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 ...
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.
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