Last month, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney offered withering criticism of fellow candidate Newt Gingrich’s idea to colonize the moon. Gingrich offered a spirited defense at a campaign rally in Georgia Tuesday,
The Hill reports.
In one of the presidential debates in Florida, Romney said, “I spent 25 years in business. If I had a business executive come to me and say they wanted to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the moon, I'd say, 'You're fired.' "
Gingrich responded Tuesday, saying Romney "is the kind of guy who would have fired Christopher Columbus.” The former House speaker borrowed that rebuke from one of his supporters in Tennessee.
"You either believe we have vision — you know Lincoln had a vision of a transcontinental railroad," Gingrich said. "The Wright brothers had a vision that they could fly, Edison had a vision that we could have electric lights . . . We've been a nation of visionaries. And while the cynics and the 'realists' ridicule vision, I believe in the Bible's 'Without vision the people perish.' "
Gingrich is working to engineer a comeback in next Tuesday’s primaries, including Georgia and Tennessee.
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