Taking Newt Gingrich Seriously

Newt Gingrich wants to run for president. Number 1 on his priorities as president would be to rewrite the First Amendment.

This is a serious long term war, and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country, that will lead us to learn how to close down every website that is dangerous, and it will lead us to a very severe approach to people who advocate the killing of Americans and advocate the use of nuclear of biological weapons.

And, my prediction to you is that ether before we lose a city, or if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people before they get to reach out and convince young people to destroy their lives while destroying us.

This is a serious problem that will lead to a serious debate about the first amendment, but I think that the national security threat of losing an American city to a nuclear weapon, or losing several million Americans to a biological attack is so real that we need to proactively, now, develop the appropriate rules of engagement.

I think he's serious.

I guess I really blew it in the 1960's and '70's; I could have done a lot of drugs and messed up my mind so I wouldn't be conscious now and have to listen to this kind of crap. (It sounds like Mr. Gingrich did his fair share.) And for more jollies, read some of the comments of the people who agree with him (below the quote on the linked article). It sounds like a cocktail party at Nuremberg in 1936 just before the big show.

That brings me to the larger question: when will we reach the point where we finally say "enough!" of these attacks on America in order to save "America"? As Glenn Greenwald asks,

...are there any American values at all in which Bush followers and neocons actually believe -- any constitutional principles that are sacrosanct and whose violations they would oppose if undertaken in the name of fighting The Terrorists? It certainly doesn't appear so. They literally do not believe in "America" -- other than as a physical land mass.

It's not enough that the administration itself has taken it upon itself to violate several Amendments of the United States Constitution -- the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Fourteenth come to mind -- they are able to justify it with a straight face either under the theory of the "unitary executive" -- a phrase that does not exist in the Constitution -- or that "we're at war" and that anything we do in the name of the Global War on Terror is justified.

Sixty-five years ago today, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Habor and launched America into World War II (a war that we won in less time than the current conflict in Iraq has lasted), this nation responded, as could be expected, with cold fury. In some cases, the people and the government took it out on innocent victims (vide the internment of citizens of Japanese descent) and there were calls for restrictions on the Bill of Rights during wartime in order to protect ourselves. But it was clear then -- as it apparently isn't to the True Believers -- that if we did that, we would be no better than the tyrannies we were fighting. There are some things you just do not give up in order to win, and if we cannot win with our basic laws and ideas intact, then what right do we have to preach freedom and democracy to the world when we can't even guarantee it to ourselves?

If we do give them up, then we surely have become our own worst nightmare. We're getting awfully close to it if Newt Gingrich can seriously advocate "rethinking" the First Amendment and can seriously think about running for president, and people can still take him seriously at all.