So the new line of attack against Mitt Romney is that if you expect him to pay you and you don’t give value for his money he’s going to put a stop to it.

Newt wasn’t the only one pushing this crap. Perry is just as guilty.

“Mitt Romney’s going to have a hard time coming into South Carolina and making the people here think that he’s anything other than just a rich Wall Streeter who took advantage of their businesses.

People lost their jobs, they lost their pensions, they lost a lot.

…. shutting down these businesses — with the only real reason that most people can see — was so that Bain Capital could profit and he could get richer.

That’s not going to sell in South Carolina.”

Perry’s camp is also schlocking a ringtone beating up Romney on this issue.

And now there’s a full-blown controversy, because since Gingrich and Perry started in with the Romney-as-Gordon-Gekko attacks Romney has responded thusly…

“I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. … You know, if someone doesn’t give me a good service, then I want to say, ‘I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.’”

Look, I can’t stand Romney as the “inevitable” GOP candidate. He’s the weakest frontrunner since…OK, since McCain. Bad example.

Gingrich hit it precisely right in today’s Quote Of The Day when he talked about Romney’s “pious baloney” about how he’s a conservative businessman and not a career politician. Romney’s been running for office since 1994, and the one time he actually did manage to get elected he didn’t do a particularly good job in office – there’s a reason he didn’t run for re-election as Massachusetts’ governor; it’s because he wouldn’t have won.

But apparently while that line of assault doesn’t pass muster, it’s OK for Republicans to offer up class-warfare bilge because a venture capitalist, who provides an extremely valuable service to the economy and who on balance creates jobs and opportunities for people, is a bad guy.

Some 78 percent of the companies Bain Capital invested in made money. Only 22 percent went under.

That’s actually a pretty good record. A damn good record, in fact. Romney should be proud of that.

Not according to another one of Romney’s attackers…

Huntsman quickly tried to capitalize on Romney’s remarks — later on Monday morning in New Hampshire he said, in contrast, that he likes “creating jobs.”

“What’s clear is he likes firing people, I like creating jobs,” Huntsman said in Concord.

Creating jobs? Perhaps Huntsman doesn’t understand that you don’t create jobs when you’re in public office. All you can do is create an environment where other people can do that. Government doesn’t create jobs – or if they do, they create expenditures which must be paid for through tax revenue.

But it’s OK for Republicans – conservative Republicans – to speak like statists.

This is disheartening. The only one not attacking Romney for being a capitalist is Santorum…

“We try to hire good people, we try to keep them employed. If someone if obviously not performing their duty and their mission, obviously a business has a responsibility for the greater good of the business and the other employees to make sure that everybody there is pulling their weight,” Santorum said.

Asked whether Romney’s corporate takeover experience at Bain Capital would be a liability, Santorum said: “I’m not making it a liability. I believe in the private sector.”

Perhaps Santorum recognizes that with his pro-union votes in the Senate he’s on thin ice playing the class-warfare card.

The point being that Romney stunk as Massachusetts’ governor. Romney comes off as a less-friendly Ned Flanders who wants to run for president. Romney begat Obamacare, and Romney ran to the left of Teddy Kennedy. Romney also abandoned the Republican Party when Reagan was president.

There is ample material to use against Romney. Romney’s camp’s response to that material is, essentially, “Shut up and get in line, because we’re winnin’ this thing and you can’t stop it.”

Trashing him on the basis that he invests in companies and dusts off unnecessary or unproductive divisions or employees is something the Democrats are perfectly capable of doing. It’s not necessary for Republicans to go there.

But it’s worse than that. Romney’s experience firing people at Bain Capital is the single most important qualifier he possesses as a presidential candidate. What the hell do these people think the next president is going to have to do to keep our debt from carrying us over a cliff? Obviously, the most important piece will be firing federal employees by the hundreds of thousands. We’re going to need a jobs massacre in Washington; somebody like Romney who’s not afraid to RIF 30 percent of the federal workforce is exactly what you need.

Of course, it’s also going to require someone with the stones to dramatically scale down or at least radically reform Social Security and Medicare as well, and Romney’s a joke with respect to entitlements. There’s probably a line of attack in there; “Romney’s career shows he’s perfectly happy to pull the trigger on normal folks as a private businessman when it’s his money at stake, but as a politician he wets his pants rather than doing what needs to be done when it’s your tax dollars in the lurch.”

But none of the Not Romneys out there have the chops for an attack like that. That’s clear. Instead they offer up this half-ass Marxist line about how Romney is a corporate raider – when that’s the only evidence anyone can show that Romney has the sand to do what must be done in Washington.

I’m more likely to vote for Romney now than I’ve been since this campaign got started. And I can’t stand it. The crappy campaigns Newt Gingrich and Rick perry are running are doing this to me, and I won’t forgive it.