Richard Grenell, a new foreign policy and national security spokesman for the Mitt Romney campaign, has embarked on quite the deleting spree over the weekend.
Almost 1,000 of his tweets? Gone. His personal website? Gone.
Why? Probably something to do with the fact that a lot of his tweets have been controversial. He tells Politico:
my tweets were written to be tongue-in-cheek and humorous but I can now see how they can also be hurtful. I didn’t mean them that way and will remove them from twitter. I apologize for any hurt they caused.
Some of his favorite targets: Various members of the media. Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Rachel Maddow. Even Newt Gingrich and wife Callista.
Politico, The Huffington Post and Think Progress have all taken looks at this and found some of the more controversial tweets that have since been scrubbed from Grenell's account. In the Twitter campaign of 2012, it's mind-boggling that: A.) The Romney campaign didn't take a closer look at this from the beginning; and B.) That these weren't scrubbed sooner.
Like this one:
According to The Huffington Post, Grenell went from 7,577 tweets to 6,759 pretty quickly.
Politico points out some of his attacks on Newt Gingrich's extramarital affairs, and shots at his wife Callista's appearance. In tweets that have all since been taken down:
• "do you think Callista's hair snaps on?"
• "Callista stands there like she is wife No. 1"
• “Newt: My 1st Lady knows what it’s like to be 2nd and 3rd….” and later, in the same debate: “Newt compliments all the wives proving he can’t pick just one 1st lady.”
Another target has been Rachel Maddow. Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead retweeted this one:
Grenell himself has been a target of attacks since the Romney campaign hired him. Grenell is gay, which prompted Bryan Fischer, the director of issue analysis for the American Family Association, to tweet that Romney's appointment of him was like telling the "pro-family community" to "drop dead."
