by digby
Newt Gingrich had a Facebook chat today and said something I haven't heard anyone say before, at least not in quite this way:
He's making the usual hawkish distinction between fighting a "war" and fighting "crime" but it's usually deployed in service of the idea that we shouldn't allow prisoners to have any rights. Here he's conflating the NSA breaching its mandate against domestic activity by suggesting that the distinction is the type of activity the government is tracking rather than people it's tracking and where it's tracking them. And what does the NSA have to do with that anyway? We have an FBI that is tasked with both terrorism and criminal investigations. The laws of the land apply to both of those activities in the United States. So what's he talking about exactly?
It sounds as though he thinks that if anyone, including a US citizen, is suspected of "terrorism" civil liberties shouldn't apply. That strikes me as a very dangerous proposition.
He may have just been talking out of his hat and didn't mean anything specific. But I keep hearing stuff along these lines from other gasbags and I'm beginning to think there's some kind of serious theory developing here.
In case you missed it, Gingrich penned a hysterical screed for the WSJ yesterday that pretty much declared a world war (again) against terrorism everywhere on the planet, which is what inspired this Facebook chat. Like all the rest of the Chicken Little Hawks, he apparently thinks that small scale terrorist attacks are going to destroy the country unless we wage a full scale war against radical Islam.
Meanwhile, this is just business as usual, no big deal.
There have been 95 shootings on K-12 and college campuses — an average of nearly one every week — in the two years since the deadly attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., according to a new analysis by two anti-gun violence advocacy groups.
These shootings have left 45 people dead and 78 injured, the analysis claims.
Gingrich and company literally could not care less about that. But this attack in Paris is a threat to all we hold dear. The only way these right wingers will care about all these school shootings is if terrorists decide to do it.
I also think it's interesting that so many people seem to be reacting with the kind of hysteria we saw after 9/11 to the Charlie Hebdo killings but managed to keep their wits about them after the Boston bombing. That one seemed to me much more like a real terrorist attack against civilians just going about their business and being killed and maimed purely for shock value. And it happened right here in the good old USA. I was actually quite impressed with the fact that Americans kept calm and carried on without a lot of hand wringing over how this represented a new terrorist threat and we needed to immediately start killing somebody somewhere or our way of life would be destroyed. I thought we had matured.
Perhaps it's just the idea that this latest was an attack on the abstract concept of free speech that makes it more scary. But the perpetrators were locals just as the Tsarnaev brothers were locals (albeit immigrants) so it's not the scary middle eastern foreigner thing that sets it apart. There's something different in the air after this one. And it isn't good. If I didn't know better I might think there was some politics involved.
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