Here are three reasons you can count on tonight’s Republican debate being a lively one.

a) The latest poll shows Romney retaking the lead over Gingrich. Newt is always more feisty in the underdog role.

b) Gingrich has the entire Republican establishment battling him. They understand that a Gingrich win in the primary, not only guarantees an Obama victory in November but just about rips open the Republican party. Gingrich needs to win Florida to keep the momentum going…and the cash flowing in.

c) They’re allowing the crazies in the audience to applaud and boo at tonight’s show and no one plays an audience better than Gingrich.

In the preshow war of words Romney got things rolling by questioning Newt’s mental state.

He’s gone from pillar to post almost like a pinball machine, from item to item in a way which is highly erratic…It does not suggest a stable, thoughtful course, which is normally associated with leadership.”

Moon-man Gingrich fired back.

“We are not going to beat Barack Obama with some guy who has Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island accounts, owns shares of Goldman Sachs who have foreclosed on Florida and is himself a stock holder in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while he tries to think the rest of us are too stupid to put the dots together and understand what this is all about,” Gingrich declared in a preamble to a decidedly angry stump speech.

“In 1992, he gave money to Democrats for Congress,” he added at another point. “He voted in the Democratic primary for Paul Tsongas, the most liberal candidate. This is the man who stood up the other night and questioned my credentials as a Reaganite? This is the kind of gall they have, to think we are so stupid and we are so timid that we will let someone who voted for Paul Tsongas -– in 1994 he is running for the U.S. Senate to the left of Teddy Kennedy. Do you know how hard it is to run to the left of Teddy Kennedy? And he says, ‘You know, I don’t want to go back to the Reagan-Bush years, I was an independent then.’”

“He won’t tell you that now, because he is counting on us not having YouTube,” Gingrich said. “That’s how much he thinks we are stupid. And we are not stupid. The message we should give Mitt Romney is: we aren’t that stupid and you aren’t that clever.”

All of which has hardcore conservatives saying stuff like this:

I am a firm believer that primaries make stronger candidates. But at some point you just have to stand back, take a sip of bourbon, and sigh “Damn” under your breath as you behold the carnage being wrought within the Republican Party.

How pretty is that?

Very.

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It appears that the South Carolina verdict is forcing Romney to start taking Gingrich seriously.

“We’re not choosing a talk show host, we’re choosing a leader,” Romney said, saying that their nominee should exhibit “integrity,” “sobriety,” and “ethics.”

He called Gingrich a “failed leader” as Speaker who “had to resign in disgrace” and criticized his work as a highly paid consultant for Freddie Mac in his years out of office. “He said he was just a historian there,” Romney said. “I’d like him to release his records there.”

Gingrich was able to take South Carolina by expertly flipping any criticism about his character and past into an attack on the media and the left. In a game where perception is everything and integrity takes a back seat to hubris, it’s not what one has actually done that counts but rather the manner in which one denies having done any wrong. Romney’s poor performance in that regard was his downfall in South Carolina. He came off as weak and defensive in defending his role at Bain Capital and was unable to articulate in a convincing manner his reluctance to release his tax records.  As for Gingrich, he was able to deflect the issue of his gross hypocrisy and infidelities by deftly going on the offensive with blows to CNN’s John King and the mainstream media. After that, it was game over.

And so, the call for Romney to remove the mittens has begun.

Another reason why Gingrich won is that Romney has been playing it safe, believing that the nomination will be his, and that he can train his fire on President Obama. That thought should be banished from Romney’s head; he has to use the upcoming contests to decisively put away his competition. He can do so by going on the offensive against Gingrich, who actually represents a target-rich environment for Romney. Romney has to campaign as though he is a million votes behind, so that commentators will stop talking about how Romney might feel that he is entitled to the nomination, and so that they will start talking instead about the grit and fire which Romney needs to display from here on out.

Romney has the backing of the Republican establishment to take out Gingrich as quickly as he can. The thought of Newt possibly winning the nomination is creating serious headaches for every thinking conservative who hopes to defeat Barack Obama in November.

