“The left is becoming a parody of itself,” Newt Gingrich said at a TAS newsmaker this morning. Gingrich attacked the Obama-Pelosi government on foreign policy, spending, and corruption grounds. He also responded to criticism from Norah O’Donnell on MSNBC that his Obama-athlete comment at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference was racist. Gingrich said at the conference, “shooting three-point shots may be clever, but it doesn’t put anybody to work. What we need is a President, not an athlete.”
O’Donnell said on Friday, “I think it’s open to some criticism because it suggests that the President is an athlete and some people may suggest, you know, because all black people are good athletes. I mean that’s what it sort of sounds like to me.”
Gingrich responded today:
“You may have seen Norah O’Donnell shocked Friday morning that I made a joke about the president shooting a three point shot and suggested that if he focused on being president it would be a more productive use of his time. She immediately said that must be a racist comment. It’s relatively hard to go from ‘we need someone who is a good president more than we need three point shots to [concluding that was a racist comment]. ‘That must have been racist’ rests on the premise that nobody on the Duke team was white.”
If my memory from the Final Four is correct, Duke usually had around 3-4 players out of 5 on the floor of European descent.
