Looks like things are getting nastier in the GOP primary race, with Newt Gingrich coming straight out and telling CNN's Wolf Blitzer that he would not vote for Ron Paul were he to win the nomination.
BLITZER: All right, here's an ad that Ron Paul is playing. This is not a super pac. This is Ron Paul's campaign and it's very tough on you. I'll play it. [...]
BLITZER: Serial hypocrisy, that's what Ron Paul is accusing you of. And you're telling me and I've covered you and have known you for a long time. Somebody says you're involved in serial hypocrisy and you're not going to fight back?
GINGRICH: Well, first of all, as people get to know more about Ron Paul, who disowns 10 years of his own letter, says he doesn't really realize what was in it, had no idea what he was making money on, that it was racist, anti-Semitic, called for the direction of Israel, talked about a race war.
All this is a sudden shock to Ron Paul? There will come a morning people won't take him as a serious person. This is a man who happened that have had a good cause, auditing the Federal Reserve, cleaning up the Federal Reserve and I think as a protest, he's a very reasonable candidate.
As a potential president, a person who thinks the United States was responsible for 9/11, a person who believes who wrote in his newsletter that the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 might have been a CIA plot.
A person who believes it doesn't matter if the Iranians have a nuclear weapon. I'd rather just say you look at Ron Paul's total record of systemic avoidance of reality. And you look at his newsletters and then you look at his ads. His ads are about as accurate as his newsletters.
BLITZER: Now, if he were to get the Republican nomination --
GINGRICH: He won't.
BLITZER: Let's say he would. Could you vote for him?
GINGRICH: No.
BLITZER: What would you do? Could you vote for President Obama?
GINGRICH: Somebody just saying I don't care if Israel's destroyed? I don't care if the Iranian get a nuclear weapon?
BLITZER: I'm not so sure he says Israel destroyed. But he does say he doesn't think Iran represents a threat to Israel even if it had a nuclear bomb.
GINGRICH: What he says is that's a risk he's willing to take and he just had one of his former staff say flatly that he said over and over again that Israel was a mistake.
I think it's very difficult to see how you would engage in dealing with Ron Paul as a nominee given the newsletters, which he has not yet disowned.
He would have to go a long way to explain himself and I think it would be very difficult to see today Ron Paul as the Republican nominee.
BLITZER: What would you do if the choice were Ron Paul or Barack Obama?
GINGRICH: I think you'd have a very choice at that. I think Barack Obama is very destructive to the future of the United States. I think Ron Paul's views are totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American.
Now, that's going to be very controversial, but I just suggest to people, before you decide that I'm wrong read the newsletters. Look at what he said and ask yourself, this is a very serious question for the United States. It's a very serious question --
BLITZER: So, you don't accept this explanation. He never read that. He never wrote it. Only years later that he look at it.
GINGRICH: So he spent 10 years -- he's attacking me for serial hypocrisy and he spent 10 years earning money out of a newsletter that had his name that he didn't notice.
All I'm saying is, I think he's got to come up with some very straight answers to get somebody to take him seriously. Would I be willing to listen to him? Sure.
Are there circumstances you have to weigh heavily? Yes. I think the choice of Ron Paul or Barack Obama would be a very bad choice for America.
BLITZER: Would you run as the third party candidate?
GINGRICH: It's not going to happen. He's not going to get the Republican nomination.
BLITZER: What if he did? He might win here in Iowa.
GINGRICH: He's not going to get the nomination. It won't happen. The people of the United States are not going to accept somebody who thinks it's irrelevant if Iran gets a nuclear weapon.
I think that is a national security threat to the United States of the first order and I'm very willing to draw the line and say to everybody in this country.
If you think it doesn't matter for the Iranians to have a nuclear weapon, then Ron Paul's reasonable candidate. But if you think that the Iranians might use it on an American city, you better find a different candidate than Ron Paul.
The Nation's John Nichols doesn't think much of Newt's chances either and I agree with him. I don't think either Paul or Gingrich will end up being the nominee, despite the fact that so much of the base really hates Mitt Romney.
