Newt Gingrich calls Obama "Kenyan anti-colonial" con man...
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http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/gingrich-president-exhibits-kenyan-anti-colonial-behavior/
newt gingrich is a scumbag...
Gingrich: President Exhibits ‘Kenyan, Anticolonial Behavior’
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Newt Gingrich said this weekend that President Obama exhibited “Kenyan, anticolonial behavior,” an observation that drew angry if puzzled responses from Democrats and questions about Mr. Gingrich’s meaning and motivation.
Mr. Gingrich, who is mulling a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, made the comments to National Review Online. He was quoted by the conservative Web site as saying: “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”
Commenting on a recent article in Forbes by Dinesh D’Souza, Mr. Gingrich told National Review Online that Mr. Obama “is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.”
“I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating — none of which was true,” Mr. Gingrich was quoted as saying.
Mr. Gingrich’s comments drew sharp rebukes from the Democratic National Committee, which accused him of stoking the false rumors about Mr. Obama’s heritage and birthright.
“This crushes the hopes of those who thought Gingrich could bring ideas instead of smears to what the G.O.P. was offering,” said Hari Sevugan, the committee’s press secretary. “He’s not a reasonable man that some thought he could be. He’s proven he’s just like the rest of them. With a worldview shaped by the most radical and fringe elements of the Republican Party, which are more dominant with each passing day.”
The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that “I don’t even have – quite frankly, George – the slightest idea what he’s talking about.”
Mr. Gibbs added that Mr. Gingrich “knows that he’s trying to appeal to the fringe of people that don’t believe the president was born in this country.”
“You would normally expect better from somebody who held the position of speaker of the House,” Mr. Gibbs said.
But Mr. Gingrich has been a bomb thrower since he was a backbencher in the House trying to work his way up. And in his years as a former politician, he has sought to grab headlines by sometimes taking extreme positions.
As he toys with a run for the Republican nomination, Mr. Gingrich has weighed in on the mosque controversy in New York, comparing the backers of the Islamic community center to Nazis. Those comments drew rebukes from some Republicans but earned him TV time.
newt gingrich is a scumbag...
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/13/AR2010091305307.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
......................Gingrich, unhinged on Obama
By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Is Newt Gingrich just pretending to have lost his mind, or has he actually gone around the bend?
His lunacy certainly seems genuine enough. It's one thing to be a rhetorical bomb-thrower, as Gingrich has long fancied himself, and another to lob damp squibs of pure nonsense into the fray. The man's contributions to the public discourse have become increasingly unhinged.
The latest example comes in an interview with the conservative Web site National Review Online. Unsurprisingly, he was criticizing President Obama. Bizarrely, according to the Web site, he said the following: "What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" According to Newt, this is "the most accurate, predictive model" for the president's actions, or policies or something.
What in the world is "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior" supposed to mean? That Obama is waging a secret campaign to free us from the yoke of British oppression?
In fairness to Gingrich, he wasn't being original. He was speaking in praise of a big gob of gibberish in Forbes by conservative "intellectual" Dinesh D'Souza. In the piece -- much of it strikingly lazy -- D'Souza argues that Obama somehow absorbed a fully elaborated, frozen-in-time, anti-colonial worldview from his Kenyan father. Who left the family when the future president was 2.
Well, we knew Obama was precocious. But if he was so absorbed with the study of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism and all the other isms, when did he have time to learn to go ? ?
D'Souza goes on to froth and foam like one of those conspiracy theorists who believe the CIA is controlling our brain waves. Suffice it to say that the author believes it remarkable that there has been "virtually no reporting" on an article that Obama's father -- who saw his son once more in his life, when "Barry" was 10 -- wrote in an obscure journal in 1965. I'm thinking that the Da Vinci Code might be in there somewhere, too.
Yet Gingrich finds this claptrap a "stunning insight" -- or pretends that he does.
The rational explanation is that Gingrich seized on the "programmed by his absent father" thesis as a way of furthering the "birther" narrative -- the paranoid fantasy that Obama is foreign, exotic, alien, somehow not American. So what if D'Souza's piece makes assertion after assertion that is plainly, demonstrably unsupported? Just throw it out there, and maybe a few gullible souls will believe it.
But this was just the latest offering from Gingrich that vaulted the barrier between provocative and crazy. It started last year during the confirmation hearings for Justice Sonia Sotomayor, when he said that her innocuous "wise Latina" remark proved she was a "racist." He made the same lightning-quick allegation of racism against Shirley Sherrod -- before a full hearing of her remarks showed that she was actually speaking against racism. And then Gingrich's rhetorical insanity reached a new high, or a new low, last month when he accused supporters of the Lower Manhattan mosque of "triumphalism" and compared them to the Nazis.
