Charlie Crist is the front runner in the Florida Senate race. He is also the incumbent Governor of Florida. By any reasonable measure, including fundraising, the Florida Senate race should be his for the taking.

Except it is not happening for him. Charlie Crist is becoming so desperate that his campaign has descended to farcical parodies of Nixonian tactics. The campaign has decided to attack itself and blame Marco Rubio. We know this because, when caught, their lame cover up proved they were behind everything.

Let’s review from the very beginning.

Marco Rubio announced he would be running for the United States Senate.

Then Charlie Crist got in.

The Chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, Bob Greer, decides to invoke a little known and rarely used rule of the Florida GOP to deny Rubio ballot access in the primary.

Local parties across Florida revolt. Rubio stays in.

Last quarter, Rubio has pretty crummy fundraising numbers relative to Crist. Crist ignored him.

But then something happened. Rubio kept inching up toward Crist in the polls, closing a 40 point gap to right about 14 points. Then his fundraising efforts kicked in and he raised around a million dollars last quarter. Crist is now panicked.

The lame attacks of a man who has never had to run a seriously contested primary kicked in. How they campaign handled the attacks and cover up of the attacks suggests Crist is running an amateur race.

It all started on October 24, 2009, or 5 days ago.

Someone created an account on YouTube and uploaded a video of that Hitler clip that has been circulated endlessly and turned to parody.

Three days later on October 27, 2009, someone created a website called truthaboutrubio.com. That website went live on the morning of October 28, 2009.

Concurrent to all of this going on, Charlie Crist’s errand boy, Senator George LeMieux, who Crist appointed to the Senate to presumptuously keep his seat warm, began telling Senate colleagues to stay tuned as damaging information was going to start flowing about about Rubio. He advised Senators not to go the way of James Inhoffe and Jim DeMint in endorsing Marco Rubio.

The star feature of the website was the Hitler video, with a poll, a post, and a twitter feed accusing Marco Rubio of being behind the Hitler video.

RedState readers scoured the source code of the website and found Rich Heffley’s name and a path directory to his computer associated with one of the image files on the website.

We and a reporter from the St. Petersburg Times called Heffley and within minutes the site was taken down.

Charlie Crist was asked by a reporter yesterday, October 28, if he’d seen the website. Crist said he read about it on the Sayfie Review, a website operated by my friend Justin Sayfie. Interestingly though, Crist knew details about a site that had not even been online for a full day (created on October 27 and launched the morning of October 28) — details like all the articles used were “in the public domain.” How could he know if he’d just read about the site on another website? And even had he perused it briefly, how did he know all the content was in the public domain — something that wasn’t even true?

Eventually, the website came back online.

Heffley’s name was scrubbed. The Hitler video content was also gone.

RedState pointed out that the Hitler video had also been scrubbed from the site and the site violated the copyright of every major news outlet in Florida by running those news outlets’ full content without permission.

Again the site went down. This time the server was not even accessible.

At some point early this morning, the site came back thanking RedState for all the attention and, this time, all the news articles were abbreviated with links to the full text. The website has not denied any of our findings, nor has Rich Heffley.

To add to Charlie Crist’s problems, we know now that Rich Heffley, his campaign consultant who mysteriously was the one major player in the campaign not mentioned in the Hitler video, and Charlie Crist both pay rent to the Republican Party of Florida, operating both the consultant’s office and the campaign office out of the RPOF’s headquarters in Tallahassee.

There was no disclaimer on the website — a requirement under FEC law. Likewise, depending on the arrangements made in the RPOF headquarters, there could be serious coordination issues regarding both the creation of the Hitler parody and the anti-Rubio website.

Importantly, it is equally damning that Senator George LeMieux, hundreds of miles away in Washington, began, at the same time this started happening, began telling his Senate colleagues that damaging information about Marco Rubio was about to start coming out.

What we know is very clear: Charlie Crist, the man who would be Senator, is getting so desperate that his campaign has resorted to exceedingly amateurish attacks and coverups in an effort to derail the Marco Rubio Express.

We also know something else very clear: Looking at the attacks Crist is leveraging against Rubio, there must not be much there. They are of the half-hearted, limp wristed variety that typically do more to show Rubio’s integrity than hurt him. One example is that Rubio, who is anti-gambling, has taken less than $5,000.00 from gambling interests while he was Speaker of the House of Representatives. Did Rubio then change his position on gambling? Not in the least. Compare that to Crist who, depending on the wind, has a different position each day.

If that’s an attack on Rubio, more please.