades apparently finds Romney’s own fluency in French less bothersome.)
(snip)
Griffin, who was leaving the RNC, invited Rhoades to a steak dinner in Miami with Drudge. At that dinner, Griffin passed the torch to Rhoades as Drudge’s chief connection in the GOP. Exactly how that relationship works is a mystery, but Rhoades’s own stock rose as a result and insiders considered it a coup when Romney hired him as communications director for his last campaign.
(snip)
Some reporters go out of their way to curry favor. “ENGAGED,” read an August posting in Politico’s Playbook announcing Rhoades’s engagement to Jamie Loftus, a McCain campaign veteran. It added that he “popped the question Saturday night on the beach in Siasconset, on Nantucket.”
(snip)
http://mittromneycentral.com/tag/jamie-loftus/
ENGAGED: Matt Rhoades, Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign manager, to Jamie Loftus, chief of public and government affairs for the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey. Loftus, like Rhoades, is an alumnus of the DCI Group. She also worked on the McCain campaign.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCI_Group
Industry Public relations
Lobbying
Founded 1996
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jamie-loftus/7/a22/8bb
Pay to play, baby!
Priceless.
What amazes me is how transparent Drudge has been with his agenda. Years ago I considered Matt a true conservative. He has to still be incredibly rich and already set for life so it bewilders me why he would totally sell out to RINO Romney. If I didn’t know any better, it seems like Drudge wants to destroy the Republican Party.
No kidding, Nana!
Man, the gushing over Romney and shrieks for Huckabee to “GET OUT” because Romney was going to lose to McCain was nauseating here. When Fred dropped out, remember all the posts saying, “I’m a Mitten now! Go Mitt!”? No, I didn’t like McCain, either, but Romney? Yeeesh. I was even called a troll for asking a question about Romney. LOL.
Now I read these things about him, I feel like I need a shower. He really is scum.
I remember you and several other determined posters were trying to educate FR about Romney back then. Thank you for that.
Speaking of which:
I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more
No, I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more
Well, he hands you a nickel
He hands you a dime
He asks you with a grin
If you’re havin’ a good time
Then he fines you every time you slam the door
I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more
And the finale verse:
Well, I try my best
To be just like I am
But everybody wants you
To be just like them
He will definitely will not won without us, I WILL NOT VOTE FOR
ROMNEY, under any circumstances. The GOP thinks we will just fall in
line, NO MORE NOT ME,!!!!,!,!
Mitt Romney is the modern embodiment of Richard Nixon, both in his left-of-center slant and in his ruthless disregard for ethics and honesty. If elected Romney’s slimy and destructive political ambition will damage the Republican party for a generation just like Nixon’s did.
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