http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=1AAA5952-7D59-4742-BFF1-721F13BDEF11Rush: Stop whining about attacks
By: MJ Lee
January 30, 2012 03:03 PM EST
Stop the whining — that was the message about “negative campaigning” from Rush Limbaugh on Monday to both the Republican presidential candidates as well as the press.
“I am getting tired of the whining about negative campaigning. I’m getting tired of the whining from everybody about it. Not just the candidates, I’m getting tired hearing about it from everyone,” Limbaugh said on his radio show. “What in the world is politics? What is it, if not this?”
The conservative radio show host began by calling out Tom Brokaw for recently requesting that Mitt Romney’s campaign pull an ad that features footage of the NBC News correspondent from the 1990s.
The anti-Newt Gingrich commercial, which NBC News and Brokaw have both objected to, features a clip of the former anchor of the “Nightly News” from Jan. 1997 discussing the former House speaker being found guilty in a House ethics probe.
Limbaugh said on his show Monday that NBC News and Brokaw should be less concerned about the fact that Romney’s campaign was using the clip, but rather that their reporting had been “misleading.”
“He was factually wrong about Gingrich. Gingrich was only found guilty of one ethics violation out of 84 that the Democrats brought. It was a technicality if there ever was a technicality, but apparently Brokaw and NBC aren’t embarrassed that their reporting was misleading,” Limbaugh said. “They’re just upset that Romney’s using it. Maybe Brokaw wants a stipend. Who knows.”
And Limbaugh’s disdain didn’t stop with NBC News and Brokaw – the talk show host also gave Gingrich and the other Republican candidates a piece of his mind.
“Newt is really caught up in this notion that Romney is saying things about him that aren’t true,” he said. “I’m telling you, I’m having a tough time relating to being upset about that. As someone who is routinely lied about every day and has been for 25 years, it comes with the territory.”
The radio host also warned that the complaints that the Republican candidates have recently made about each other are nothing compared to what’s to come in the general election.
“I don’t know if that is a ploy for sympathy or what, but what in the world do either of these two guys think is going to happen when either one of them ends up facing Obama?” he said. “I don’t care who’s telling lies in the Republican campaign, they are pikers compared to what’s going to happen when the Democrat campaign begins.”
