Newt Gingrich’s only appearance in the news cycle this week came when he introduced a bold new plan to wean America off foreign energy. Ha, ha! Only kidding. No, it came when he demanded an apology for Robert De Niro for joking about whether America was “ready for a white First Lady.”

Newt returns to the news cycle today by musing about how brain science can… no, I’m not going to play you again, he was musing about why Republican voters think the president is a Muslim.



Why does the President behave the way that people would think that [he is a Muslim]? You have to ask why would they believe that? It’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because they watch the kind of things I just described to you.

And about why their skepticism is warranted.



It is just astonishing to me how pro-Obama they are. Do you think you are going to see two pages on Obama’s Muslim friends? Or two pages on the degree to which Obama is consistently apologizing to Islam while attacking the Catholic church? Do you see anybody in the elite media prepared to say, gee, isn’t this kind of odd that we really worry a lot about the Quran and nothing about the Bible.

Leaving aside the question of why we should “worry a lot about” the Bible in the context of occupying Muslim countries, what do we see here? We see the Gingrichian version of the Southern strategy, which has been in play for most of the last month. And it doesn’t actually contradict Gingrich’s plea for a high-falutin campaign of Ideas. The starting assumption of the Gingrich campaign is that the media, snobbishly, ignores the concerns of real Americans. Real Americans are naturally attuned to the ideas Gingrich borrows or comes up with. They’re essentially conservative, and essentially good. It’s liberals who cause them to believe wrong things, or doubt the patriotism of the effete elites.

When you run this strategy through the funnel, this is what splatters on the floor.