Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin continued to stand up for Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on Thursday, saying that the recent character assault launched by conservatives against him was a case of the establishment trying to "crucify" the former House speaker.
"Look at Newt Gingrich, what's going on with him via the establishment's attacks. They're trying to crucify this man and rewrite history and rewrite what it is that he has stood for all these years," Palin told Fox Business Network's John Stossel after weighing on Ron Paul's candidacy. "So it's not just Ron Paul. I believe it's also Newt Gingrich, that the establishment, that the liberal media, certainly that the progressives and the Democrats don't like."
(Watch Palin's comments above)
On Thursday, a number of conservative media figures launched an anti-Gingrich salvo -- highlighted by the right-leaning Drudge Report as a coordinated effort -- criticizing him as temperamental, unpredictable, and a historical foil to President Ronald Reagan during his tenure in Congress during the 1980s.
Of course this week's barrage wasn't the first time Gingrich has been put in the conservative media's crosshairs. During his first surge in the polls late last year, columnists from George Will to Peggy Noonan, who characterized him as an "angry little attack muffin," cast doubt on Gingrich's leadership credentials.
On Thursday, Palin responded to Noonan's insult.
"They maybe subscribe such characterization of Newt via words like that, but they don't subscribe those to say Mitt Romney when he or his surrogates do the same thing. That's that typical hypocrisy stuff in the media you know I've lived with over a couple of decades in the political arena," she said. "It is hypocritical of the media to subscribe to one candidate and not another, that kind of 'angry attack muffin' verbiage to one and not the other."
Palin, whose husband has endorsed Gingrich while she remains "undecided," has been one of Gingrich's most enthusiastic defenders over the past few months. Earlier this week, she responded to New Jersey governor and Mitt Romney supporter Chris Christie's claim that Gingrich had been an "embarrassment" to the GOP, saying that he had gotten his "panties in a wad."