The trogs at the GOP are not happy that a liberal Republican is their party’s likely nominee. Now the long knives are out for Rudy Giuliani as rightwing groups plot to bring his presidential nomination down the way they did the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court:

[The] Right is facing what some of them see as an even more ominous threat: the prospect that Rudy Giuliani could win the GOP presidential nomination. And just as they did with Miers, right-wing activists - especially anti-choice Catholic ones – are gearing up to launch an all-out attack in an effort to deny Giuliani the nomination:

And Free Republic, the Internet locus for advocates of American authoritarianism and theocracy, has purged Rudy’s supporters from its ranks:

Over the past few weeks, chaos has reigned in the “Freeper” community as members sympathetic to the former mayor’s candidacy claim to have suffered banishment from the site. They were victimized, they say, by a wave of purges designed to weed out any remaining support for the Giuliani campaign on the popular conservative web forum. Another significant chunk of commenters have migrated away from the controversial site over the action, according to a number of former site members and conservative bloggers who have been tracking the situation.

In a plaintive post on the blog “Sweetness & Light,” exiled commenter Steve Gilbert, who says he does not support the former mayor’s campaign, blasted the site’s new “anti-Giuliani, anti-abortion jihad.” Since George W. Bush was elected president, he wrote, “there haven’t been any large scale [Free Republic] purges to speak of — until now.”

This is ironic, of course, because no candidate is more authoritarian than Giuliani, who once tried to forbid public criticism of him when he was mayor.

These same virtual goons purged supporters of George W. Bush from the site in 1999 but had to recant after it became clear Bush had been ordained as the party’s next Dear Leader.