"South Carolina turned out to be quite a shock for the Republican Party as Newt Gingrich sailed to an easy victory over Mitt Romney. Gingrich, an historian, knows full well the significance of this victory: no Republican has ever won the nomination without the South Carolina primary under their belt.
However, even more shocked and disturbed was the third estate and ABC News.
The media was sure that the airing of Gingrich’s former wife complaining about his desire of an ‘open marriage’ would destroy Newt at the SC primary. In fact, not only did Newt win, one of his widest margins was in the 18-44 women’s vote, much to the chagrin of ABC.
During this election, the media has consistently played the family and wife card on Republican candidates in order to besmirch and monkey with the election process of the Republican primaries (on a side note, a good argument could be made against ABC for an election tampering case). The played the religion and faux pas mistakes cards on Bachmann, Pawlenty and Perry and went after Cain the most vociferously with unsubstantiated claims of infidelity and basically boorish character flaws.
Unfortunately, up until Gingrich they all fell into the trap of denials and explanations. By doing so, previous candidates validated the media’s claims whether they were true or not, or made the candidates look bad. They put people on the defense and thus gave credibility to the stories, and power to the attacks.
Instead, Newt responded not as a politician would, with denials and explanations’, but as an ordinary American would—he called the media out on their ruthless and despicable acts of yellow journalism. Instead of saying “Yes, that was a mistake in my life, and I’m sorry”, he simply said “Yah I did it, so what? You are a jerk for bringing that up now”.
By responding in this way, he struck not only a major blow against the networks, but against political correctness itself and struck a chord with almost every American who detested the rampant spread of silly and worthless adjustments to popular culture that do nothing but weaken a society. He made neither apologies nor disavowals, he simply defined himself as who is today and burned the media at the stake for their accusations.
Political correctness is the elephant in the room, the subjects we dare not brooch. We have made free speech and acts of normal human nature taboo. We have avoided subjects and hidden our flaws in order to be more accepted in society"
Thomas Purcell
Newt fights! That is the under-reported characteristic the has many Repub voters cheering for him. Like Lincoln who went throught a dozen generals until he got that smoking, drinking, cussing, irreverant General U. S. Grant. He fights!
Thanks, onyx *blushes*