If Gingrich wins Florida, the Republican Establishment is going to have a meltdown that makes Three Mile Island look like a marshmallow roast. Why? Because the Establishment will be staring down the barrel of two utterly unpalatable choices. On the one hand, Gingrich’s national favorable-unfavorable ratings of 26.5 and 58.6 percent, respectively make him not just unelectable against Obama but also mean that he would likely be a ten-ton millstone around the necks of down-ballot Republican candidates across the country. And on the other, Romney will have shown in two successive contests—one in a bellwether Republican state, the other in a key swing state—an inability to beat his deeply unpopular rival. If this scenario unfolds, the sound of GOP grandees whispering calls for a white knight, be it Indiana governor Mitch Daniels (who, conveniently, is delivering the Republican response to Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night) or Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan or even Jeb Bush, will be deafening.

Tonight’s debate will indicate whether Mitt Romney is willing to take the fight to Gingrich face to face. Tune in, it should be interesting.

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Here’s what you missed:

Santorum, Paul and Perry – more of the same.

Gingrich was in fine form giving the raucous conservative crowd exactly what they wanted – red meat. Tainted and slimy? Of course. Is there any other kind offered at a Republican debate? Oh, and in case you were not aware, Gingrich Perry  informed the world that, “South Carolina is at war with this federal government.”  SC Gov. Nikki Haley nodded in agreement. To the barricades!

As for Romney, the following observation by a conservative blogger pretty much sums up not only Romney’s performance in the debate but it also gives an apt description of the essence of the man.

So far I’m pretty horrified.  The low point was when Santorum asked Romney if Romney believed that felons who had completed their sentence should be allowed to vote.  Romney froze and tried to change the subject since apparently Romney didn’t know what he was supposed to pretend to believe.

Nice.

As for the audience in attendance last night, they booed when it was mentioned that Romney’s father was born in Mexico. Some people just can’t hate enough.

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The ABC Republican debate last night was a bust as no one was willing to go after Romney with any degree of conviction.  This morning’s NBC debate was a different affair.  Great television as Huntsman, Gingrich and Santorum walked in with a rumble in mind and faced Mitt Romney head on. It brought about some of the better lines heard at any of the debates.

Santorum vs. Romney

This skirmish dealt with Romney’s repeated claim that he’s not a career politician.  Note Romney’s straight-faced, ludicrous claim that he had no desire to serve a second term as Massachusetts’ governor. And listen for the “Run again? That would be about me?” assertion from Romney which should win the Chutzpah Award, if one existed, for brazen bullshit.

Gingrich vs. Romney

Romney’s “politics for me is not a career” was too much for Gingrich to let pass.  Here was his honest and brutal appraisal of Romney, the ‘non-politician’.

I find Gingrich to be one notch below disgusting but you had to love his honesty on this one.  And what was Romney thinking when he shot off this line about his father’s advice to him on entering politics?

“Mitt, never get involved in politics if you have to win an election to pay a mortgage.”

Really?  The implication here was that anyone from the middle class wishing to enter politics might want to reconsider.  In the Romney household, politics is a career reserved for the well-to-do.

Another Romney $10,000 bet moment from the Richie Rich of Republican politics.

Huntsman vs. Romney

This next confrontation produced the best line of the debate…perhaps the best line of all the debates.

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The boxing gloves are on and the fun level has just gone up a notch.

“This is a man whose staff created the PAC, his millionaire friends fund the PAC, he pretends he has nothing to do with the PAC – it’s baloney. He’s not telling the American people the truth.

“It’s just like this pretense that he’s a conservative. Here’s a Massachusetts moderate who has tax-paid abortions in ‘Romneycare,’ puts Planned Parenthood in ‘Romneycare,’ raises hundreds of millions of dollars of taxes on businesses, appoints liberal judges to appease Democrats, and wants the rest of us to believe somehow he’s magically a conservative.

“I just think he ought to be honest with the American people and try to win as the real Mitt Romney, not try to invent a poll-driven, consultant-guided version that goes around with talking points, and I think he ought to be candid. I don’t think he’s being candid and that will be a major issue. From here on out from the rest of this campaign, the country has to decide: Do you really want a Massachusetts moderate who won’t level with you to run against Barack Obama who, frankly, will just tear him apart? He will not survive against the Obama machine.”

