In an interview with Fox Business Network’s John Stossel yesterday, Sarah Palin said the establishment is trying to “crucify” Newt Gingrich.

Palin is far from alone in this opinion. Whatever suspicions conservatives had that much of the media is in the tank for Mitt Romney were confirmed yesterday by Matt Drudge’s multiple-link assault on Newt Gingrich (which, to the detriment of my standing with some HA commenters, I found interesting and compelling enough to post about here). A sampling of the ire that the Drudge attack drew:

“Cherry-picked quotes, biased headlines and hyperlinks to Newt-hating op-eds in order to patch together an ugly and distorted mosaic of the former House speaker is not journalism,” Matt Barber, a blogger, wrote in a post titled “The Drudge Distort.” He continued, “It’s mercenary-style political prostitution.”

Another blog post declared Thursday to be “Bloody Thursday the Day the Drudge Report Sold Out.”

The writer said, “I have read the Drudge Report daily ever since he broke the Lewinsky story. I have NEVER seen him attack anyone with the volume of coverage and with the venom that he has attacked this Gingrich fellow.”

The blog post concluded, “On this Thursday, this quite bloody Thursday, I can only say, et tu Matt.” …

Rush Limbaugh, on his radio show on Thursday, also took note of the headlines, calling it a “coordinated” effort to smear Mr. Gingrich.

“Now, when I saw all it is stuff — and obviously it’s a coordinated document dump here, opposition research dump. It’s obviously coordinated,” said Mr. Limbaugh, who has not been a fan of Mr. Romney’s in the past.

On this subject, I’d like to offer this disclaimer: I know I’ve written more negative posts about Newt Gingrich than about Mitt Romney — but I’ve done it because I assumed the flaws in Romney’s record were more well-known — at least to my generation. We weren’t old enough to be attuned to politics during Gingrich’s speakership, but we did encounter Romney in the first GOP presidential primary in which we were eligible to vote.

The rest of the primaries promise to be this way — messy and vicious in all directions and with sensitivities also running high in all directions. At such a time, it’s helpful to remember what the end goal is. From my perspective, the end goal is to elect a president who would at least sign an Obamacare repeal bill, who will reduce spending across the board and who will actually move the ball forward on entitlement reform. Everybody probably has a different list of legislative and executive priorities — but there’s also probably a lot of overlap. What’s most important to you in a president?