Gingrich to OWS: Take a Bath, Get a Job

Offering unsolicited advice to Occupy Wall Street has become one of America’s favorite pastimes of late.

There was Bill Clinton, who urged the protesters to “come up with two or three things they want to achieve.” In Slate, Eliot Spitzer laid out eight suggestions for the activists, from calling for a financial service transaction fee to diversifying their own ranks.

Then there was Herman Cain, who tweeted at them to start “protesting the failed policies of this administration and not Wall Street.”

This weekend it was Newt Gingrich, who waded in at a Republican candidates forum in Iowa with this blunt prescription: Take a bath and get a job.

Raw Story has the video and a transcript of Gingrich’s comments. Here’s the relevant passage:

Jefferson said that people that want to be both free and ignorant are asking for something that has never been and will never be. Captain John Smith said in 1607 in the first English speaking permanent colony to the aristocrats who paid their way and didn’t want to work, "If you don’t work, you won’t eat."

Let me take that for a brief moment to describe Occupy Wall Street. All of the Occupy movement starts with the premise that we all owe them everything. They take over a public park they didn’t pay for, to go near by to use bathrooms they didn’t pay for, to beg for food from places they don’t want to pay for, to obstruct those that are going to work to pay the taxes to sustain the bathrooms and to sustain the park so that they can self-righteously explain that they are the paragons of virtue to which we owe everything.

Now, that is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country and why you need to reassert something as simple as saying to them, "Go get a job right after you take a bath."

Hear that, you real estate brokers, solar energy company workers, and 72-year-old retired university professors? Get a job! And you, 44-year-old unemployed man with two college degrees? Have you tried taking a bath?

Most irksome of all, of course, are those ungrateful Army vets. (Gingrich, for his part, received a draft deferment during the Vietnam War.)