It has been suggested that perhaps Gingrich, who is thinking of running for president, is trying to lure attention away from a recent unflattering profile in Esquire -- the one that charts his three marriages in excruciating, and embarrassing, detail. But it hardly furthers his ambitions to pretend to be so nuts.
And there's a thread that connects his outbursts: They all fit into the idea that American democracy -- indeed, the whole Anglo-American-Judeo-Christian enterprise -- is under attack in a titanic clash of civilizations. In this view, we are threatened most acutely by the Islamic civilization. But we must also be on guard against the "Sinic" civilization of China, the "Hindu" civilization of India and assorted others. This analysis was developed by Samuel P. Huntington, a Harvard professor who died in 2008 -- and who said he never intended his work to be read as a battle plan.
Gingrich seems to believe that our culture and values are also threatened from within -- by black and brown people who demand that they, too, be given a voice in defining that culture and those values. He really needs to get out more. But, hey, it's a free country. If he wants, Gingrich can imagine himself a retired British colonel in 1963, harrumphing in his armchair about who lost Kenya. A diverse and multicultural America has long since moved on. -
lol, i was waitin for someone to post this
WTF @ acting like "anti-colonial" is a bad thing
George Washington might have summin to say bout that -
Why dont people like this just die- him ? Cheney- and a few others
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Swiffness! wrote: »lol, i was waitin for someone to post this
WTF @ acting like "anti-colonial" is a bad thing
George Washington might have summin to say bout that
I agree- like he should be thinking like a native american bieng forced onto a reservation and smiling about it-- is that what hes thinking??? what was that supposed to mean -
the guy who wrote the article Gingrich is quoting, Dinesh D'Souza, is a racist hack btw.
In the book, D’Souza also calls for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination in employment and in access to public places like restaurants and hotels. He argues for "rational discrimination" in the areas of housing, crime control, banking, and education. "A bigot is simply a sociologist without credentials," he explains. In addition to arguing that slavery was not a racist institution, he concludes that white racism isn’t actually racism at all, but a logical response to alleged deficiencies among minorities and that “the American obsession with race is fueled by a civil rights establishment that has a vested interest in perpetuating black dependency.” (wow, that's pretty racist, eh?)
The book was so extreme that two prominent African American conservatives, Robert Woodson Sr. and Glenn Loury, ended their affiliation with the American Enterprise Institute, where D’Souza was a fellow, in protest of the book. In reviewing the book, Loury called D’Souza "the Mark Fuhrman of public policy," and went on to note that AEI had extensively marketed the book to the business community and that "Republican staffers on Capitol Hill are said to have eagerly anticipated how the book might move the affirmative action debate in the ‘right direction.’”
http://www.campusprogress.org/articles/know_your_right-wing_speakers_dinesh_dsouza
His 2nd book was the one that made the ridiculous claim that 9/11 happened because of sex and cursing on TV. Nevermind that the Karl Marx of Al Qaeda was appalled and offended by squaredances in the 1940s.
Of course, it isn't just racist but idiotic. D'Souza's grasp of policy is shallow as a puddle of ? in a dark alley, but it's safe to say that someone self-identifying as an "anti-colonialist" would not be escalating an American war in central Asia or claiming the authority to use the entire planet as a target range for flying robots armed with cruise missiles.
If Obama is a Kenyan anti-colonialist for supporting financial regulation, then Scott Brown is a Kenyan anti-colonialist. If Obama is a Kenyan anti-colonialist for supporting the proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero, then Michael Bloomberg is a Kenyan anti-colonialist. If Obama is a Kenyan anti-colonialist for supporting health-care insurance reform, then Ben Nelson is a Kenyan anti-colonialist. The Center for American Progress is a Kenyan anti-colonialist think tank, MoveOn is a Kenyan anti-colonialist advocacy organization, and Peter Orszag is a Kenyan anti-colonialist intellectual.
All of which to say is there's no need to parse the ethnic origins or political philosophies of Obama's parents to understand the ideology of Barack Obama. He is a center-left Democrat who supports mainstream Democratic policies. But some conservatives don't want to talk about policy. They are unable to engage in an argument with liberalism on substantive terms; they know only argument by epithet. They want to talk about the fact that our blackety black president is blackety black. It has been two years since a black man was elected president of the United States, and for a group of conservatives clinging to their cultural superiority, this was a moment of apocalyptic existential crisis, a moment that refuted all they had come to know and understand about themselves, about black people, and about this country. D'Souza is writing for them, the same kind of audience he has always written for.
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/adam_serwer_archive?month=09&year=2010&base_name=forbes_embraces_birtherism#comments -
I stopped reading after Newt Gingrich.
