GOP presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich moved from outlandish to downright offensive last week when he declared the Palestinians are an “invented people” only capable of terrorism. “Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth. These people are terrorists,” he said. “It’s fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, enough lying about the Middle East.”

Today on Fox and Friends, New York City’s former Mayor Rudy Giuliani exulted in Gingrich’s inflammatory remarks. “I jumped up out of my chair and cheered for Newt when he said what he said about Palestine,” Giuliani exclaimed. “Finally. Thank God. Someone is saying the right things about Palestine.” Taking Gingrich’s extremism a step further, Giuliani proclaimed that the creation of a Palestinian state would just create a “terrorist state” that “will be training people to come over here and blow us up”:

GIULIANI: I jumped up out of my chair and cheered for Newt when he said what he said about Palestine. Finally. Thank God. Someone is saying the right things about Palestine. Somebody has to question why are we creating a Palestinian state that’s going to be another terrorist state. Put Israel aside for a minute. Is it in the interest of the United States of America to create another state where they’re going to be training people to come over here and blow us up? Of course it isn’t. And somebody’s got to have the guts to stand and say that like Ronald Reagan said, “the Evil Empire.” Like Ronald Reagan said, “Tear down the wall.” We need somebody like that.

Watch it:

Giuliani may want to take another look at his hero. As Politico’s Ben Smith noted yesterday, Reagan was nowhere near the “no-daylight-with-Israel policy that leading Republicans advocate” today. in 1982, he called for a settlement freeze, stating that it “could create the confidence needed for wider participation in these talks.” He even complained about Israel’s participation in the war in Lebanon, saying “the relationship between our two countries is at stake.” In 1987, he called on Israelis to “step back from confrontation” regarding the violence in the West Bank, adding that their occupation “also damages the self-respect and world opinion of the Israeli people.”

As Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz noted, “If Obama treated Israel like Reagan did, he’d be impeached.” And yet, Republicans like Gingrich and Giuliani continue to insist that their regressive, prejudicial, and ignorance of the Palestinian people is a position Reagan — or anyone who believes in the peace process — would support.

This week on Fox News, anchors Bill O’Reilly and John Stossel discussed former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean’s advocacy for the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), an exiled Iranian opposition group designated as a “foreign terror organization” by the State Department. The leadership of the group is based in Paris, while more than 3,000 former fighters linger in Camp Ashraf — a base set up outside Baghdad in the 1980s when the group allied with Saddam Hussein against Iran — where they face violent harassment by the Iraqi authorities.

O’Reilly and Stossel went through some background about the group and Dean’s history of paid speeches advocating for their removal from the terror rolls and U.S. recognition of the group’s leader, Maryam Rajavi, as the president of Iran.

Their history is shoddy. For example, Stossel blames the group’s U.S. designation solely on acts committed in the 1970s, which he says were carried out by a “nasty fringe” and occurred “30, 40 years ago.” But the MEK only renounced violence in 2001 and fighters were separated from their tanks in Camp Ashraf only in 2003. The U.S. government actually directly accuses the MEK of carrying out terrorist acts as recently as the late 1990s.

But the really staggering ignorance on the part of Stossel is his misunderstanding of the statutes that criminalize material support for groups designated as terrorists. Stossel compares Dean’s paid speeches advocating for the MEK to speeches on behalf of medical industry groups and Stossel’s own paid speeches. O’Reilly, to his credit, pushes back:

O’REILLY: He’s lobbying, and he’s getting paid by this group, Dean, to…

STOSSEL: We don’t know that he’s lobbying for them. He’s made speeches for them, but so has Rudy Giuliani.

O’REILLY: Come on. Why would these guys do that unless they were getting paid?

STOSSEL: Because they say, “Oh, we have Howard Dean speaking here in Belgium. Come over and meet Howard Dean.”

O’REILLY: That’s right. And Dean wouldn’t do that unless they were greasing him.

STOSSEL: Right. They’re greasing him.

O’REILLY: Yes, so he’s getting money from these people.

STOSSEL: So? I make speeches for money.

O’REILLY: Yes.

STOSSEL: If he checked them out and he believes…

O’REILLY: You do the chamber of commerce in Toledo. Not the Muhajadeen.

STOSSEL: If I believed in their cause, as he says he does.

O’REILLY: Oh, yes, he believes in their cause. Socialized medicine people? That’s what he believes in.

STOSSEL: He’s also taken money to change the patent rules for pharmaceutical companies. I don’t blame him for doing that.

O’REILLY: Dean is a lobbyist now, that’s what he does. And he gets paid by MSNBC.

Watch the whole exchange:

Stossel’s defense closely mirrors that of Rudy Giuliani, Tom Ridge, and Fran Townsend (a paid CNN contributor), who argued after they were accused of material support for terrorism that they didn’t consider the MEK to be a terror group.

That Dean was paid by the group — or more accurately, American supporters of the group (if that’s indeed the case) — is less important than whether or not he made what is considered speech that was “coordinated” with the group. Having spoken to actual MEK rallies in Europe alongside Rajavi, that is a difficult defense for Dean and other paid or unpaid advocates to make. (This is not to say one shouldn’t be able to speak in favor of delisting the MEK, or that they do not deserve today to be delisted, but simply that until they are delisted, the laws on the matter are clear.)

But one does not simply get to choose which laws they follow and which designations they recognize. In a nation where the rule of law matters, it needs to be applied equally to all violators, irrespective of what they or others feel about it. That’s why the false comparison between the MEK and the Toledo Chamber of Commerce is so staggering.

“America’s Mayor” Rudy Guiliani spoke at a College Republican-sponsored event at Dartmouth last week and weighed in on the debt ceiling debate, saying that if it does get raised, the U.S. could potentially have “one of the weaker economies in the world.” (Actually dire economic consequences will result if the debt ceiling isn’t raised.) Then, Giuliani — who is reportedly considering another run for president — said that whatever happens, military spending should be left alone because it’s apparently not a big part of the federal budget anyway:

“I think we use our foreign aid budget pretty efficiently,” he said. “There are much more important things to cut.

He also said that defense spending is “not a major part” of the federal government’s budget, only constituting “about four or five percent” of the total.

Military spending actually is a major part of the federal government’s budget. Not only does the Pentagon’s budget make up 20 percent of total spending — not “4 or 5 percent” as Giuliani claimed — but the defense budget represents 50 percent of discretionary spending.

The United States is now spending more on defense than at any time since World War II. Moreover, the Senate Appropriations Committee recently found that the military’s budget increased more as a percentage than all other government expenditures since 2001. Indeed, the Pentagon’s baseline budget has nearly doubled in the last 10 years.

To his credit, Giuliani did tell Dartmouth students that he “would try to get control of defense spending.” But it seems like the first step would be for the former mayor to get the facts on how much the U.S. actually spends.