Gingrich: End Democracy as We Know It

I caught a video of Newt Gingrich on Meet the Press today explaining how he would win the war in Iraq. The third item in Newt's 6 point plan was particularly eye catching.

Encourage the development of a military tribunal system to lock people up the way Abraham Lincoln would have done it.

When Gingrich mentions "locking people up" through a military tribunal system, he is referring to war opponents. The key is the Lincoln reference. When conservatives like Gingrich talk about military tribunals in relation to Abraham Lincoln, they emphasize that Lincoln had the leading Copperhead, or Southern sympathizer, Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, brought before a military tribunal and convicted. For conservatives, the Vallandigham case established a decisive precedent for presidents having domestic opponents of a war arrested and brought before military courts. Former Reagan defense official Frank Gaffney argued recently in a Washington Times column that the Lincoln precedent meant that members of Congress like Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan should be subject to arrest. Obviously, the same would apply to the leadership of anti-war organizations like MoveOn.org, the proprietors of popular left-wing blogs like DailyKos and MyDD, and anti-war figures like Michael Moore as well.

For Gingrich, "locking people up" means jailing hundreds if not thousands of war opponents and silencing anybody else who might be opposed to the war. At least implicitly, Gingrich believes that "winning the war" means abrogating the free speech, free press, freedom of assembly, habeas corpus, and other due process rights for the entire American population. In other words, the effort to create democracy in Iraq would have the effect (at least temporarily) of ending democracy in the United States.