•  Campaign Videos (January 2012) « Newt 2012
  

Female Voice: Speaker Newt Gingrich.  [applause]

Gingrich: Let me say first of all that I'm very grateful to everyone in South Carolina who has been so positive and so hospitable and so committed.  I'm very excited by Saturday.  The latest poll that came out this morning shows us ahead now by 32 to 30.  [applause] 

And so with your help—this is not over, we've got three days of hard work yet—but with your help, if you get your friends and your neighbors to understand that the only conservative option to a Massachusetts moderate is Newt Gingrich and we get all the conservatives to unify, we will in fact win decisively on Saturday.  So I need your help getting that message out.

But I want to take a minute or two to talk about President Obama if I might, because there's so many things going on that are I think truly disturbing that we need to figure out a way to take this president head on every day because you can't wait until November for him to finish doing the damage he's doing to finally get rid of him.

And let me just give you a few examples.  He makes recess appointments when there is not recess.  I mean under all the rules of the American Constitution he only can make recess appointments when the Senate is not in session.  But the Senate was in session so as far as I'm concerned he's just plain breaking the law and the Congress ought to cut off funding for every agency to which he makes an illegal appointment and just say we're not going to take ...[applause]

We then watch the Iranians practice closing the Straits of Hormuz, which is an absolute threat to the world's oil supply, and after two weeks of provocative Iranian behavior, the president cancels an American exercise with Israel because he doesn't want to provoke the Iranians.  Now that is an act of such stunning weakness that it sends all the wrong signals to dictators around the world. 

I mean a weak, timid, confused America is a dangerous country because it creates confusion in our enemies' minds and leads them to think they can get away with things that ultimately we can't let them get away with.  And so that by itself would be troubling.

Sunday we learned that the Saudi Arabians had given up on the Obama administration and they have signed an agreement with China to develop a nuclear energy program for Saudi Arabia.  Now there are two parts to this.  Part one is they're saying they believe the Iranians are going to get a nuclear weapon, therefore they better have one.  Part two is they're saying they don't trust the United States any more and they find the Chinese a more reliable ally.  So this is just one more example. 

But yesterday's decision on the XL Keystone pipeline is so stunningly irrational that it's really worth your thinking about.  Now I've told people it's one thing if a White House can't play chess.  It's another thing if they can't play checkers.  [applause]  But if they can't even play tic-tac-toe. 

Now think about what happened yesterday. Here we are with absolute, vivid proof from the Iranians that we should be developing American energy as a national security matter so we would not be dependent on Middle Eastern dictators for our energy sources.  And faced with that, the president cancels a pipeline.  Now why does he cancel the pipeline?  Basically to take care of left-wing extremists in San Francisco who hate Canadian oil. 

But their position is just frankly stupid.  Because it assumes—this is why I use the tic-tac-toe analogy—because it assumes Canadians have no alternative.  Prime Minister Harper had already said, and he's a conservative and he's pro-American, and he's already said that he is prepared to have the Chinese finance a pipeline across the Canadian Rockies to Vancouver.  That's not what he wants to do.  It's much less expensive to build the pipeline from central Canada down to Houston.  There—it's geologically easier, he wants to be an ally of the United States, he wants to tie Canada's future to America.  But imagine an American president so destructive that the Canadians find the Chinese a better partner.  So now you have the Saudis saying the Chinese are a better partner than the United States and you have the Canadians saying the Chinese are a better partner than the United States, and that's the legacy of the Obama administration.

So President Obama in one decision kills 30-50,000 construction jobs, kills 30-50 years of oil being processed in Houston, kills 30-50 years of jobs in the ports of Houston and Galveston shipping the oil, guarantees that the Canadians move closer to China and further away from the United States.  I mean it's almost unimaginable that an American president could be this destructive.

But then of course we were reminded that he's a man of the people because he's going to have a town hall meeting at Disney World.  Now I'm trying to be positive about this experience, and my wife has been lecturing me all morning, because you know I think to myself President Obama, Mickey Mouse.  [applause]

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Notes:

Copyright © 2012 Eric M. Appleman/Democracy in Action.