I love this speech by Newt you can read the whole thing here. I admit that although I know who he is, I was not that involved in politics back when he was a major force. I do know that many do not like him. All I am saying is that this speech was awesome, I have put some of the best parts below
…I think the phrase “do not tell me it can’t be done,” is about a good a way to start thinking about 2010 and 2012 as you can imagine. And I think our goal should be to reach out to the American people in every possible way. To make sure that ...this is a one term presidency in the Jimmy Carter tradition...
…Consider California. ...Think about this, 64 percent of the people of California said Sacramento is such a mess they rejected raising taxes and raising spending. …The referendum failed in every county. That is a majority of the voters of San Francisco voted no. Now one of the challenges to the Republican Party, are we prepared to be inclusive and not exclusive.
… A majority Republican Party will have lots of debates within the party. ... There’s not a single Reagan speech where he doesn’t say “my fellow Republicans, and those independents and Democrats who are looking for a better future.” There were not enough Republicans to win in 1980, in fact we were – I believe – 21 percent of the electorate by identity in 1979.
Now inclusion does not mean lack of principles. Like Reagan – …I am for first principles. Tonight, I am going to apply first principles to three areas. One – strengthening our unique American civilization, Two – strengthening our national and homeland security, Three – Building a productive America with the best jobs and greatest prosperity in the world.
First, we must strengthen our unique American civilization. …I am not a citizen of the world. I think that the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous. There is no world sovereignty, there is no world system of law - there is in fact no circumstance under which I would like to be a citizen of North Korea, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Cuba, or Russia. I am a citizen – I am a citizen of the United States of America. And, the rest of this speech is about the United States of America.
America is a unique civilization. …the 9th circuit court, which is in fact irrationally out of touch with this country, and which actually ruled that ‘One Nation Under God’ was unconstitutional. Grounds, in my judgment, for abolishing the court and re-recruiting it. That is not a radical position. Thomas Jefferson eliminated 18 out of 35 federal judges, over one half of all federal judges. I am merely proposing one court of appeals. I am a moderate on this issue.
But the core of this is a very straightforward historic debate. It is not a theological debate, it is not a religious debate, despite every effort of the elite media and the academic left to distort it. It is a fundamental question of political history. If you go to the national archives, you will find the Declaration of Independence, a political document. It says, “We are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This is fundamental to the nature of America. We are the only country in history that says, “your personal rights come from God directly to you, and you loan the government sovereignty.” But the center of sovereignty in America is inevitably inexorably with the citizen because it is inalienable. That’s the core document of this country.
That is why quotas and Sotomayor are wrong, that is why rationing in healthcare is wrong. No government bureaucrat has the right to take from you the rights that God gave you, and rationing under healthcare is inevitably limiting your life at the whim of a bureaucrat and at the manipulation of a politician.
…And, by the way, if you want absolute proof you cannot teach American history honestly and accurately without reference to God, go to the Lincoln Memorial, read the second inaugural – March 1865 – 703 word – 14 references to God – Two quotes from the Bible – and explain to me how you would teach Lincoln accurately and honestly without explaining his attitudes.
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Compare that passion for individual liberty and individual opportunity with the quotas, group politics, and the bureaucratic healthcare rationing advocated by our opponents. …
It is why we have to teach American history accurately and honestly; and frankly, replace those professors and those teachers who are unwilling to be accurate and honest about American history.
It is why we have to have judges that refer to the American Constitution and worry about American precedents and reject those would be judges or replace those judges who insist on quoting foreign precedent and foreign law, which has no application to the United States of America.
It is why we recognize that American entrepreneurial capitalism and a free market will work. And that European socialism will not work in terms of productivity and prosperity.
Because America is unique it is worthy of defending. So my second point is – we must ensure national security and homeland security.
We need a great national debate on five key questions.
- Is the world dangerous?
- Are there people and governments that would like to destroy us?
- What is it worth to keep America and Americans safe from those dangers?
- What strategies can defeat our opponents?
- What metrics can we use to tell if the strategies are working or failing?Under the Obama administration, we have fallen back into the utopian fantasies and self deception of the 1977 Carter Administration and the 1993 Clinton Administration.
