Newt Gingrich Slams San Francisco: GOP Hopeful Blasts City Of 'Strange Fantasies'
Memo to old conservative white guys: Why you gotta hate on us, homies?
Sure, we hold candlelit vigils when marijuana dispensaries shut down, homeless cab drivers are considered genuine contenders in the mayor's race and the Board of Supervisors is currently mulling legislation that explores the rights of naked people in public plazas. But must you constantly trash-talk a place you clearly know so little about?
Our latest insult was hurled from none other than GOP presidential contender (and recent South Carolina champ) Newt Gingrich, who's been involved in a very heated -- and very public -- back-and-forth with Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.
Pelosi made headlines Tuesday after declaring that Gingrich has zero chance of nabbing the presidency in an interview with CNN's John King. "Let me just say this. That will never happen," Pelosi said of a potential President Gingrich. "He's not going to be president of the United States. That's not going to happen. Let me just make my prediction and stand by it. It isn't going to happen."
And Gingrich fired right back during a Wednesday morning appearance on the Today show, attacking the Minority Leader's city right along with her. "She lives in a San Francisco environment of strange fantasies and strange understandings of reality," he said in response to claims that Pelosi knows potentially damaging secrets about his past. "I have no idea what's in Nancy Pelosi's head. If she knows something, spit it out. Tell us what it is. I have no idea what she's talking about."
The congresswoman suggested in an interview with Talking Points Memo late last year that she was privy to information that could destroy the GOP hopeful's career. "One of these days we'll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich," she said at the time. "I know a lot about him. I served on the investigative committee that investigated him, four of us locked in a room in an undisclosed location for a year. A thousand pages of his stuff."
Gingrich is most certainly not the first conservative talking head to publicly slam San Francisco and its whimsical ways. Perhaps most famously, Bill O'Reilly became the laughingstock of the town when he released a pseudo-documentary smearing our city as a land of vagrants and drug addicts.
But if "strange understanding of reality" means we pioneer initiatives like marriage equality and technological innovation alongside those pleasant pot-smoking hippies, we'll take it as a compliment.
Take a trip down memory lane by watching Bill O'Reilly's Ode to SF below, and click over to SFist for more on Gingrich's remarks:
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First Posted: 01/25/2012 6:25 pm Updated: 01/26/2012 1:27 pm