Newt Versus Newt

Newt Gingrich wants to horsewhip activist judges, but not the one he’s asking to intervene and overturn Virginia’s law regarding qualifications for the Republican presidential primary.

This is the classic neocon game of contradiction — “These are our eternal principles! — Until they aren’t.”

Gingrich was too lazy to meet the state’s very routine ballot requirements, so now he’s going to whine to some judge — whom he will threaten to subpoena, no doubt, if he loses.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Cuccinelli, who has just announced his intention to run for governor in 2013, stumbled coming out of the gate by siding with Gingrich. Cuccinelli has campaigned in the past as a defender of the Constitution and the Rule of Law — but not when it comes to cronies, apparently.

Update: The 2013 battle is on in Virginia. Cuccinelli’s most prominent opponent in the GOP primary is Lt. Governor Bill Bolling levels a barrage at Cuccinelli’s intrusion into the 2012 GOP presidential primary: “Whether you like Virginia’s current system or not is a fair debate for future elections, but I don’t understand how you can change the rules in the middle of this election process. If you do that it would be unfair to those candidates who qualified for the ballot in accordance with the law and the rules that had previously been established. You can’t change the rules in the middle of the game just because you don’t like the result. That doesn’t seem fair or legally correct to me.”

Update 2: Cuccinelli has seen the error of his ways and changed his mind: “Just 24 hours after imploring Virginia legislators to pass emergency legislation opening the primary up to the rest of the field, Cuccinelli now feels ‘that changing the rules midstream is inconsistent with respecting and preserving the rule of law,’ he said in a statement.”

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6:12 pm on December 31, 2011