…Ronald Reagan and his idealistic belief in democracy announced firmly and clearly that our goal in the Cold War was “We win, They Lose.” He announced clearly that our opponents were an evil empire and eleven years after his election the Soviet Union disappeared. He was both idealistic and realistic.
Jimmy Carter who was sincere idealist was totally out of touch with reality. He lived in a world of fantasies and the result was a catastrophic failure.
…The challenge for the Obama Administration is simple. Americans know better. This isn’t the first issue in which the President is clearly and decisively on the wrong side and the American people have begun to get it. By 3 to 1, the American people believe that we are safer with prisoners in Guantanamo than in America. Now, 3 to 1 is a pretty big margin.
Guantanamo is a case study is common sense versus self deception …The great difference between Reagan’s rhetorical skills and President Obama’s rhetorical skills are that Reagan used his rhetorical skills to shine light on truths and fundamental facts. Obama uses his rhetorical skills to hide from fundamental facts. If you want a single case, read the Cheney speech and the Obama speech on the same day. There is a fundamental mistake, which tells you a great deal about this administration. Cheney had a fairly simple message – the reason we have Guantanamo is that we have people at Guantanamo that are dangerous. They are called terrorists. We call them terrorists because they want to kill us. It is good not to have them anywhere near us because it makes it harder for them to kill us. Now the average American could hear that simple declaredly sentence and say to themselves, “Okay, there’s the terrorists are okay gang and there’s the terrorists stay in Guantanamo gang. Uhh, okay, I got it. I’m with the terrorists stay in Guantanamo gang.”
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But we need to build on the lesson of this debate because it’s not about Guantanamo – it’s about the nature of reality. ...After 9/11 people ask, “why didn’t we think of that attack?” In fact many of us had, just nobody wanted to pay attention, it was in the bureaucracies. There is no excuse for not thinking today about the potentially catastrophic attacks that are threatening us. …
The key national security question for the next generation is simply our third topic. What do we have to do to compete with China and India so our grandchildren live in the most productive and therefore the most prosperous country in the world? How do we make America the best place in the world to build the next factory and create the next high paying job? …I commend to all of you Bob Compton’s film 2 Million Minutes – that’s four years of high school – which shows you vividly two Indian high school students, two Chinese high school students, and two American high school students. …go to 2mminutes.com to see just how bad the challenge is. …
...The idea that you can pour $787 billion in Washington and have it somehow create jobs in an effective way is a fantasy of the first order. Not that the people who voted for it care; their goal was not productivity and prosperity. Their goal was power and paying off their allies.
You can tell how badly the stimulus has failed – and let’s be clear, this is not something President Obama inherited from George W. Bush – he got his stimulus, on his schedule, for his amount, delivered by his robots in Congress who did exactly as they were told without even reading the bill. So he can’t turn around now and say, “Oh Gosh, George W. Bush made me have a stimulus plan.” This is his plan. And what happened? They promised we would peak at 8 percent unemployment and on Friday we were at 9.4 percent, which is not in their budget which means their budget is already wrecked because we are going to have higher unemployment, greater government expenses, and less revenue than they projected because their plan has already failed.
And let me be clear as a matter of first principle. Bureaucrats micromanaging companies - Does not work. Politicians dominating the economy - Does not work. ...
My good friend Dave Bossie pointed out that he was only 13 at the time and every morning his father would give him a screwdriver to go out back to change the license plate so that the car that needed gas had the right license plate. And from that I have developed a simple test for liberal and conservative. If you learned that government rationing led 13 year olds to change license plates and you conclude that we should have dropped an idea that dumb, you’re a conservative. If on hearing Dave Bossie’s story you concluded that we needed license plate police at every gas station, you are a liberal. It’s that straightforward.
…Paying off ACORN and other left wing interest groups will not work. You can’t have capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down. You are going to choose between one or the other, I choose capitalism because for 400 years it has been the most productive, the most prosperous highest quality of life system on the planet.
You have to have the rule of law not the rule of empathy. You cannot pay off political allies in violation of contract law, if America begins to resemble Venezuela and Russia in changing the law to favor political allies and punish political enemies, our economy will be crippled for a generation.
