Mark Steyn: Newt as the Republican presidential candidate is extremely dismaying to me."

Hugh Hewitt.com ^ | December 1,2011 | Hugh Hewitt

[Hojczyk]

Which is a long way of saying that the best thing that can happen to Newt right now is that the conservative media vet him and do so with great vigor, anticipating every charge and debating every past apostasy and failing. Newt's personal story, marriage to Callista and his conversion are powerful walls against his past poor judgments in his life, but they serve not as all to answer Steyn's charge that Newt "hops and skips like a giddy frog across lily pads across the pond, from one, little, itsy-bitsy novelty idea to another, not awfully well thought out."

"And when I look at some of the things he’s managed to sign onto over the last fifteen years, I find that very worrying," Steyn offered, before doubling down: "The idea of Newt as the Republican presidential candidate is, I have to say, extremely dismaying to me."

I got email last night denouncing Mark Steyn, just as Geraghty got such mail yesterday and I get such email every day --most of it from the anti-Romney fringe who have been serially outraged at journalists covering the serial collapses of the previous anti-Romneys, correspondents who vastly overestimate the influence of the center-right chattering class. Romney's base network of support --his rock-solid 25%-- has been built over years and is holding together and Romney will thus either put the nomination away early or answer the bell for the next thirteen rounds after Iowa and New Hampshire. A extended, vitriolic Newt v. Mitt debate between the two camps will be great for talk radio and cable television, but exhausting, expensive and exhilarating for the Chicago gang.

[Da Bilge Troll]

here come the rats posing as Freepers to get us all screwed up.

Is that what Pelosi was doing in that commercial with Newt? Posing as a Freeper?

[COgamer]

“Romney is a lot worse the Newt and in fact, the GOP candidate I’ll NOT vote for!”

How many affairs and commercials with Nancy Pelosi does Romney have under his belt? Let’s be honest - they’re both unacceptable, but any instrument that measures Newt as better than Romney needs to be re-calibrated. They’re both flip-flopping, RINO hypocrites, but only one of them is (to date) a proven sleezebag.

[hal ogen]

Anybody but nobama. I’d vote for my dog, Dippi, before I’d vote for nobama.

[BunnySlippers]

I agree too. It’s disgraceful.

I’m looking at the prospect of hating the R nominee as much as Obama.