Be Afraid

"The Bush administration did not, of course, invent the use of fear as a weapon to justify its wrongful conduct and enhance its own power Nor is Al Qaeda the first enemy the United States has had. …

On April 24, 1950, President Harry S. Truman gave a speech to the nation regarding the threat posed by domestic communism -- a threat at least as real as Islamic terrorism. Part of what he said:

'Now I am going to tell you how we are not going to fight communism. We are not going to transform our fine FBI into a Gestapo secret police. That is what some people would like to do. We are not going to try to control what our people read and say and think. We are not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat.'

And the founders repeatedly warned of the danger, and the likelihood, that governments would attempt to exploit fear of external threats in order to justify abridgments of core liberties. …

The apex of fear-wallowing came during the exceptionally well-staged Republican National Convention of 2004 … Here is Zell Miller, the former Democratic senator from Georgia, explaining how his fears drove him to support George Bush:

'And like you, I ask which leader is it today that has the vision, the willpower, and, yes, the backbone to best protect my family? There is but one man to whom I am willing to entrust their future and that man's name is George W. Bush

We do not have a government where the president can break the law in secret and then tell us not to worry about it because it is being done to 'protect' us. We have never had a system of government operate on such paternalistic and blindly loyal sentiments. And we have never before been a nation living in such fear that, in exchange for promises of protection and safety, we are told that we must allow the president to seize those very powers which the Constitution prohibits."

Excerpt: How Would a Patriot Act?