From the Fraters Libertas:
At one point the issue of circumscribed civil liberties came up and Gingrich’s response was that it had to be a balancing act. He rhetorically posed the question, if there were reliable information that a terrorist nuclear strike on Washington DC was scheduled for inauguration day next January, would he favor the temporary retraction of all civil liberties in the country. Given the threat to the survival of the US government and the loss of over a million people, his answer was “unquestionably, yes”.
Since Gingrich believes the war on method will last until 2070, this definition of “temporary” is apparently a Clintonesque one meaning “longer than you will likely live.” In other words, once gone, they’re gone forever. I would rather lose a city or three than sacrifice “all civil liberties” and live in a military dictatorship – I thought the whole point of being Americans was that we were willing to make sacrifices for freedom, not of it. Isn’t sacrificing the nation’s freedom in order to save the nation tantamount to burning the village in order to save it? What are we hoping to save? A nation of frightened serfs slavishly grateful to their feudal protectors? Bah – what are sheep if not for slaughter?
As for saving the government, this country would be much better off if Congress and the White House both disappeared in a big bang. The scene in Independence Day, you may recall, was greeted with cheers across the country. We’d be faced with governing ourselves for a change – oh, the horror! And where is the limit drawn? We now know that a million lives justifies throwing out the Constitution in Gingrich’s opinion, (we’ll skip over the fact that this begs the question of whether it would do any good at all), where, precisely, does he draw the line. Do we throw out our supposedly unalienable rights and call in Marius to save us if 100,000 are at risk? 1,000? Ten? What if one little girl in New York City has a tummy ache, should we declare martial law then?
The rampant idiocy of this is the notion that embracing serfdom will protect us from anything. It won’t. I absolutely guarantee that, and I assure you that if we go down this path, the most that Gingrich and his poisonous ilk will ever be able to say is to make a baseless assertion that whatever ends up happening could have been worse. Even now, the central goverment is ENSURING that the situation is more dangerous than it need be – you don’t think NWA would ban Arabs in a heartbeat and advertise that fact if the Feds would let them? – and even if Gingrich is correct about the threats he cites, the centralized autocracy he advocates will cripple the economy and stifle individual initiative as it always does, making any future war harder to win, not easier. History is littered with centralized military dictatorships that have lost wars, whereas decentralized free nations are usually victorious. And no government, once having expanded its reach, can be expected to voluntarily give up the new powers it has claimed for itself.
We already knew the Democratic leadership is treasonous, but with their recent words and actions, the Republican leadership seems hell-bent on proving that they, too, are traitors to the republic.