Dana Rohrabacher is not holding anything back this week. First he called the president a cream puff. Then he said former Speaker Newt Gingrich belongs in the "Hall of Shame" for claiming that the Uighurs who were released from Guantanamo Bay pose a terrorist threat.
Rohrabacher has long been supportive of the Uighurs, who he says are fighting the good fight against Chinese dictatorship. That has put him out of step with his own party. At a Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing this week, he said this:
Video here:Much to my dismay, some pundits in the Republican party have fallen for
this bait and are lumping the Uighurs in with Islamic extremists. The
Bush administration did not help matters. It held Uighurs in Guantanamo as terrorists, and they did this, I believe, to appease the Chinese government in a pathetic attempt to gain its support at the beginning of the war against Iraq, and also to assure China's continued purchase of U.S. treasuries. Many, if not all, the negative allegations against the Uighurs, can be traced back to Communist Chinese intelligence, whose purpose is to snuff out a legitimate independence movement that challenges the Communist party bosses in Beijing.No patriot, especially no Republican who considers themselves a Reagan
Republican, should fall for this manipulation, which has us do the
bidding of a dictatorship in Beijing. In the hall of shame, of course, is our former speaker, Newt Gingrich. His positioning on this should be of no surprise, and is of no surprise, to those of us who, during Newt's leadership, were dismayed by his active support for Clinton-era trade policies with Communist China.
Gingrich response here.
Nice to see you giving Rohrbacher some "ink", even if it is just in the blog. I like to read what he has to say, and this is a perspective I had not heard before. Unlike Gingrich, Rohrbacher still has a job in Congress, and therefore would have knowledge of current intelligence information.