Politics

Gingrich calls Obama’s terrorism speech ‘just stunningly, breathtakingly naive’ [VIDEO]

Jeff Poor Media Reporter
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On this weekend’s “State of the Union” on CNN, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said President Obama’s speech on terrorism failed to “talk honestly” about the threats America faces abroad.

“I think it’s just stunningly, breathtakingly naïve,” Gingrich said of the speech. “He says at one point ‘wars have to end.’ Well, [Leon] Trotsky said, ‘you may not care about war, but war cares about you.’ I mean, right after you have somebody beheaded in London, you have a bomb go off in Boston, you have the Iranians — as you were just told by Congressman [Michael] McCaul — every day trying to penetrate our system with cyber, you have an Iranian nuclear program underway and the president announces cheerfully, ‘the war’s going to end because I’m not happy being a war president.’”

Later on, Gingrich said that both the Obama and Bush administrations had failed to acknowledge the size and scope of Islamic extremism, and the danger it poses to the U.S.

“You have problems in northern Nigeria,” Gingrich said. “You have the Chinese volunteering to send troops to Mali. You have problems in Libya. Well, it is — this is part of the problem we’ve had in two administrations now. No one wants to talk honestly about the fact that there is a radical Islamism on offense. It is on offense across the planet. It is what killed people in Boston. It’s what just killed a soldier in London. I just saw a thing in which there was an attack in Paris today.”

“This stuff’s going on everywhere,” he continued. “And we will never be at peace in the pre-1941 sense that we are not threatened and that we don’t have to actively take measures all the time. So the president’s speech in that sense — and by the way the last administration, the Bush administration had the same problem. No one wants to talk honestly about how big the threat is, how widespread it is, how fanatic it is and how in its own mind it is totally legitimate.”

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