The Inconsistent Señor Newt

Newt Gingrich has some splainin' to do after a recent speech in which he seemed to say Spanish was "the language of living in a ghetto."

Can any mentally competent adult with a fifth-grade education truly believe such an idiocy? The language of Cervantes, Borges and 10 winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature? A 1,000-year-old Iberian offshoot of Latin that grew to become the third or fourth most widely spoken language in the world?

You'd think Gingrich, with a doctorate in history, might have read a book or two that mentioned some of this.

Here he is, verbatim:

"We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto."

Now, let's be fair. Parse those words, and you cannot say with 100 percent certainty that Gingrich called Spanish a ghetto language. It is possible he meant to say that not knowing English limits socioeconomic mobility.

That was his claim when Fox's token liberal Alan Colmes asked him what he meant by "language of living in the ghetto." Gingrich answered: "What I meant is very clear, Alan. I'll let you pick the right word for me. We should not have a program which traps people into not being able to speak English."

It is foolish to conclude that Gingrich, once one of the most powerful men in American politics when he served as speaker of the House, really believes Spanish is some sort of pidgin spoken by the guys who mow the lawn.

But it is just as foolish to not realize he and other Republicans are stoking the fire of the biggest nonissue in American politics today: that Hispanic immigrants, unlike immigrants in the good ol' days, refuse to learn English.

An essay under Gingrich's byline on his Web site, www.newt.org, makes the point explicitly. "One of the most frequent complaints I hear when I'm out traveling and speaking to groups is the lack of importance given to English as the language of success in the United States," it says.

Makes you throw your hands up in exasperation. No one challenges the assertion that English is the language of success in the U.S. -- every single immigrant I've ever met in my entire life agrees it is important to learn English. What's a canard is the belief that hordes of immigrants don't agree with that, and therefore do not learn.

The fact is that today's immigrants do continue to learn. The Pew Foundation found in 2004 that 93 percent of secondgeneration Hispanics were bilingual or English dominant, and that by the third generation it was 100 percent.

As Gingrich himself puts it on his Web site, "Estados Unidos se acerca rápidamente a un momento decisivo en el tema de inmigración."

Yep. The same Newt Gingrich who opposes bilingual education has a bilingual Web site.

Well, don't expect consistency from a guy who cheated on his wife while working to impeach some other guy for cheating on his.

(c) 2007 King Features Synd., Inc.