![Last year, following D’Souza, Gingrich posed an insane hypothetical question:
What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.
This week we have a recap of that language. After his specious description of the Palestineans as an “invented people”, one of Gingrich’s handlers tried to do damage control:
To understand what is being proposed and negotiated you have to understand decades of complex history, which is exactly what Gingrich was referencing during the recent interview with the Jewish Channel.
Both these comments, and others like them, essentially tell we-the-people that we are too ignorant to understand the way Gingrich sees and describes the world. This reinforces the absurd idea that Gingrich is some kind of inscrutable academic mandarin: an image in keeping with his his constant references to himself as an historian and intellectual. In fact, he modestly calls himself “the most seriously professorial politician since Woodrow Wilson”.
But Gingrich has produced no body of scholarship whatsoever. No articles worth mentioning. No books of historical research. He got a PhD from Tulane and taught some college history classes. That’s great and all, but there are about 2.5 million people in the US who can say as much, and many of them have done actual research, too. So Gingrich’s insistence that we are just too dumb to understand what he is thinking is a risky claim to make, especially in light of his party’s anti-elitist, anti-academic rhetoric. What sort of game is he playing? That is hard to comprehend.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lw1y7yYmvA1r3fmj5o1_400.jpg)
Last year, following D’Souza, Gingrich posed an insane hypothetical question:
What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.
This week we have a recap of that language. After his specious description of the Palestineans as an “invented people”, one of Gingrich’s handlers tried to do damage control:
To understand what is being proposed and negotiated you have to understand decades of complex history, which is exactly what Gingrich was referencing during the recent interview with the Jewish Channel.
Both these comments, and others like them, essentially tell we-the-people that we are too ignorant to understand the way Gingrich sees and describes the world. This reinforces the absurd idea that Gingrich is some kind of inscrutable academic mandarin: an image in keeping with his his constant references to himself as an historian and intellectual. In fact, he modestly calls himself “the most seriously professorial politician since Woodrow Wilson”.
But Gingrich has produced no body of scholarship whatsoever. No articles worth mentioning. No books of historical research. He got a PhD from Tulane and taught some college history classes. That’s great and all, but there are about 2.5 million people in the US who can say as much, and many of them have done actual research, too. So Gingrich’s insistence that we are just too dumb to understand what he is thinking is a risky claim to make, especially in light of his party’s anti-elitist, anti-academic rhetoric. What sort of game is he playing? That is hard to comprehend.
