Newt Gingrich has put up a new post on his Web site saying he shouldn't have called her a racist -- and then proceeds to go into detail about how she's a racist!
"The word 'racist' should not have been applied to Judge Sotomayor as a person," Gingrich says, "even if her words themselves are unacceptable (a fact which both President Obama and his Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, have since admitted)."
Then he goes into all sorts of details about the "wise Latina" comment, the intricacies of the New Haven firefighters case, and other objections he has to Sotomayor. At each juncture, he borrows a line from Fox News: "You Read, You Decide."
Well, at least Gingrich does us the favor of underscoring the folly of the "pragmatic" but utterly mistaken response to apologize--when I explained there was absolutely no reason to (in my diary, "What Sotomayor ACTUALLY Said, And Why No Apology Is Necessary"). That's far and away the strongest thing he's got going for him. The rest is just warmed over racist BS table scraps.
In fact, Gingrich'S invocation of the "You Read, You Decide" mantra is actually used to distance himself from any engagement with Sotomayor's actual record. It is best comprehended as an of performance, a ritual invocation of the gods of Faux News, rather than any serious sort of argument. The purpose, quite simply, is to stir up outrage, and to throw in the shabbiest imaginable appearance of rationality, due to the lingering prestige rationality still manages to command.
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