Patriotic Conflict - I've always

Patriotic Conflict - I've always been queasy about the Patriot Act - the law ushering in a raft of anti-terror provisions. On the one hand, as a military historian, I know that government can not run exactly the same in wartime as in peacetime. As a conservative, I know that you often know a thing most truly by that thing's enemies - and the Patriot Act's first enemies were the same sort of retro-sixties fossils that oppose EVERYthing pro-American.

And yet the libertarian in me thought that some aspects of the Act rounded up excessive power for the government, too.

Cities around the country are passing resolutions - and sometimes meatier laws - against the Act. Many of them are the usual suspects: condo-pinko la-la lands like Amherst, Boulder, Berkeley and Portland. Others are creeping every so close to the mainstream, like heavily-Arab Ann Arbor.

Somewhere between the Attorney General's seeming cavalierness and the ACLU's detached absolutism, perhaps. is the truth. For example, this rant from Dennis Miller:

"You have to admit phone sex has gotten a lot hotter in recent months. There's just something spicy about knowing that John Ashcroft might be
listening in. As for what many are calling racial profiling in the aftermath of September 11th, well, get ready to be pissed off, you ACLU-F**king-Morons, we're dealing with a massive threat and limited manpower, so, you want them to check everybody out equally? Sure, fine okay, but let's at least compromise and put the Swedish dwarf a little
further down the list than the Iraqi explosives expert carrying a Belgian passport with more eraser marks on it than Kid Rock's trig final."