Totally Not Racist

Newt Gingrich's recent forays into the race-baiting game have included calling President Obama the "food stamp" president and suggesting that work is a "strange, distant concept" to Juan Williams, the African-American Fox anchor.

This isn't new for him. Or, as they say in Dixie, old times there are not forgotten.

At the height of his career in Congress, Newt Gingrich used to tell audiences that renewing American civilization was "the central challenge of the rest of our lives."

But before Gingrich could deliver his grand new theory of American civilization to the public in a 1993 speech, his deeply divisive racial stereotypes would need to be removed.

"For poor minorities, entrepreneurship in small business is the key to future wealth," Gingrich wrote by hand in a first draft. "This is understood thoroughly by most of the Asians, partially by Latinos, and to a tragically small degree by much of the American black community."

[...]

The draft is one of many handwritten sheets among the more than 1,000 pages of records, correspondence and disclosure forms that make up the evidence in the former speaker's long-running case before the House Ethics Committee, which was settled in 1997.

By the time a member of Gingrich's staff typed up the notes and prepared the speech for delivery at the National Review Institute, the racial stereotypes were gone.

Lest you think he had a change of heart, he really didn't. He probably got a copyright infringement threat from David Duke.

In the same speech, he said that "Bosnia, Somalia and Iraq are grim reminders that humans can be vicious, brutal and savage to each other," but "Anacostia in Washington, Techwood in Atlanta and East L.A. are reminders that Americans can return to barbaric behaviors and vicious brutality with frightening speed."

In case you're wondering, no, those are not white suburbs. But he's totally not a racist, and you're a racist if you even suggest it.