From Wednesday’s Special Report All-Star Panel Appearance

On whether it matters if Newt Gingrich’s stance on immigration is considered amnesty:

I think it does. Amnesty is if somebody has committed an offense — which [in this case] is entering [the United States] illegally — and you don’t have to pay a penalty. Or, if you get residency in the United States, it’s actually a prize. So it’s essentially amnesty.
But there is a logical problem here. If you say you are inhumane if you kick someone out after a quarter of a century, where do you draw the line? Are you humane if you kick them out after 15 years or 10 years or five? If the idea is to promote the family, which is what Gingrich was arguing, [and] you have a family after a couple of years here, under the logic of Gingrich proposal you’d want to let them stay here.
But I think it’s a larger issue. I think the Gingrich slot now is the anti-Romney slot. Everybody… has been looking for somebody who is an orthodox, ideological conservative. When Perry had the slot, people discovered he had all these apostasies on immigration, vaccination, et cetera, and he fell like a stone. Gingrich has a long history of these things apostasies, like the individual mandate, attacking the Ryan plan on Medicare as right wing social engineering, on climate change (the cozy ad he did with Pelosi).
I think as people learn about all of this — all of this wasn’t that well known before — I think the cumulative effect of that is people will say: Is he the real authentic ideological champion we thought he was — after people learn of his rather checkered history on many of the issues?

On Russian President Medvedev’s threat to target US missile defense installations:

The truculent language we heard from the Russians today is the perfect symptom of the abject collapse of the “reset” Russia policy that Obama has initiated.
Obama handed everything over — by cutting off the Poles and Czechs who agreed to house our missile defense system. Then we cut them off, canceled it — as a way to appease the Russians — and substituted a much weaker plan that involves the radar in Turkey, an extremely unreliable ally.
The [administration’s] objective was [first] to get Russian assistance on Iran — of which we have gotten none. After the IAEA report, the Russians said explicitly: No new sanctions, which undercuts everything we were trying to do.
But even on the missile system itself, the Russians are contemptuously rejecting the substitute missile defense system . . . saying: We [the Russians] are going to target our offensive missiles on your American facilities. And, second, we might even cancel the START treaty.
These are the wages of appeasement.