Apparently Gingrich is attacking Romney for his ability to speak French.
WTF? I mean… seriously? Is there something I’m missing?
Rank and file Republicans resent education and learning and dislike all things foreign.
yes, seriously, and no, not missing anything. speaking french is a prep school, mamby, pamby, rich boy thing, according to some people; and always something someone who lived in mass. would do.
Strangely, Newt Gingrich has a PhD and has worked as a college professor. You’d think that this anti-intellectual sentiment would work against him, too.
Yeah, why would any prospective leader of our country need to speak with anybody in Quebec?
I don’t like Romney, but dangit the Gingrich camp is just over the top with this one.
Pick something else, you silly idiots!
Attack his positions, not his competencies!
Sheeesh.
Is there really even a single person there who doesn’t know English, at least as a second language? (I’m sure there are no Indians left who don’t, from the Rio Grande to the Northwest Passage.)
Well, you have a point.
Didn’t remember that not ever having been there.
Though I really wish I had.
I’m pretty sure this Gringich’s way of turning Romney’s comments about Obama trying to make the U.S. like Europe back on Romney himself.
In fact, yes – visiting Montreal & Quebec City I’ve found plenty of people with little or no English. But the POTUS doesn’t deal with the Province of Quebec any more than the Prime Minister of Canada deals with the State of New York: speaking French would be more useful in dealing with France, and with those countries in Africa that used to belong to the French Empire.
Anyone remember the popular anti-French hysteria back in 2003 when France dared to question the US plans to liberate Iraq? People in the US were buying expensive French wine and pouring it down sewers. The US Capitol cafeteria renamed French Fries as “Freedom Fries.” There were movements to boycott French goods and companies, including that notorious French discount store chain Target.
So do you think the Bain cafeteria was serving French Fries or Freedom Fries?
It’s a way to leverage that old anti-French patriotic fervor.
“Lafayette, we are here!”
– Col. Charles E. Stanton, 1917, at the tomb of the Marquis de Lafayette.
Oh crap. Somehow I had a brain fart and forgot that.
Sorry. Working while posting does that sometimes.
kerry was also mocked for speaking french. of course that was closer to the “freedom fries” anti french thing.
So there’s that. One thing the story doesn’t say is where these ads are being broadcast. South Carolina, I presume?
Worst ads since probably LBJ’s ads of “If Goldwater gets elected, nuclear war will ensue”.
Well, they were kind of…tacky…in two world wars.
America’s attitude toward France has always been schizophrenic from extreme Francophilia as the bastion of culture which American intellectuals often worshipped blindly to extreme Francophobia as Napoleonic conquerors, Jacobin radicals, or cheese eating surrender monkeys.
No.
Both Gingrich and Romney went after the racist vote the past couple of weeks by blaming African Americans for costing the country too much in unemployment assistance.
Gingrich now blames Romney for having an education. Something that will play well with white toothless beer chugging mindless drones that are, surprisingly, able to vote, and always vote Republican.
That might well have happened.
I also recall a Fox News piece from back when he was running for president about how he seemed “too French.”