Via Power Line, an accurate description of what’s going on with the GOP nomination fight…

It’s understandable that you attack your primary opponent, and primary campaigns are almost always dirtier than general election campaigns because in a primary you’re trying to occupy the same political space as your opponent and you’re not dealing in major ideological differences.

But it’s ridiculous to run around with a gas can and a match howling about equity firms firing people at troubled companies. Democrats do that crap because demagoguery is their stock in trade.

Republicans are supposed to be better than that. And when there are legitimate things to beat Mitt Romney up on, you don’t go after him from the left because he did what needed to be done to clean up failing businesses.

Even Newt Gingrich, who got this clown show started, recognizes that…

“I’m here to implore one thing of you. I think you’ve missed the target on the way you’re addressing Romney’s weaknesses. I want to beg you to redirect and go after his obvious disingenuousness about his conservatism and lay off the corporatist versus the free market. I think it’s nuanced,” said Dean Glossop, an Army Reservist from Inman, S.C.

“I agree with you,” Gingrich said. “It’s an impossible theme to talk about with Obama in the background. Obama just makes it impossible to talk rationally in that area because he is so deeply into class warfare that automatically you get an echo effect. … I agree with you entirely.”

Negative campaigning is part of the process, and nobody begrudges the candidates that. But it’d be nice if it was principle, rather than politics or personal pique, behind the mudslinging.