Posted on 03/13/2012 8:36:40 AM PDT by Lazlo in PA
I can’t counter any argument from you because you never gave me any argument. You gave me potpourri. Someone pee in your punchbowl lately?
Your post #55 is absolutely correct. Newt and Santorum should be working together to allow first one, then the other, to run as the only anti-Romney in state-by-state... sort of the way Gingrich backed off in Michigan to let Santorum go one-on-one against Romney.
The pair ought to coalesce as an anti-Mitt, and I think they eventually will.
Hey! I want to call foul here — a foul on both sides.
I'm not writing this to know-nothing yahoos pounding on keyboards in back rooms somewhere. I've been reading Free Republic much longer than I've been posting, and while I don't personally know either C. Edmund Wright or AmericanInTokyo, it's clear that both of you have deep roots in the Republican Party, and not at low levels, either.
I'm guessing that if I knew more about your bios I wouldn't be writing this post because I'd feel ashamed to be criticizing legitimate leaders. (Given where he lives, AmericanInTokyo will understand the concerns of a younger man criticizing older people.) Both of your credentials are much better than mine, and I don't think it will help my reputation on Free Republic to be pointing out stuff like Gerald Ford writing my college recommendation letter or Richard Nixon giving my father post-election awards in 1968 or my mother's ties with Michigan Gov. William Milliken dating back to the 1950s in Traverse City. I burned my bridges with that wing of the Republican Party decades ago.
Now that I've smeared myself with some readers as a compromising weak-kneed RINO based on my background from decades ago that doesn't represent anything I believe today, let me say this — have we gotten to the point that we're attacking people's wives for things that **EVERYBODY** on all sides agrees she repented of more than two decades ago? I'm no moderate, I'm all for hard-hitting bare-knuckle politics, but we need to hit the right target and use the right argument to do so.
To my knowledge there is nobody anywhere on the Republican political spectrum who argues that Mrs. Santorum still thinks its okay to be living in sin with a man or to be an abortionist, and nobody has ever made a credible claim that Rick Santorum supports extramarital relationships. As far as I can tell, all that happened is Rick Santorum agreed to marry a woman with a seriously sinful past who has demonstrated her repentance by the way she's lived her life for the last several decades. Some of us would consider that to be evidence of a remarkably forgiving man.
Also, Mrs. Santorum is not running for office — I'm not saying the Republican attacks on Michelle Obama are totally out of line, but many of them do more harm than good to us. The average voter doesn't like what are perceived as cheap shots, even if they're valid.
On the other hand, those of us who support Rick Santorum need to stop acting as if everything Gingrich has done has been a disaster. He deserves credit, as C. Edmund Wright correctly said, for the 1994 election takeover of the House of Representatives. Virtually **NOBODY** thought there was the remotest possibility of that happening. We're so used to the idea now that Republicans don't have to be a permanent minority working out coalitions with conservative Democrats to get to 50 percent margins that we've forgotten that Gingrich **DOES** deserve credit for a massive victory that upended virtually all of modern House of Representatives history. Gingrich opened the door to an ideologically based two-party system in the House rather than the older de-facto three-party system of coalition “go along to get along” politics we had for many years in the House of Representatives. Greatly reducing the old Southern Democrats as a political force is something for which Gingrich deserves great credit.
I think Gingrich and Santorum supporters need to remember that we **ARE** on the same team. Gingrich may say he's not a team player, but he knows he can't win by himself, and even if he somehow did, he needs others to govern effectively once elected. On the other side, Santorum knows he needs to be willing to break eggs to make omelets — he was part of the anti-corruption Gang of Seven, after all — and he knows how much good Gingrich did to win back the House of Representatives.
I don't have a problem with seeing tapes of Newt Gingrich saying things two decades ago that don't look good. He's a historian, and if he didn't know that his words will be used against him, that's his fault, and if there really are skeletons in his closet it's good to get them out. I've already watched videos of Santorum and Specter together, and that isn't pretty either. We need to see those things now, because we're going to see them this fall used by Barack Obama if either of these men are our Republican nominee.
What I fear is we're going to spend so much time beating up on other that Romney wins the nomination and then Obama wins re-election.
That would be an exceedingly bad outcome if we destroyed two flawed but acceptable conservative candidates and got a nominee who is much worse than either of them.
Andrew Breitbart may be dead, but he appears to still be Freeping!
That sir, is the most reasonable post to me from any Santorum supporter during this entire process. In fact, if so many of the Santorum supporters, including RS himself, didn't walk around acting like that never happened, there would be a helluva lot less venom between the two sides. RS has criticized Newt about 100 fold that Newt has criticized RS - and that has indeed burnt the rear ends of many Newt supporters over the course of the campaign.
On that common ground you stated above however, you and I will get along great even in disagreement.
