Maureen Dowd still not much of a Gingrich fan

Laura Seay, an assistant professor at Morehouse College in Atlanta and an expert on Africa, blogged that Gingrich’s thesis was “kind of a glorified white man’s burden take on colonial policy that was almost certainly out of vogue in the early 1970s. Gingrich wrote this as the Black Consciousness and Black Power movements were approaching their pinnacles. It was most decidedly not the time to be arguing that white European masters did a swell job ruling black Africans through a system that ensured that most Congolese would never get a real education.”…

This was a typical Newt mental six-car pileup. The man who espouses Christian values being un-Christian in visiting the alleged sins of the father upon the son; the man who reveres the anticolonialism of the founding fathers ranting against the anticolonialism of the father of America’s first African-American president. How do you rail against the Evil Empire and urge overthrowing Saddam and not celebrate liberation in Africa?

Newt is like the Great White Hunter out on campaign safari, trying to bag a Mitt, an animal with ever-changing stripes. Certainly, the 68-year-old’s haughty suggestions on child labor last week in Iowa smacked of harsh paternalism and exploitation…

Newt’s the kind of person whom child labor laws were created to curb. He sounds like a benign despot with a colonial subtext: Until I bring you the benefits of civilization, we will regard you as savages.