Glenn Beck: If You Support Gingrich Over Obama Then You Must Be A Racist

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Written By:
Rob Port

Dec 12, 2011
4:24pm

In an interview on Andrew Napolitano’s Fox Business program, Glenn Beck said that if you’re supporting Newt Gingrich over Barack Obama then your decision “must be about race.”

Because that’s the only reason anyone could possibly support Gingrich over Obama, right?

And I issued a challenge to Tea Party members. … [Gingrich] is a progressive. … If you have a big government progressive, or a big government progressive in Obama, one in Newt Gingrich, one in Obama, ask yourself this, Tea Party: is it about Obama’s race? Because that’s what it appears to be to me. If you’re against him but you’re for this guy, it must be about race.

This seems fantastically unfair. I understand Beck’s frustration with this field of Republican candidates, to be sure, but to suggest that there is effectively no difference between Gingrich and Obama is factually inaccurate. Gingrich is no paragon of conservative virtue and tea party ideals, but he is quite a bit more conservative than Barack Obama in a number of ways.

For instance, the regulatory regime Obama has created would be scaled back dramatically under a President Gingrich. The national debate would be steered less by Obama’s ceaseless class war than by some level of basic understanding of how the economy actually works. These would be improvements over the status quo, and for Beck to ignore them and impute racism as the only reason for supporting Gingrich over Obama makes me think that Beck isn’t a very serious commentator.

Update: Here’s Beck’s unconvincing defense of the comments in which it’s (of course) a “progressive GOP” plot to discredit him or soemthing:

Or it could just be that he said something kind of stupid.