Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has some advice for members of the Occupy Wall Street movement: take a bath and get a job.
"Jefferson said that people that want to be both free and ignorant are asking for something that has never been and will never be," the former House Speaker told an audience during a debate at the First Federated Church in Des Moines, Iowa Saturday. "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 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."
He added: "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.'"
The Republican debate audience responded to that comment by filling the Christian church with some of the loudest applause of the evening.
Only two days before, Gingrich found himself being "mic checked" by members of the Occupy movement in Florida. Considering Saturday's remarks, the candidate can probably expect to hear more from the 99 percent.
