Posted by aogThursday, 02 June 2005 at 16:27 TrackBack Ping URL

It's best to not pick an example your opponents like

It’s definitely “mock NPR day”. Another story this morning was about the horrors of the Patriot Act.

The story, as far as I could gather, is that

• Someone notices an apparently inflammatory passage hand written in a library book.
• That someone notifies the FBI.
• The FBI asks the library for records on who checked out the book.
• The library board decides to fight the request.
• A library staffer uses an internet search to discover that the passage is a quote from a Bin Laden speech.
• Presented with this and resistance from the library, the FBI backs off.

I won’t go in to why the FBI wasn’t bright enough to use an internet search engine, but what was amazing was the hysterical reaction of the library staff. One of them referred to this as “a life changing event”. And I thought my life was uninteresting. The discussion of the board deciding to resist was played like they were setting up barricades in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943.

And this is the worst abuse of the Patriot Act that they could find? It’s another example of scraping the bottom of the barrel to reveal just how empty that barrel is. I object to the Patriot Act as not being worth cost in civil liberties not because I find the cost high but because I find the benefits miniscule, if not actually negative. I am, however, embarrassed to have people like this as my rhetorical allies. It’s almost enough to make me reconsider my position.