What does it take to run for President as a Republican in 2012? Well, Newt Gingrich -- who recently accused the President of the United States of exhibiting "Kenyan anti-colonial" behavior -- has been betting that it will require selling your soul to the devil in a desperate attempt to appeal to teahadist lunatics.
The latest evidence of this came earlier today on The Brian Lehrer show when Gingrich explained what he meant by "Kenyan anti-colonial" behavior:
LEHRER: "I’m sure you weren’t for colonial rule, so what does that mean in a negative sense?"
GINGRICH: "It means, you don’t see Winston Churchill as the man who helped defeat the Nazis or the man who helped stop the Soviet Union. You see him as somebody who tried to preserve the British empire. It means you start out every morning with a belief that the West somehow exploited the rest of the world and therefore the west is not worthy of equal treatment."
Actually, the truth is that President Obama believes America is a great nation whose legal system and values serve as a model to the rest of the world. He does indeed believe that America is exceptional -- and one of the reasons for that exceptionalism is that ours is a nation that believes in progress while remaining grounded in our founding ideals of liberty and tolerance. Gingrich, meanwhile, is stuck in the past, bitterly clinging to the racism of yesteryear in a desperate attempt to quench his thirst for political power.
It's notable that Gingrich's recent lurch towards the worldview of the KKK comes at the same time that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour has been testing the 2012 waters. Unlike Gingrich, Barbour (who attended segregated schools) comes across as a genuine product of the extreme Southern racism of the mid-twentieth century. Given the rightward tilt of the GOP's primary electorate, Gingrich clearly feels threatened by Barbour's presence in the field. What we're seeing now is Gingrich's most pathetic -- and dangerous -- trait: his utterly unprincipled willingness to do or say anything that he thinks will help him win votes.