Perry: 'We Saw a Crazy Man Walk Into the White House...'

While running through a list of national security failures, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry told the New Hampshire Republican Leadership Summit today that “we saw a crazy man walk into the front of the White House and nobody seemed to know where he came from.”

Upon the audience bursting into laughter, Perry clarified, “And I am talking about the crazy man that walked through that wasn’t supposed to be there, OK?”

That would be Omar Gonzalez, who jumped the fence and ran through the open door of the White House back in September.

“I know somebody will take that wrong,” Perry added.

Perry issued a scathing criticism of the current White House occupant during the address, particularly on foreign policy.

“You see individuals being led to a beach in Libya and be beheaded. You see a young Jordanian pilot burned alive in front of us. You see these young Christian college kids that are murdered. And there is — there’s pessimism in the world. And we think back and we look at Libya and we see what happened to Libya. We see Egypt. We think about our best friend and most reliable partner, the most vibrant democracy in the Middle East, treated the way Israel’s been treated. We think about Syria. And we realize that we missed an incredible opportunity to stop ISIS in its tracks in Syria early by funding the Syrian rebels. And we could’ve gotten rid of Assad as well, I would suggest to you, but our president stood back,” the governor said.

“And then they left, ISIS, and went into Northern Iraq and at that particular point in time, I will suggest to you, had the Americans delivered lethal weapons to those Peshmerga fighters in Northern Kurdistan, that they would have stopped ISIS. They were fighting for their country. They’re fighting for their family. But we didn’t. And today, ISIS controls a greater part of that region of the world than the entirety of the size of the United Kingdom. And while all that was going on, there was somebody watching. Vladimir Putin was watching. And he realized that Crimea wasn’t going to be a problem to annex.”

Perry sounded like a guy who will be tossing his name into the ring at this first-in-the-nation state gathering of Oval Office hopefuls.

“Two things I learned in 2011, number one is you got to spend a lot of time in New Hampshire and you’d better be healthy and you’d better spend like years here,” he quipped.

Perry also stressed that “to be prepared to stand on a stage and talk about this myriad of issues, whether it’s domestic policy, monetary policy, whether it’s foreign policy, takes years of intense study.”

“And I spent the last three years in that, in that mode, being able to stand up and discuss all of these issues and do it in a way that is very profound and impactful,” he said. “…But with that said, I will suggest to you that the next President of the United States really needs to be someone who has deep experience as an executive.”

“That that executive experience is incredibly important to the next leader of this country because we’ve spent eight years with a young, inexperienced United States senator. And I will suggest to you economically, militarily and foreign policy wise, we’re paying a tremendous price.”