As my latest Townhall column prophesies, the New Media tanks have begun to roll in an effort to suppress those grassroots social conservatives in the GOP who heretofore have refused to bow at the altar of the Republican Establishment.

Hugh Hewitt leads the charge with his latest post today:

Huckabee’s lunge left may not have been premeditated, but it clearly displayed a candidate with no anchor in the GOP’s tradition of fiscal restraint, free trade and low taxes and a very limited understanding of the world’s most dangerous forces. 

. . . . .

As actual voting approaches, GOP regulars have to ask themselves who can beat either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama.  Mike Huckabee will never rally the GOP base to his standard given his populist rhetoric –the sort of nonsense that President Bush and every GOP nominee since Reagan has blasted away at.

Hugh’s committment to the GOP status quo is mind boggling given his leadership in the formation of the New Media. The bumper sticker on the back of Hugh’s tank reads: No fresh thinking allowed in the GOP.

I don’t know if this will “help” or hurt Huckabee, but I couldn’t help but smile watching it!

HT: Crunchy Con

Writing for RealClearPolitics.com, liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne says Huckabee “has exposed a fault line in the Republican coalition,”and proceeds to precisely diagnose what ails the Republican establishment:

The old religious right is dying because it subordinated the actual views of its followers to short-term political calculations. The white evangelical electorate is tired of taking orders from politicians who care more about protecting the wealthy than ending abortion, more about deregulation than family values.

. . . . .

If you had to bet, you’d wager that the Republican establishment will eventually crush Huckabee. But the rebellion he is leading is a warning to Republicans. The faithful are restive, tired of being used, and no longer willing to do the bidding of a crowd that subordinates Main Street’s values to Wall Street’s interests.

Dionne’s prognostications sound similar to a previous post of my own.

On Sunday’s editorial page, the Dallas Morning News endorsed Mike Huckabee for the Republican presidential nomination:

The endorsement describes Governor Huckabee as “a pragmatic, compassionate conservative,” with “a respectable record of fiscal responsibility in Arkansas” and a candidate whose “core foreign policy convictions” make him “a standard conservative.”

Governor Huckabee is a conservative who understands the working poor:

A liberal Arkansas professor told The New York Times Magazine that Mr. Huckabee was a good governor. ”When he first came to office, people like me were worried about the religious aspect,” she said. “And he is very orthodox on gays, guns and God. But he knows there’s more than just these issues.”

Indeed. Mr. Huckabee has a stout heart for working families and the poor, which as governor got him crossways with some Republicans. Though his strident criticism of free trade is misguided, the economically moderate Mr. Huckabee seems particularly attuned to the anxieties ordinary Americans face in this era of rapid change.

The Dallas Morning News also emphasized Governor Huckabee’s record on race, something that will haunt the Romney campaign:

And he is one social conservative who’s acutely aware of the call to racial healing. In 1997, when Little Rock Central High commemorated integration’s 40th anniversary, Gov. Huckabee delivered a magnificent speech about race, justice and reconciliation that left many in the audience weeping.

It was a profound and profoundly moving address, and it revealed an unusual gift for leadership. Plain-spoken and eloquent, Mr. Huckabee strikes us as decent, principled and empathetic to the views and concerns of others – an antidote to the power-mad partisanship that has led U.S. politics to a dispiriting standstill.

In an editorial the New York Times describes as “quite extraordinary,” The Concord Monitor on Sunday published its “anti-endorsement” of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, saying in part:

If you followed only his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, you might imagine Romney as a pragmatic moderate with liberal positions on numerous social issues and an ability to work well with Democrats. If you followed only his campaign for president, you’d swear he was a red-meat conservative, pandering to the religious right, whatever the cost. Pay attention to both, and you’re left to wonder if there’s anything at all at his core.

The Politico reports on Mitt Romney’s rather “paltry record on life,”

Why are conservatives having such a hard time believing Romney? His recent comments about his abortion record as governor of Massachusetts provide a clue.

“I came down on the side of life [in] every single instance as governor of Massachusetts.”

So declared Romney at the recent CNN/YouTube Republican presidential debate.

. . . .

Unfortunately, an examination of Romney’s record on life issues reveals a much more nuanced record than Romney likes to admit. Herewith a partial account:

• Romney’s universal health insurance plan, which he often touts as the signature achievement of his governorship, allows women to have an abortion for a $50 co-pay. Even worse, the plan does not include any exceptions, which means Massachusetts taxpayers are forced to fund abortion-on-demand.

