Obama Mocks GOP Opponents Over Energy Positions: 'Members of the Flat Earth Society

President Barack Obama on Thursday derided his GOP challengers, calling them members of the "flat earth society" for their positions on energy.

"Lately, we have heard a lot of professional politicians, a lot of the folks who were, you know, running for a certain office, who shall go unnamed, they’ve been talking down new sources of energy," Obama told a crowd during a speech in Maryland. "They dismiss wind power. They dismiss solar power. They make jokes about biofuels. They were against raising fuel standards. I guess they like gas guzzlers. They think that’s good for our future. We’re trying to move towards the future, they want to be stuck in the past!"

While not identifying any of the GOP contenders by name, Obama continued: "We've heard this kind of thinking before. Let me tell you something, if some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail, they must have been founding members of the flat earth society. They would not have believed that the world was round."

Many of the Republican presidential candidates have slammed Obama in the face of soaring gas prices, including Newt Gingrich, who has vowed if elected gas would be lowered to $2.50 a gallon.

Continuing to mock the Republicans, Obama suggested they would have agreed with those who said television wouldn't last or that the automobile was "only a fad."

"One of my predecessors, President Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone, 'It’s a great invention but who would ever want to use one?'" he said. “That’s why he’s not on Mt. Rushmore!”

Additionally, at another point during the speech, one person in the audience appeared to faint.

"I think somebody may have fainted," Obama said. "Remember next time, if you're going to stand for a long time, you've gotta eat!"

As The Hill pointed out, it's the second time an audience member has fainted during one of the president's speeches in two weeks: A spectator passed out last Wednesday while Obama was speaking at a truck manufacturing plant in North Carolina.

Update: Nan Card, curator of manuscripts at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Ohio told Talking Points Memo Obama's reference to the 19th president was not entirely fair or accurate:

“He really was the opposite,” she said. “He had the first telephone in the White House. He also had the first typewriter in the White House. Thomas Edison came to the White House as well and displayed the phonograph. Photographing people who came to the White House and visited at dinners and receptions was also very important to him.”

While often cited, Card said Obama’s cited quote had never been confirmed by contemporary sources and is likely apocryphal. A contemporary newspaper account of his first experience with telephone in 1877 from the Providence Journal records a smiling Hayes repeatedly responding to the voice on the other line with the phrase, “That is wonderful.”

Hayes, Card said, was "pretty technology-oriented for the time” and "between the telephone, the telegraph, the phonograph and photography, I think he was pretty much on the cutting edge.”