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Meet The Press

MR. GREGORY: You’ve been more pointed when you talk about in favor of Governor Romney. You say he will never embarrass you. Do you think Newt Gingrich will embarrass the party?

GOV. CHRISTIE: I think Newt Gingrich has embarrassed the party over time. Whether he’ll do it again in the future, I don’t know. But Governor Romney never has.

MR. GREGORY: You say he’s embarrassed the party. How and where do you worry he might do it again that makes him unelectable?

GOV. CHRISTIE: Well, listen, David, we all know the record. I mean, he was run out of the speakership by his own party. He was fined $300,000 for ethics violations. This is a guy who’s had a very difficult political career at times and has been an embarrassment for the party. You remember these times, you were here. So the fact of the matter is, I don’t need to regale the country with that entire list again except to say this. I’m not saying he will do it again in the future, but sometimes past is prologue.

It’s funny, not long ago Franklin County Presiding Commissioner, John Griesheimer, used those exact words to describe Sen. Brian Nieves (R-26) to me. “He has been an embarrassment for the party.” The thing is, Griesheimer, like Christie, doesn’t fully appreciate how radicalized the Republican base has become. There’s simply no more room for moderates in today’s GOP. The Reagan era is over.

Players like Nieves and Gingrich get it, and are more than happy to provide tons of red meat for their own narcissistic gain and to hell with the establishment. In the case of Nieves, he has little else to offer the party faithful but fear and victimhood, virtual catnip for the persecuted conservative who is afraid of everything from Muslims to Medicare. Gingrich, on the other hand, has a few ideas. They’re just awful ideas.

Moderate Republicans who embraced the teabaggers and the fire breathers back when they were blessedly re-branding conservatism after George W. Bush so thoroughly discredited it (I thought irreversibly at the time) must have figured they’d be able to rein them in once the elections were over. But they appear to have unleashed a Kraken of radicalism in their ranks that is threatening to devour them instead.