Newt's not a racial healer
by digby
Let's not bend over backwards to give Newt Gingrich too many props for his late-breaking racial sensitivity. He said the right things for a change. But it would be foolish to think that the man who has been brainstorming with Trump about how to double down on his anti-semitism is actually evolving. He is who he is, as Judd Legum at Think Progress partially documents:
In 2010, Gingrich accused President Obama of engaging in “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.” Those comments came a year after he called then-Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a “racist” for her comments about how being “a wise Latina woman” might help her come to better legal conclusions. Two years before that, Gingrich claimed that bilingual education teaches “the language of living in a ghetto.” Perhaps most infamously, when he was House Speaker, Gingrich proposed that the federal government should take children born out of wedlock to women under 18 and put them in orphanages.
One need not travel so far back in time for examples of Gingrich’s racial insensitivity. Just hours before his Friday Facebook Live broadcast, Gingrich appeared on Fox & Friends and said, “My argument is the policies that have driven us apart, the policies that have trapped African-Americans in all too large numbers in poverty and in hopelessness [are] the ideological policies that say, ‘Black lives matter.’
“Well, baloney! All American lives matter, of all backgrounds,” he continued. “And we ought to challenge the Hillary Clintons and the Bernie Sanderses to say that American lives matter. All American lives.”
Nobody understands wingnut dogwhistle rhetoric better than he does. He was one of the perfecters of the practice. When he called President Obama "the food stamp president" he knew exactly what he was saying.
I'm willing to give anyone credit for evolving on these issues. But not this guy. He's been a malignant force in American life for decades and I don't believe for a minute that he's changed.
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