Meg Whitman when running for Governor in California in 2010 was asked by opponent Jerry Brown to stop running negative ads against him. She refused. She lost the election, but no one attributes the loss to her negative ads against Brown. Whitman was strongly backed by Mitt Romney and the two remain friends. Romney, now running for president again, has run very few negative ads against any of his opponents and the ones he has run have been more drawing distinctions between himself and others such as calling Rick Perry a “career politician”. For someone who spent 30 years in politics, that isn’t a “negative ad” so much as a critical distinction.

Other attacks have come from pro-Romney PACs and Newt Gingrich has an incoherent complaint about them. He is angry over some of the ads alleged untruths and has bashed Romney in very personal terms – calling him a liar and asking if he would show those ads to his grandchildren, implying that he should be ashamed…of advertisements Romney did not write, did not approve and did not have anything to do with. In fact, it is illegal for a candidate to have any such involvement with a PAC.

Michael Hirsh in the National Journal notes:

So let’s briefly play out the pretense of the coming days. Gingrich, who along with Santorum remains Romney’s only viable competitor, will huff and puff about the negative ads that Romney’s super PAC ran about him in Iowa. (Actually, all those ads did was point out accurately that Gingrich bears the “baggage” of two decades of expediency, hypocrisy, and flip-flopping in Washington.) Then Newt, who is among the most negative politicians in modern memory, will permit his own super PAC to attack the former Massachusetts governor over his less-than-conservative record.

All of which will do little to help Gingrich achieve what is almost certainly already beyond him, the Republican nomination, and will only boost Romney with the independent and centrist voters he needs to win in the general election, as will the inevitable attacks by Santorum.

Byron York calls Romneys position disingenuous in what is itself a disingenuous claim:

Where Gingrich has been naive, Romney has been disingenuous. Asked Dec. 20 why he didn’t tell the super-PAC to stop the negative ads, Romney answered, “It’s illegal … I’m not allowed to communicate with a super-PAC in any way, shape or form.” Asked the same question the next day — after experts pointed out there was no law or rule preventing him from condemning the negative ads — Romney said, “I’m sure I could go out and say, ‘Hey please don’t do anything negative.’ But you know, this is politics.”

Spot the difference?

York says Romney was disingenuous for…er…accurately citing a law he was being asked to break.

Then when Romney was asked a different question, which was essentially “why don’t you just say you don’t like them instead of actually tell the PAC to pull them”, he didn’t dispute that of course he could say that but what for? Why would he? The guy isn’t against negative campaign ads. So… what is the bit of disingenuousness?