Former House speaker Newt Gingrich would like to take back that thing he said about Sonia Sotomayor being a reverse-racist who should withdraw her nomination. Maybe because Republicans with real jobs in politics haven’t backed him, or maybe because he still clings to the hope of running for president in 2012. But it’s definitely not because he doesn’t still think Sotomayor’s comments were kind of racist. “My initial reaction was strong and direct perhaps too strong and too direct,” he writes today on the conservative website Human Events. “The sentiment struck me as racist and I said so.” The mea culpa continues: “The word ‘racist’ should not have been applied to Judge Sotomayor as a person, even if her words themselves are unacceptable (a fact which both President Obama and his Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, have since admitted).” Actually, what Gibbs and Obama said was that Sotomayor probably would have chosen her words differently in retrospect a sentiment which, one would think, Gingrich would now be capable of empathizing with. Except empathy is something that activist liberal judges do.
Supreme Court Nominee Sotomayor: You Read, You Decide [Human Events]
