Laura Bush Endorses Sonia Sotomayer, Newt Gingrich Attacks Her

In an interview with ABC’s Good Morning America, former First Lady Laura Bush offered her endorsement of President Obama’s pick of Sonia Sotomayor to sit on the Supreme Court. “I think she sounds like a very interesting and good nominee,” Bush said. She added:

As a woman, I’m proud there might be another woman on the Court. So we’ll see what happens, but I wish her well.

Newt Gingrich attracted a great deal of attention for himself last month when he said that Judge Sonia Sotomayor should withdraw her nomination because she is a “Latina woman racist.”

That rhetoric proved too much for even right-wing Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL), both of whom distanced themselves from Gingrich.

So Gingrich pretended to back down. “The word ‘racist’ should not have been applied to Judge Sotomayor as a person, even if her words themselves are unacceptable,” he wrote.

But on CBS’s Face the Nation, Gingrich again used the word “racist” but suggested that what he really meant is that Sotomayor is a “racialist”:

When I did a Twitter about her, having read what she said, I said that was racist — but I applied it to her as a person. And the truth is I don’t know her as a person. It’s clear that what she said was racist, and it’s clear — or as somebody wrote recently, “racialist” if you prefer.