As far as this statement goes, I'll agree with it too.
Unfortunately the only time I see it lofted is when Santorum supporters finally stand up and start playing by the same rules Newt's supporters have been living by.
I can enter a thread where folks are trashing Santorum, and bring up things about Newt, only to have the Newt supporters tell me we shouldn't be attacking each other.
Say what?
And then there's the issue of one candidate who claims certain things that simply are not true.
One guy trashes Reagan for eight years, then claims he's the heir of Reagan's legacy. One guy actually claims to be that heir, after claiming the Reagan Legacy is dead. One guy claims this candidate saved the U. S. $5 Trillion because he wrote the Contract with America. The Contract with America was written by someone else, with input from a number of politicians in the Republican party, including that one candidate. And the United States only realized about $1.5 trillion during that time frame. And then one of his supporters claims that the Tea Party founding documents were based on a candidates Contract with America, when he didn't write it. And then this team thinks we shouldn't address things from his past. Don't make false claims and expect them to get a free pass. Sorry folks, if candidates want free passes, they shouldn't make false claims, and send their supporters out to trash other candidates.
God bless you and yours!
In 1983 a single woman in her 20s who lived with a man that was in his 60s, and we have to dredge this up so her children will have to read about it in the MSM 29 years later? Really?
Thank heaven Newt’s supporters are above posting this on forums across the internet.
I didn’t need to know the details of this to know it wasn’t something that must be made public. She isn’t running. Her family shouldn’t be made to rehash the embarrassment this represented to them in 1983 again in 2012.
Now, go back out across the forum and remind folks how we need to quit posting things about Newt, because it’s destructive.
Sheesh!
Thank you also, sir... and I mean it.
I truly do believe that conservatives in this campaign run a deadly risk of biting and devouring each other to the point that we all lose.
I know it's hard for us as conservatives to compromise because we, unlike the liberals, really do believe in absolute truth. But if we don't do something very soon we have a disaster coming down the road — we as conservatives **MUST** find a way to accept half a loaf rather than seeing the whole loaf destroyed.
To DoughtyOne, I agree with your perspective as well. There is a contingent of people here on Free Republic who I think love to yell and scream and enjoy fighting — it's not most of the people and probably is a small minority, but it's a significant group because of their volume level. Rick Santorum was not their first target; other candidates have suffered from that same treatment. Well, there's a time and a place for that, and that time is when we're fighting the Democrats, not each other!
Rational debate has a place. Personal attacks do not; they simply embitter people who we need to be able to work with to win this fall.
I realize there has been fault on all sides. I'm not going to get into “he started it first” or “he said worse things than me.”
What I am going to say is it needs to stop or we're going to get Romney, and then we risk getting Obama re-elected.
Not one of us on Free Republic wants that, except maybe a few paid Democratic operatives or Romneybots who are trying to stir stuff up. I think most regular posters here can be taken at face value, so let's stop doing Mitt Romney's work for him by trashing each other, and focus instead on rational reasons to vote for one candidate or the another.
Mitt Romney has plenty of money. He doesn't need our unpaid volunteer help to destroy his opponents.
Since I live in Missouri, I have a caucus this Saturday; Republicans have rented the second-largest off-post venue in the Fort Leonard Wood area. I will go to a Republican club meeting tonight after a local planning and zoning commission adjourns that I need to cover. I live in a county that's known for bitter and divisive bare-knuckle politics, and I am grateful to say that we're not seeing **ANYTHING** in public meetings or private discussions like what I see in the broader Republican Party. I guess maybe we're doing something right in my county, and it's been a long time since I've been able to say that.
You know, you talk a good game. Then you go back 29 years to post personal details about a woman who hadn’t even met her husband that she had six (or more) children with, and you lost me.
I don’t know what your total game here is, but a neutral peace-keeper isn’t part of it.
That was a disgusting thing to do to one of the candidates wives, and that from a position of neutrality? B. S.
I don’t care what other candidate’s wives did 29 years ago, it’s not fair game. And the idea the Democrats would bring something like this out later this year is hogwash. They would suffer a crushing reaction if they did.
????????
Now that is funny! LOL
Another person here on Free Republic said that he would bring out the background of Rick Santorum’s wife, noting that it isn't pretty. I pointed out that has already been done with an article in Newsweek.
My post provided the link to the Newsweek article, summarized the article, and explained why this is something most conservative Christians are going to regard as pre-conversion sin. Karen Santorum’s life for the last two decades gives every appearance of demonstrating that she's repentant.
As the link to the Newsweek article points out, the national media has **ALREADY** jumped on Santorum’s wife for something that has been known to some extent for a long time in pro-life circles.
