Newt Gingrich Calls Obama's Comments on Trayvon Martin 'Disgraceful'
Newt Gingrich, the man who recently said that President Obama behaves like a Muslim and therefore deserves to be mistaken for one, wishes the president would stop playing the race card and using divisive language. He was referring to Obama's comments yesterday about the Trayvon Martin shooting, in which the president noted, "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon."
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Gingrich's remarks, from his appearance on The Sean Hannity Show on radio:
"What the president said, in a sense, is disgraceful. It’s not a question of who that young man looked like. Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe, period. We should all be horrified no matter what the ethnic background.
Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him. That’s just nonsense dividing this country up. It is a tragedy this young man was shot. It would have been a tragedy if he had been Puerto Rican or Cuban or if he had been white or if he had been Asian American of if he’d been a Native American. At some point, we ought to talk about being Americans. When things go wrong to an American, it is sad for all Americans. Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling."
Here are some examples of Gingrich's unifying rhetoric (with thanks to Media Matters):
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In 2010, he told the National Review Online that President Obama displays "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior" and pulled a "wonderful con" on the American public:
“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]?” Gingrich asks. “That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”
“This 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,” Gingrich tells us.
“I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating — none of which was true,” Gingrich continues. “In the Alinksy tradition, he was being the person he needed to be in order to achieve the position he needed to achieve...He was authentically dishonest.”
In 2007, he described bilingual education as teaching "the language of living in a ghetto."
"The American people believe English should be the official language of the government ... We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto."
In 1995, Gingrich explained to a class at Reinhardt College in Georgia why women should not serve in combat:
"Females have biological problems staying in a ditch for 30 days because they get infections, and they don't have upper body strength," [Gingrich said,] and added that men "are basically little piglets; you drop them in a ditch, they roll around in it."
Gingrich reportedly further said that if being in combat "means being on an Aegis class cruiser managing the computer controls for 12 ships and their rockets, a female again may be dramatically better than a male who gets very, very frustrated sitting in a chair all the time because males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes."
Speaking about Proposition 8 in 2008, he warned Bill O'Reilly of "a gay and secular fascism" that is "prepared to use violence."
"I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion."