Gingrich has taken a beating at the expense of Romney’s PAC attack ads and it’s showing.  If the polls are right and Romney wins Iowa with Gingrich taking 4th position, the next couple of debates should be interesting.  Expect Gingrich to go full throttle against Romney, who is every bit the lying, duplicitous, poll-driven politician Gingrich says he is.

Yes, I know…pot, kettle, etc., but Gingrich’s words are true nonetheless.

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Whatever happens in Iowa come January 3, the next Republican debate should be a doozy. Here’s Newt Gingrich unloading on Ron Paul.

“I think Barack Obama is very destructive to the future of the United States. I think Ron Paul’s views are totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American,” Gingrich said Tuesday in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer.

Could he vote for Paul? “No.” If it came down to Paul vs. Obama? “You’d have a very hard choice at that point.”

“As people get to know more about Ron Paul, who disowns 10 years of his own newsletter, says he didn’t really realize what was in it, had no idea what he was making money off of, had no idea that it was racist, anti-Semitic, called for the destruction of Israel, talked about a race war – all of this is a sudden shock to Ron Paul?” he asked. “There will come a morning people won’t take him as a serious person.”

With Paul now leading in Iowa (Romney’s in second with everyone else but Huntsman tied in third position), the spotlight is now on the cranky old man with the radical positions and the bigoted past.  To hear Paul disavow any knowledge of the content of newsletters which earned him a little fortune ($1 million or more), does serious damage to his credibility.  It’s a point which Gingrich, Bachmann and Perry will hammer away at over the next while.

Interestingly, a poll released this week shows that only 51 percent of Paul’s supporters come from the Republican side of the ledger.  That compares with Romney’s 87 percent and Gingrich’s 85 percent Republican support.  The breakdown for Paul supporters in New Hampshire is as follows: 13% Republican, 36 % independents and 26% Democrats.  No other candidate attracts non-Republicans like Paul does.

Is Ron Paul going to win this thing?  Not likely…but here’s an interesting thought to ponder:

[A] semi-successful Paul 2012 run means that there is now a whole network of party activists who love the Paul brand and know the ropes. They’re ready to go if Kentucky Senator Rand Paul – Ron’s son – wants to run. He’s also a fairly pure libertarian in many ways and could easily pick up that wing of the party. If the social conservatives burn out in 2012 and 2016, by running against Democrats during the peak of the business cycle, then the GOP may be ready to let Rand Paul run in 2020 and he might win. The real legacy of Paul’s 2012 primary run may be laying the groundwork for Rand Paul presidency.

Chew on that.

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Andrew Sullivan over at The Dish made the decision last week to endorse Ron Paul over Jon Huntsman (although, smart conservative that he is, he’s still voting Obama in November).  You can read the reasons behind his Paul endorsement here, but it all comes down to Ron Paul being the least crazy of the crazies as well as the belief that Huntsman has zero chance of becoming the nominee.

Well, many Dish readers took exception to Sullivan’s endorsement believing that he erred in choosing the more popular Paul over the pragmatic and more electable Huntsman.  The following letter makes a compelling argument…and it also made me laugh.

While I agree that Paul is far more attractive than the rest of the field, that is damning with the faintest of praise. His problem is still the same – he clings to ideology divorced from reality. If he were to become president and actually governed according to his beliefs, it would be an unmitigated disaster for this country. He would eviscerate the economy and cripple government. At least Romney is just faking his radical beliefs, but Paul, Gingrich, Bachmann, Cain and Perry actually believe that what they advocate for the country makes sense.

True, true and true.  But here’s the part I really love.

At first glance, it may seem that Paul is the only person riding in the clown car who is a real human being – a civilized, dress-suited adult, out of place in a tiny car full of face painted fools with curly wigs. But no. Look down at Paul’s shoes: they are red and about 5 sizes too big.

Beautiful and perfectly stated.

I’ve written a number of times that there is much about Paul for one to admire – not the least being one’s sense that the man is in it for his beliefs, so very unlike most politicians who come off as self-serving grifters willing to sell their souls for a pocketful of votes.  Not so, Ron Paul.  To hear him speak is to understand that his beliefs, all of them, are not for sale at any price.

