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| Newt Gingrich |
Commentary by Newt Gingrich - The Washington media reached new levels of absurdity in its coverage of the Republican convention in Tampa this past week. That's how we know it was a success.Completely at a loss for truthful or substantive criticism yet determined to derail the Romney-Ryan ticket, they resorted to accusations of imagined racism. To listen to some TV commentators, you'd think that conservatives oppose President Obama out of prejudice. Indeed, the charge that Republicans were using their convention to race-bait was leveled again and again and again through the week.
I doubt these attacks will work with voters, since no reasonable person watching the convention could possibly have seen what these media personalities claimed to perceive.
But the charges were all the more outrageous when you looked at the figures appearing on stage.
Now, the media commentators could be forgiven for having missed former Representative and former Democrat Artur Davis--the African American Congressman who submitted Barack Obama's name in nomination four years ago--since MSNBC didn't even air his amazing speech (undoubtedly afraid it would embarrass their commentators and their candidate).
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| Artur Davis - Nominated Barack Obama in 2008 |
But these highly nuanced and racially-fixated minds surely must have noticed that, beside Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, the faces of the party they were accusing of race-baiting were Marco Rubio, Condoleezza Rice, Ted Cruz, Susana Martinez, and Luis Fortuño.
These people are the stars of the Republican Party. And they're stars not because of their race or their gender, but because they're some of the best, most intelligent, most innovative, most persuasive leaders anywhere in the country.
It must drive the elite media nuts, since they're intent on fabricating racial excuses for the nation's disappointment in its president.
In some cases, it literally did drive them nuts.
When I appeared on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews earlier in the week, he was eager to discuss a litany of conjured-up charges of racism.
Each was more absurd than the last.
I was race-baiting because I've pointed out that more Americans have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than under any president in American history.
Mitt Romney was race-baiting because he denounced the President's gutting of the welfare work requirement.
Ronald Reagan was race-baiting because he spoke
Chris was not exactly feeling a thrill with my response.
pointed out to him his own prejudiced thinking: the vast majority of people on food stamps and welfare are white. To assume that anyone talking about those services is speaking in racial code is to hold a racial stereotype of those groups yourself, not the other way around.
Ronald Reagan's welfare queen was *committing fraud against the taxpayers*. He never said she was African American. But rather than acknowledging that Reagan was offering an example of welfare fraud which we know was *in fact a real problem*, Matthews tries to excuse the behavior just as he excuses President Obama's failure: by trumping up charges of racism to distract from the important issues at hand.
Gingrich: Media Replete with "Racially Fixated Minds"
From American Committment.com - by Phil Kerpen - It is always foolish for a country to order the burning of its food supply, but it takes a special kind of depravity to do it in the midst of a severe drought. Yet that is precisely what the misguided federal ethanol mandate is doing, requiring the burning of 40 percent of the corn supply at a time of shortages and sky-high prices. If no action is taken, the impact will be another spike in grocery prices next year, as well as devastation for farmers and ranchers attempting to cope with higher feed prices. Two Democratic governors — Bev Purdue of North Carolina and Mike Beebe of Arkansas — have officially petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to grant a waiver from the ethanol mandate, officially known as the Renewable Fuel Standards (RFS). They have now been joined by a bipartisan group of 26 senators and 156 House members. The head of the Democratic Governors Association, arch-liberal Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley wrote the EPA in support of the waiver: “In 2012, more than 40 percent of the U.S. annual corn supply was to be used to meet the RFS corn based ethanol requirements established annually by the EPA. If you were to exercise your statutory authority to waive the RFS standards for the next year, it would make more than 5 billion bushels of corn available to the marketplace for animal feed and foodstuffs, driving down costs and significantly lessening the financial impact.” So far, instead of providing relief from the food-burning mandate, the Obama administration’s emergency response has been to buy up meat and poultry at taxpayer expense. It’s an expensive non-solution to a very real global problem — food scarcity exacerbated by food burning. The EPA has now opened up a public comment docket on waiving the ethanol mandate for next year. The comments they receive will likely be overwhelmingly in favor of a waiver — but the ethanol dream dies hard. The Obama administration may refuse to stand up to its environmental allies, even in the face of serious economic and human suffering and a broad bipartisan consensus. Our country’s ethanol experiment has been a failure in good times and bad, but never more tragically than now. Whether the EPA grants the waiver or not, the American people should elect a Congress willing to repeal the destructive ethanol mandate completely and put an end to mandated food burning. Read more
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