People will not invest where politicians can rip them off. And I don’t think that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd are exactly good advertisements around the world for the next factory to come to the United States.
So, how do we get back to economic growth? Raising taxes does not work. What would work? As Reagan would have said, ‘Let’s go back to First principles.’ Taxes are a first principle. …
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Now let me make a key point here, and I want to say this because of Jon Voight’s wonderful quote, “Do not tell me it can’t be done.” I just outlined for you the first four tax cuts that ought to be the heart of the Republican Party. And many of you will say to me, “Well, that’s unrealistic.” Well, so was a majority in ’94 and so was welfare reform and so was balancing the budget and so was electing Ronald Reagan and so was eliminating the Soviet Empire.
This is precisely what Ronald Reagan meant in 1975 at CPAC when he said, “we cannot have pale pastels, we need bold colors.” The fact is that if you go to the country with a genuine free market opportunity and you’re prepared to win the argument in the Margaret Thatcher phrase, “That first you win the argument, and then you win the vote.” …
Tax increases cannot balance the budget because they crush the economy which reduces revenues and they encourage the liberals to spend more. Look at Sacramento and New York. If raising taxes work, New York and California would have balanced budgets. But they don’t because the interest groups spend the money as fast as they find it.
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Today, there are huge opportunities for controlling spending; the level of fraud and corruption which has infected our government is staggering. Let me be blunt, when you read a New York Times story that 97 percent of the people who retire from the Long Island Railroad are getting disabilities, you are reading about a society so corrupt that theft has become the norm. It cost the U.S. taxpayer in the last decade $250 million for theft by Long Island Railroad retirees.
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And beyond tax policy, we need an American energy policy. We need a policy that emphasizes energy in America and recognizes that the problem is government. It’s not that we don’t have energy sources. The Bakken Field in North Dakota for example, in the last three years the estimate has gone up by 25 fold – 2500 percent – the amount of oil available.
For national security, for the national economy, we should keep the money here. The next great building boom off of energy ought to be in Denver not Dubai….
The American people reject an energy tax and that’s all cap and trade is. I never refer to cap and trade – that’s just a fancy liberal phrase to hide the reality – this is an energy tax and every American at every level will pay it and it will export jobs to China.
The American people reject and imperial Environmental Protection Agency which is grotesquely exaggerating its power and one of the bills we should introduce is to replace the current bureaucratic litigation system at EPA with an entrepreneurial innovative system that is fundamentally new and different.
Americans reject the fundamental liberal principle of paying more to get less. I have confess I began reading the Waxman- Markey bill and I gave up when I got to the page where they were explaining how they would regulate Jacuzzis. People who believe that 31 year olds can redesign …the automobile industry …are people that have lost any sense of what made America unique, …
Now is a time to be bold. If we believe that we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, if we are going to be the party that wraps itself around the Declaration of Independence and stands firm for being Americans then every child deserves to learn. Every adult that has been lost by bad education deserves to learn. Every first time prisoner deserves to learn…
This administration would destroy the American healthcare system. … I am fundamentally, unalterably opposed to comparative effectiveness becoming the first step towards rationing because if we have been endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights…
So let me just close with the following thought. The Republican Party has a great a moral challenge as it had in 1858 when Lincoln as an unknown lawyer was campaigning in Illinois. It has as great a challenge as it had in 1976 when Ronald Reagan, having lost the nomination, was invited by President Ford to come down and said, “We may be fewer than we have been, but we have the moral obligation to reach out to every American, to recruit every person, to make our case for America’s future.”
We stand for a strong national and homeland security system. We stand for a solid base in classic American principles. We can offer far better solutions than the left.
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I hope that each of you will leave here tonight, dedicated for your children, for your grandchildren, and for your country, to reaching out to every person that you can touch, to making the decision that we will win in 2010, and in 2012 in the great tradition of Jimmy Carter – we will make this one more one term left-wing presidency.
And before you say it can’t be done, let me remind you of Jon Voight’s great quote, “Do not tell me it can’t be done.”
If it was true for FDR, it’s true for us…
