If anyone wants a good reason to reject Newt Gingrich as a Presidential candidate, it’s not the serial hypocrisy:
It’s not him claiming Occupy protestors need to get a job right after they take a bath.
It’s not even his outrageous claim that the Palestinians are an “invented people”.
It’s the fact that he entertains bizarre notions like this:
It’s almost like [The Bush Administration] should every once in a while have allowed a terrorist attack to get through just to remind us.
Civil libertarians understand the threat of terrorism to a free society. The real threat of terrorism to a free society is that governments and societies respond to terrorism by shutting down the institutions of a free society — freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, freedom from monitoring, freedom of speech, freedom of ideology, freedom of economic activity.
Civil libertarians understand that the best way to fight terrorism is to oppose demagogues like Gingrich, who propose the curtailment of liberty as a “solution” to terrorism, and who would consider the idea that societies need occasional successful terrorist attacks in order to remind them of the menace of terrorism.
Civil libertarians know that the best way to prevent terrorism is to stop provoking it through imperialist conquest. Why didn’t 9/11 happen in Sweden, or Switzerland, or Iceland, countries which are often considered “freer” than the United States?
9/11 didn’t happen there because those nations aren’t projecting a foreign policy of imperialism, and aren’t occupying Arab countries to sate their endless thirst for oil and resources. The countries that have been attacked are the countries that are occupying the Arab world, and that support corrupt dictators like Hosni Mubarek, and King Fahd.
The best way to stop terrorism is for the West to develop a true alternative energy infrastructure so that we can get the hell out of the middle east, and end our oil addiction.