While I could live with either Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum, I'm not neutral in that race. I voted for Santorum in the Missouri primary last month, I expect to vote for him in the Missouri caucus this Saturday, and support him publicly. I support Rick Santorum because I believe he's the best candidate we have left to defeat Mitt Romney. I have problems with and concerns about some of Rick Santorum’s past views and actions but pre-conversion sin of his wife from a quarter-century ago is not on that list. It is, however, on the agenda of Newsweek Magazine and we need to be prepared to respond to that article.
DoughtyOne, if I had a major problem with Rick Santorum nobody on Free Republic would need to guess what it is. I've listed a number of secondary issues over the last year but believe all of them are minor compared to the problems of Romney, and on balance, I believe Santorum is a better candidate than Gingrich. I can see why someone could support Gingrich rather than Santorum, however, and do so in good conscience.
I hope that explains the situation. I didn't bring out anything that 1) the national media haven't already covered, and 2) which someone else on this thread on Free Republic said he would bring out. What I did do that was different was to explain how I believe Santorum supporters should respond to attacks on Karen Santorum’s background. If Santorum becomes the Republican nominee we need to be prepared to do that.
Yes, (as expressed in) this preceding paragraph I will indeed give him credit.
Both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum bring things to the table, and Gingrich does deserve credit for what he did to win back the House of Representatives and become the first Republican speaker in decades. While both candidates have baggage, I sincerely hope their supporters don't bite and devour each other so badly that Romney ends up being the main beneficiary.
I'm sitting here at my computer tonight, and when I should be writing articles on local government and reviewing the resume of a potential new employee, I'm instead reading Free Republic and listening to election reports which say Rick Santorum won both Mississippi and Alabama. Newt Gingrich is being quoted saying the two conservative candidates got 70-plus percent of the votes in those two states.
Let's all be grateful, regardless of which candidate we supported, that despite our own internal disputes, at least Romney didn't win tonight. In the long run that's more important than my local city council's decisions on things virtually nobody outside my county cares about, but I'm going to be up very late tonight dealing with the consequences of my time management decisions today.
I'm not a professional mediator; pouring oil on troubled waters is close to the opposite of how reporters are trained. We're paid to analyze and explain conflicts, not solve them. As we saw earlier this afternoon, I deserve no credit for any agreement; on the contrary, I put my foot in it and made things worse by linking to Newsweek's article on Karen Santorum.
What counts in the long run is not whether I'm a mediator or whether the three of us can talk politely to each other on the internet, but whether the backers of Santorum and Gingrich can repair our frayed relationships enough to defeat Romney in the primary and Obama in the general election. I have a feeling that Gingrich and Santorum get along considerably better than a lot of their supporters.
Now speaking not just to AmericanInTokyo and C. Edmund Wright but all the rest of the people reading this thread: Let's go out and try to convince our Republican friends and neighbors that Mitt Romney is running in the wrong political party's primary election, and then after that, let's explain why we think our candidate is the best of the two real Republicans on the Republican ballot.
If we do that, maybe we still have a chance of winning this thing.
BTW, sooner or later someone is going to ask why I'm getting involved in explicit political advocacy for a candidate. I almost never take formal public positions backing candidates for political office beyond backing the Republican in nearly all cases, but this election is serious enough that I've made an exception locally for only the fourth time in eight years. Fortunately, it seems to be a pretty popular decision in my area, though I didn't know that when I decided to support Santorum and had actually expected some pretty stiff opposition.
DTM wrote: “On the other hand, those of us who support Rick Santorum need to stop acting as if everything Gingrich has done has been a disaster. He deserves credit, as C. Edmund Wright correctly said, for the 1994 election takeover of the House of Representatives. Virtually **NOBODY** thought there was the remotest possibility of that happening. We're so used to the idea now that Republicans don't have to be a permanent minority working out coalitions with conservative Democrats to get to 50 percent margins that we've forgotten that Gingrich **DOES** deserve credit for a massive victory that upended virtually all of modern House of Representatives history. Gingrich opened the door to an ideologically based two-party system in the House rather than the older de-facto three-party system of coalition “go along to get along” politics we had for many years in the House of Representatives. Greatly reducing the old Southern Democrats as a political force is something for which Gingrich deserves great credit.”
117 posted on Tuesday, March 13, 2012 7:29:15 PM by AmericanInTokyo: “Yes, (as expressed in) this preceding paragraph I will indeed give him credit.”
107 posted on Tuesday, March 13, 2012 2:14:57 PM by C. Edmund Wright: (Responding to my post above): “That sir, is the most reasonable post to me from any Santorum supporter during this entire process. In fact, if so many of the Santorum supporters, including RS himself, didn't walk around acting like that never happened, there would be a helluva lot less venom between the two sides. RS has criticized Newt about 100 fold that Newt has criticized RS - and that has indeed burnt the rear ends of many Newt supporters over the course of the campaign. On that common ground you stated above however, you and I will get along great even in disagreement.”
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