Bill Sammon Responds To Newt's "Pgymies" Claim

The D.C. Examiner's Bill Sammon was kind of enough to e-mail the transcript of his question and Newt Gingrich's answer.

Here's the context, which speaks for itself:

Q: “A lot of people say, you know, he’s the most brilliant guy that could be considered for this, and yet he has baggage that might make him unelectable. How to you address that fundamental objection?”

A: “I don’t. That’s not my problem. I’ll take the first half of his sentence and suggest you watch the six-hour briefing. It’s not my problem. This is like going to De Gaulle when he was at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises during the Fourth Republic and saying, 'Don't you want to rush in and join the pygmies?' I have no interest in the current political process. I have no interest in trying to figure out how I can go out and raise money under John McCain’s insane censorship rules.”

Comments

Hmm... snide comment containing obscure historical reference...

Newt Gingrich = Dennis Miller?

Posted by Jeff | July 26, 2007 7:38 PM

You know, when I look at Newt, that's what I think too. "There goes Charles de Gaulle."

I guess it's not as crazy as Bush thinking of himself as a cross between Churchill and Truman.

Posted by nolc | July 26, 2007 8:23 PM

The text does speak for itself as Sammon suggests, but it does not support what he wrote in The Examiner. The first line in Sammon's July 23 piece is, "Dismissing the GOP presidential field as a 'pathetic' bunch of 'pygmies,' Newt Gingrich hinted Monday he might step in to beat Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama."

Not only did Gingrich not say this, but notice the sentence following the sentence where Sammon reported that Gingrich had referred to the "candidates" as "pygmies". It reads, "I have no interest in the current political process."

Gingrich is clearly talking about a "political process" that is broken and NOT the candidates as Sammon reported and was subsequently re-reported by reporters not in the room. There were more than a dozen reporters present at the newsmaker roundtable that morning. Only Sammon got it wrong.

You can listen to and read Gingrich's entire answer to Sammon’s question on his website, newt.org, and you can also read that Gingrich has been saying the same thing about the political process consistently over the last two years.

Posted by Rick Tyler | July 30, 2007 9:50 AM

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Posted by ykrnqxfec sopgect | August 5, 2007 2:30 AM