But it is many of those same beliefs which make Paul unsuitable for the presidency. His apparent unwillingness to moderate some of his more radical policy proposals (e.g. eliminate Dept. of Education/Energy/Health and Human Services, the Federal Aviation Administration, IRS, massive $1 trillion budget cut in the first year, etc.) make Paul a dangerous man.

As that same Dish reader wrote:

I would love to sit down over beers with Paul and talk politics. It would be fun. I’d learn a lot. I’d laugh, I’d cry, I’d be deeply moved. But I don’t what him anywhere near the federal budget. The person I want making tough decisions about what to cut is the only guy in the race with experience doing it: Huntsman. The only person I want navigating the dangerous and murky waters of our relationship with China is the one person with experience doing it: Huntsman.

Yes, do look down at Ron Paul’s shoes.  They are red and five sizes too big.

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A HuffPo reader explains Mitt Romney’s reluctance to speak to the press.

You have to know this guy is not dumb… But he is tired of acting like global climate change does not exist, acting like the earth is 6,000 years old, acting like he does not want to expand healthare coverage for more Americans, acting like he does not think the top 1 percent should pay more in taxes, acting like he does not support the dream act and acting like he wants to put women in prison who have abortions.

The teapublica­ns have driven the right so far to the right, their leading candidate would rather just NOT TALK.

True.  Romney is putting on an act which isn’t fooling a lot of people.  The man is intelligent, informed, a moderate conservative and desperately wants to be president at a time when the Republican party has shifted so far to the right that even Ronald Reagan, should he be running today, would be derided by the base.  So what you end up with is the Mitt Romney we see today – a man who has sold out on his personal beliefs in hope of calling the White House home.

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Another day, another GOP debate.  This one was actually entertaining and informative. Gingrich had a good performance and was impressive with his stand on illegal immigration.

If you’re here – if you’ve come here recently, you have no ties to this country, you ought to go home. period. If you’ve been here 25 years and you got three kids and two grandkids, you’ve been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church, I don’t think we’re going to separate you from your family, uproot you forcefully and kick you out.

Romney and Bachmann took exception to Newt’s stand and showed that they’d have no remorse in ripping families apart and shipping old folks to wherever they came from.  Romney is so desperate in coming off as a hard-assed conservative that he’s coming off as a complete asshole.  The problem here, of course, is that he’s on the right side of the issue as far as the base is concerned.  Perry took a lot of flack for supporting in-state tuition for illegal immigrants which is why you can expect Gingrich to backtrack on his position in the next couple of days.  Remember, all that matters to these guys is winning, winNING, WINNING.

Ron Paul also had a good night.  As I’ve written before, if there was a way to extract the 50% crazy from Paul and keep the rest, he’d be a powerful force in U.S. politics.  His willingness to stand up to old establishment beliefs is a refreshing change from soulless politicians of the Romney type.

Jon Huntsman, the sanest man in the room, had another decent performance but it does not seem likely he’ll be able to build up enough momentum to bolt his way out of the cuckoo’s nest.

Michele Bachmann is simply crazy.  Last night she claimed that President Obama “changed the course of history” by not dealing with Iran as she saw fit.  Sure…whatever.

Perry is history.

Santorum. Yawn.

As for Herman Cain, well, he did nothing to change the image he’s unwittingly crafted over the last number of weeks.  He lived up to his shallow, know-nothing, buffoon persona perfectly.

What made last night’s debate even more enjoyable for me, was the live blogging by The Guardian’s man in D.C., Richard Adams.  The man is quick, witty and funny.  Here’s a sampling.

8.12pm: Mitt Romney says: “I’m Mitt Romney and yes Wolf that is my first name.” No it’s not! Mitt Romney’s first name is in fact Willard. Flip-flop! His first of the night.

8.37pm: Asked about Afghanistan, Mitt Romney runs off a bunch of numbers, showing off really, but sounds like the management consultant that he is.

Now he’s using Indonesia as an example of what to do in Afghanistan. As if there is any comparison between the two countries. Other than they are actually countries.

