More people need to take this attitude. And I very much appreciate the folks that are taking notice and calling out those that would cross this line of going after candidates on the issues, electability, personal drawbacks, etc. vs. openly lying, personally attacking, and trying to propagate hatred towards many candidates that have done a lot for us over the years.

Thank you guys for making this important point! Keep it up!

First of all, my point is that people need to bring up issues that evaluate a candidate not drag someone into the dirt in the name of political expediency. That still means that you can be very critical of a candidate just don’t say things like “Newt doesn’t really have any conservative accomplishments”, “The conservative movement would be better off without Newt”, etc.

Are you saying that you would knowingly drag a candidate’s career through the dirt and downplay all of their accomplishments for the political expediency of trying to damage their candidacy? Because if you do say yes, shame on you! No matter if its Newt, Perry, Bachmann, Huntsman, etc. don’t drag their past accomplishments(both in policy and in activism) through the dirt just because you don’t want them to be president.

Now that said by any objective measure Newt is a conservative. His ACU rating was a 90 over his career. He has written more than 20 books, delivered thousands of speeches, etc. and the most people can find is a small handful of things where Newt has broken with the conservative movement and he has more than made up for them with hundreds of conservative ideas and thousands of new arguments that are in many cases more effective and equal if not more in quantity than some of our largest think tanks(with hundreds on staff). Anybody that calls Newt not a conservative either A) Thinks that conservatism is the absence of any breaks from the movement(whether mistaken or not) or B) Those that get their opinions of the candidates purely from others and don’t ever spending time looking into the candidates long record themselves(and determining what % they are in agreement with the movement which in the case of Newt would be an extremely high percentage).