Newt Gingrich did not, as the title of this article suggests, attack Obama for caring too much about civil liberties. Here’s what Gingrich said:
“I think people have a good reason to be worried about the overall tenor of the way they’re trying to move back to ‘civil liberties matter more than protecting America.’”
What he means is that coddling America’s enemies by giving them the same rights that Americans are guaranteed in the Bill of Rights impedes our government’s efforts to protect its people. I understood that. The issue has been debated so often that he took the liberty of using some verbal shorthand. Perhaps if he had spelled it out for the presumptuous, that “protecting the civil liberties of our enemies matters more to the Obama administration than protecting Americans,” he might not have been characterized as a fascist.
Of course, that would have made no difference to the multitudes of Americans who paradoxically believe that America’s enemies deserve to be protected by our constitution, no matter that our government’s ability to protect its citizens would be (and perhaps now is) greatly diminished by doing so. We certainly live in strange times when people care more about protecting their enemies than protecting themselves.
