Yes, Virginia, there are racists

Newt Gingrich is not employing a dog whistle, he's using an air raid siren.

Ta-Nehisi Coates provides the appropriate response.

When a professor of history calls Barack Obama a "Food Stamp President," it isn't a mistake to be remedied through clarification; it is a statement of aggresion [sic]. And when a crowd of his admirers cheer him on, they are neither deluded, nor in need of forgiveness, nor absolution, nor acting against their interest. Racism is their interest. They are not your misguided friends. They are your fully intelligent adversaries, sporting the broad range of virtue and vice we see in humankind. If you are a praying person, you should pray for their electoral destruction in November. Surely they are praying for yours:

Let his days be few; and let another take his office 

May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow. 

May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes. 

May a creditor seize all he has; may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor. 

May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children.

Newt Gingrich coined "The Moment" on Martin Luther King's birthday.  Real racists do real things.

 

These people are scum.  They have been for decades.  It doesn't matter if it's Joe Wilson's "you lie" howl at the State of the Union address, Romney's waxing poetic for an era before women and brown people had rights, or Newt's sneering "food stamp president."*  And if we are truly honest with ourselves, we will see that so too are the people to whom they pander, whether the panderer is George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, or Newt Leroy Gingrich.  If that doesn't matter to you, then believe that Ron Paul is a greater believer in civil liberties than is Barack Obama or that a dime's difference between the two parties is a reason not to register and vote.

* With the trifecta of attacking the working poor, African Americans, and the current POTUS, all in one "intellectual" phrase.  If he could have beaten up made fun of a gay veteran on stage, he'd be the GOP nominee already.