Gingrich’s Leap of Language

On Tuesday morning, President Barack Obama spoke about the expansion of the US war in Afghanistan and Iraq into ISIL-occupied Syria. The White House transcript of that statement is here, pegged to the time of 10:14 AM.

Former Speaker of the House and presidential candidate Newt Gingrich responded with a series of tweets.

On the other hand, Gingrich did not have the courtesy to listen to the speech himself, check the official White House text, or wait less than twenty minutes for C-Span to review its real-time transcription.

As the New York Times patiently explained:

…as any regular C-Span viewer can tell you, the network’s real-time captioning produces some far from accurate phrasing. In fact, later in the day, C-Span had Mr. Obama “partnering with African on Jupiter” on clean energy projects. What the president said was “partnering with African entrepreneurs.”

When faced with what he recognized as a “weird” text, Gingrich couldn’t simply consider that there might be an error and hold off commenting until he found more information. Instead, he fit that into his false image of President Obama’s foreign policy and leapt to criticize it. That’s another sign of Gingrich’s ongoing OIP Derangement Syndrome.