Hundreds of people can be discussing something without any knowledge about whether or not it is true. People believe what they want to believe and in this case, they didn't demand evidence before they started speculating.
After the campaign, McCain's team was blaming Palin for the loss. This became "Romney people" on McCain's campaign, and by now it's Romney people in McCain's campaign while the campaign was still going on.
Politics is a dirty business and just about anything can go on, but there's no evidence beneath all the speculation.
I wouldn't buy a bridge from Mitt Romney, either. He's a slippery character, but he's not the spider at the middle of the web responsible for everything.
About 1996, all you'd have to say is "He ran to the left of Ted Kennedy" and Romney wouldn't have gotten the nomination. His father, who had a much more substantial record couldn't do it, and it was impossible that things would have been different a generation later. Colin Powell had the advantage of being African-American and not being a politician, but he wouldn't have won either.
Revisionist history, I guess, is going to make out that the party was a lot more liberal in the days of Gingrich, but remember, Rush Limbaugh was riding high twenty years ago, and the Republican party wasn't as liberal then as some people have convinced themselves that it was.
Again, you can go back and review the discussions. Some of his most stalwart defenders here wouldn’t accept any evidence of chicanery. You could have a photo of him plunging a knife into Gov. Palin and it wouldn’t be enough.
At no point did I absolve McQueeg’s people, either. There were agendas and counter-agendas. None of these individuals were Conservatives or loyal Republicans of any sort. They were all Derp State operatives and anti-Conservative scum. Palin presented a fresh face, a reformist who took down the Alaskan RINO political machine, had enormous popularity with both parties as an outsider. That had to be destroyed, and each had their own reasons for it. Willard’s was to make sure she could never be the 2012 nominee.
I have never seen that level of hatred, derangement and sabotage of a VICE-Presidential candidate ever... and after a nomination and before the general election. You’d have to go back to 1952 to see something that personal, against Nixon, but this was a whole new level. 2008 gave us a preview of what they do to outsiders running, and not until Trump did we see it again. Again, I can understand attacks on the Presidential nominee, but not like that with a VP.
As I said before, had Willard toppled Ted the Swimmer, he was most certainly going to be the 1996 nominee. It was going to happen. Absent him, if Powell had declared, it was going to be him. Dole was a fallback, but certainly not the candidate that was going to win (at least not after the botched 1995 Government shutdown). How left-wing they were wasn’t going to supersede viability, which is what the party desperately wanted. If anyone had tried to stop Powell, they’d have been deemed a racist. Bubba would’ve had a very difficult time with him. Remember, even against Dole, he still couldn’t get 50% of the vote. Powell was so credibly worrying to the Dems who were concerned he could get 1/3rd of the Black vote. If he did, that would’ve been it for the Dems.