8.53pm:  Here’s he is. It’s about supporting Israel in a strike against a nuclear-armed Iran. Herman Cain says yes he would if the Israelis had a well-thought out business plan including franchise openings throughout the Middle East. I’m joking but not by much. Cain would expect Israel to share its plans with the US. Maybe not.

Now Herman Cain is banging on about the “mountainous terrain” in Iran which would apparently make bombing its nuclear facilities more difficult. Seriously.9.00pm: Hey, Paul Wolfowitz has been let out of his lead-lined cell to appear in public once more and ask a question here. He looks in good shape.

9.21pm:  Michele Bachmann is very excited at the thought that since China owns US government debt, it earns the interest from the debt. And it (maybe) uses that money to pay for its military! So, according to Michele Bachmann logic, the US should just save time and bomb itself now.

9.44pm: Romney says of 25-year illegal immigrants, “that’s the extreme example”. So will you throw them out, asks Wolf. “I’m not going to draw lines on who gets to stay and who gets to go,” replies Romney and retreats into blather about sealing the border.

Once again Mitt doesn’t want to be pinned down to actual things, like his first name. Mitt? Willard? Who knows, he just doesn’t want to be pinned down.

9.51pm: Now it’s a question from famous torture-enabler David Addington. Is the Heritage Foundation some sort of retirement home for ageing neo-cons?

Cute. They ask Herman Cain what he thinks about a “no-fly” zone against Syria. And he even answers, saying he’d “talk to our allies in the region”. Sadly, no one asks the obvious question: which allies in particular, Herman? Turkey? Denmark? Madeupistan?

And on it goes…

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“Watching Rick Perry fail to recall the third part of his own answer in tonight’s debate was like seeing a thoroughbred get euthanized on the track after a fall. It was shocking, grisly and impossible to look away. Seems like the race is over for this horse.” ~Adam Sorensen

That was an ugly 50 seconds of television no matter which side you’re rooting for.  I actually found myself feeling sorry for the man, hoping he’d come up with whatever it was he wanted to say, and, unlike Sorensen, I did look away for a second or two.  If someone is going to screw up, I’d rather it be for something they’ve said or done as opposed to something as human and unintentional as a case of brain freeze.  There is much about Perry to criticize and mock.  This specific incident isn’t one of them.

Cain was asked last night what he’d do to make sure that the financial disaster Italy is experiencing does not adversely affect the U.S. financial system.  His response…

“Just like a dollar must be a dollar when we wake up in the morning, just like 60 minutes is in an hour, a dollar must be a dollar.”

[...]

“This administration has done nothing but put stuff in the caboose, and it’s not moving this economy.”

Laugh or cry, it’s a toss-up.  The man is clueless and appears to have no interest in being otherwise.  And as long as conservatives like the idiots in last night’s audience who applauded his every word, refuse to ask more of the Herman Cains of the Republican party, politician’s like Cain and Palin will continue to stand front and center of the party.

For the few conservatives who do understand the damage being done by conservatives like Herman Cain, it’s a major concern.  Here is how Peter Wehner, a conservative who has worked in the Reagan and Bush (1 and 2) administrations, expressed it.

I understand early on there was a certain freshness to Cain’s style. But we’ve now had several months in which we’ve been able to watch Cain in debates, during interviews, and at center stage, raising this question: Has any recent major presidential candidate shown as little mastery of the basics, when it comes to policy matters, as Cain? … Yet some defenders of Cain actually celebrate his lack of knowledge, portraying it as a virtue, a sign that he’s an outsider, a non-establishment figure, authentic, the appealing anti-politician.

But this has very little to do with whether or not one is a slick, pre-packaged politician and has everything to do with whether an individual who seeks to be president has taken the time to study, even minimally study, the urgent issues facing our nation.

…

In the 1980s, one of the Republican Party’s main sources of attraction to younger conservatives like myself was its growing reputation for intellectual seriousness … The way such things happen is by rewarding intellectual excellence among those vying for the presidency rather than making excuses for their lack of knowledge.

Today’s Tea Party Republicans just don’t get it…or just don’t care.

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