Hey, Leonard Pitts: Is This Chart More or Less Racist Than Newt Gingrich?

Leonard who? Exactly. Leonard Pitts -- for the 99.9999999% of Americans who've never heard of him -- is a back-bencher op-ed columnist who never met an opportunity to race-bait that he didn't like. Pitts' specialty is interpreting every statement --- including the terms "food stamps", "arugula", and "golfer-in-chief" -- as a secret racist code known only to Republicans... and Leonard Pitts.

Let's listen in as all six of Pitt's neurons fire at once to create version 17,031 of the same column he's written weekly for years (subtitled, "Republican are racists"):

I got my first job when I was 12. The deacons at my church paid me $2 a week to keep it swept and mopped... So I do not need Newt Gingrich to lecture me about a good work ethic. In this, I suspect I speak for the vast majority of 39 million African Americans.

There has been a lot of talk about whether Gingrich’s recent language , including his performance at last week’s South Carolina debate and his earlier declaration that Barack Obama has been America’s best “food-stamp president,” amounts to a coded appeal to racist sensitivities. The answer is simple: yes.

In this, Gingrich joins a line of Republicans stretching back at least to Richard Nixon. From that president’s trumpeting of “law and order” (i.e., “I will get these black demonstrators off the streets.”) to Ronald Reagan’s denunciation of “welfare queens” (i.e., “I will stop these lazy black women from living high on your tax dollars.”) to George H.W. Bush’s use of Willie Horton (i.e., “Elect me or this scary black man will get you..”) the GOP long ago mastered the craft of using nonracial language to say racial things.

So I assume Pitts will agree with me when I categorically condemn the Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Census Bureau and the USDA for helping to produce this chart:

...While it's true that the country has been headed in this direction for many years — with the explosion in entitlements since the 1960s and the aging of the population — Obama has, in fact, greatly accelerated the trend...

Direct payments. The amount of money the federal government hands out in direct payments to individuals steadily increased over the past four decades, but shot up under Obama, climbing by almost $600 billion — a 32% increase — in his first three years. And Obama's last budget called for these payments to climb another $500 billion by 2016, at which point they would account for fully two-thirds of all federal spending.

...Food stamps. This year, more than 46 million (15% of all Americans) will get food stamps. That's 45% higher than when Obama took office, and twice as high as the average for the previous 40 years. This surge was driven in part by the recession, but also because Obama boosted the benefit amount as part of his stimulus plan.

...In just nine years, entitlement spending is on track to eat up 61% of the federal budget, according to the CBO. And unless these programs are cut back, they will soon consume all federal taxes, one CBO budget scenario predicts.

In other words, we're headed for complete fiscal collapse -- and Pitts is cheering Obama on with unsustainable programs wracked with fraud, cronyism, and ill-intentions.

And are things better for African-Americans under Obama? Of course not. In fact, a new low -- less than 80% of African-Americans (I assume Pitts thinks they're racist, too) -- now support President Obama.

Ronald Reagan inherited a far worse economy from Jimmy Carter: double-digit inflation; double-digit unemployment; and a Soviet Empire that was extending its tentacles all over the globe while the U.S. had single-handedly begun disarming itself.

In three years' time, Reagan had transformed the economy to the benefit of all Americans by unleashing the private sector through smaller government, less regulation, and lower taxes for all -- especially the productive members of society, irrespective of race, religion, creed or hair color.

Instead of building on a proven template of color-blind success, Pitts continues his failed career of race-baiting, which requires him to ignore history, facts, logic and reason in pursuit of a Utopian society that can't exist, won't exist and has never existed in all of human history. His path is the path to misery and, like all drones, he's too stupid to even comprehend his own endgame.