In an interview for TIME magazine as a part of its “Person of the Year” cover story Vladamir Putin told the editors:

First and foremost we should be governed by common sense. But common sense should be based on moral principles first. And it is not possible today to have morality separated from religious values. I will not expand, as I don’t want to impose my views on people who have different viewpoints.

Sounds eerily similar to what Mitt Romney recently told the country:

It is important to recognize that while differences in theology exist between the churches in America, we share a common creed of moral convictions. And where the affairs of our nation are concerned, it’s usually a sound rule to focus on the latter – on the great moral principles that urge us all on a common course.

Politico, with the help of the Romney Campaign, has dug up two witnesses to support Mitt Romney’s claim that his father, former Michigan Governor George Romney, “saw” his father march with Martin Luther King, Jr. Interesting, isn’t it, that after the Romney campaign has spent two days reframing Mitt’s recollection as “figuratively” speaking, they now have found two witnesses who counter their own spin! LOL

One of the witnesses says both the governor and Martin Luther King walked right past her “hand in hand,”

Shirley Basore, 72, says she was sitting in the hairdresser’s chair in wealthy Grosse Pointe, Mich., back in 1963 when a rumpus started and she discovered that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and her governor, George Romney, were marching for civil rights — right past the window.

With the cape still around her neck, Basore went outside and joined the parade.

“They were hand in hand,” recalled Basore, a former high-school English teacher. “They led the march. We all swung our hands, and they held their hands up above everybody else’s.”

This account, however, appears to be a case of time lapse embellishment. There is absolutely no historical record of George Romney ever marching with MLK:

Susan Englander, assistant editor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University, who is editing the King papers from that era, told the Globe yesterday: “I researched this question, and indeed it is untrue that George Romney marched with Martin Luther King.”

Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jason L. Riley has called out Mitt Romney for skirting questions about the LDS Church’s racist past. This from his op/ed in the December 21 issue of the Wall Street Journal:

In 1978, Mitt Romney was a 31-year-old vice president at Bain & Co. and a lifelong devout Mormon. Throughout his current campaign for the Republican nomination, Mr. Romney has declined to distance himself from the repugnant racial teachings of his church.

On “Meet the Press” last Sunday, the candidate was asked by Tim Russert if “it was wrong for your faith to exclude [blacks] as long as it did.” Mr. Romney dodged the question, instead stating: “I told you where I stand. My view is that there–there’s, there’s no discrimination in the eyes of God, and I could not have been more pleased to see the change that occurred.”

In his ballyhooed speech earlier this month, Mr. Romney said he wouldn’t renounce any of Mormonism’s precepts. He also implied that questions like Mr. Russert’s come too close to a “religious test” for public office that the Constitution explicitly forbids. But in a country with America’s racial past, Mr. Russert’s question isn’t a religious test. It’s due diligence. And for all his claims to the contrary, Mr. Romney has, in fact, been willing to distance himself from past teachings of the church–just not those having to do with its treatment of black people.

“Look, the polygamy, which was outlawed in our church in the 1800s, that’s troubling to me,” he told “60 Minutes” in May. “I must admit, I can’t imagine anything more awful than polygamy.” Gee, I can.

The media has forced Romney to personally address the question of whether or not his father actually “marched with Martin Luther King” as he asserted in his “Faith in America” speech at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, a claim which he also reiterated on Meet the Press with Tim Russert. A Detroit Free Press article says there is no evidence that George Romney, the former governor of Michigan EVER “marched with Martin Luther King.”

Frank Lockwood at the Arkansas-Democrat Gazette reports that Romney told the Boston Globe in 1978, “My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit.” It never happened according to long time Detroit civil rights activist Arthur Johnson who was with King at the Detroit March in 1963.

Romney’s defense against this misrepresentation is to parse the word “saw,” meaning he didn’t actually “see” his father march with MLK; rather he “saw him in the sense of being aware of his (George Romney’s) participation in that great effort.”

But this just digs the hole deeper. Romney chooses to make the story about what he did or didn’t actually see, as if what he claims to have seen actually did take place. The real story is that what Romney claims to have seen, which he now claims not to have actually seen with his eyes, could not have been seen because it NEVER took place.

The Boston Globe reports,

Susan Englander, assistant editor of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University, who is editing the King papers from that era, told the Globe yesterday: “I researched this question, and indeed it is untrue that George Romney marched with Martin Luther King.”

While meeting with reporters on Thursday Romney chalked his misrepresentation up to “a missed word” and getting the story “slightly wrong.” Sleight of hand is more like it.