Gingrich: GOP win "a duty of national security"

TULSA, Oklahoma - Barack Obama is "the most dangerous president in modern American history" and the nation's safety can't be assured until he's gone, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said Monday.

Speaking to a large and enthusiastic crowd at a basketball arena on the Oral Roberts University campus, the former speaker said Obama is particularly weak when it comes to confronting the threat of radical Islamic terrorists.

"So, defeating Barack Obama becomes, in fact, a duty of national security. Because the fact is, he is incapable of defending the United States," Gingrich said.

Obama, who ordered raids that killed Osama bin Laden and most of al-Qaeda's top leadership and has orchestrated escalating sanctions against Iran, gets generally good marks from the public on foreign policy and in particular on fighting terrorism.

But Gingrich said the Obama administration "has intellectually disarmed. It has morally disarmed. It is incapable of describing what threatens us." He reiterated his charge that the administration refuses to acknowledge the role played by radical Islamists in threatening the United States. He pointed to the arrest over the weekend of a 29-year old Moroccan man who was arrested for allegedly planning to carry out a suicide bombing at the U.S. Capitol.

Although a U.S. attorney assigned to the case said the Moroccan man "allegedly believed he was working with al-Qaeda," Gingrich told the crowd that under the Obama administration it would be "highly inappropriate to describe what motivated (him) because that would somehow be politically incorrect."

Gingrich went on to describe the president's policies as ones that would "unilaterally weaken the United States" and decried his handing of Iran's march toward a nuclear program. He said Obama should tell the Iranians that "you need to stop your program before you get hit, because you should be under no illusions. If you refuse to stop your program, long before it is completed you are going to get hit, and we are not in any way going to stop the Israelis from defending themselves."