Stop Me Before I Vote Again

An old friend of mine -- let's call her Aretina -- is a thoroughgoing Obama cultist, alas, but I still have hopes for her. She recently responded offline to an earlier post here abut the recent Effective Police State And Suppression Of Dissent Act (EPSASOD).

I hope Aretina will forgive me for heartlessly using her as a classic example of the disordered thinking that enables otherwise intelligent and well-meaning people to believe that the Democratic Party is going to actually deliver on any of the things that matter to them -- and to me, I might add.

Aretina's first line of defense: Nothing to see here, folks, move along. EPSASOD doesn't really matter; it doesn't change anything. Citation in support: A blog post from reason.com, which if, you read to the end, maybe doesn't support Aretina's case as much as she might like. The reason.com piece ends up making the case that we already have a police state, so how much difference could this latest enormity make? Which is, of course, a fairly good point.

Aretina seems to have felt, upon reflection, this this gambit may have been a bit feeble, because she followed up with another:

This president is under a record assassination threat level.... it doesn't seem unreasonable that any moves in that direction should be punishable by something a little stiffer than a D.C. trespassing law.

Never mind that the President already gets as much protection as a human being can possibly get, and that EPSASOD goes well beyond protecting the president, in a breathtakingly sweeping fashion.

The piquant thing for me, of course, is the liberal fondness for 'stiff' laws. All this talk of stiffness invariably makes me reach for the saltpeter. How I wish the enforcement sector's stiff nightsticks would all strangely wilt, as in the Viennese doctor's famous casebook.

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(*) Yer honor, I wasn't there at all, at all. And besides, that whore of an Ulsterman threw the first punch!

"Leaks of classified information regarding intelligence sources and methods can disrupt intelligence operations, threaten the lives of intelligence officers and assets, and make foreign partners less likely to work with us," said Feinstein, a Democrat from California. "The culture of leaks has to change," she said in a joint statement with Chambliss, a Georgia Republican.

The "culture of leaks" indeed! None of the leaks and dribbles have ever had any effect at all on anything but the gassy self-satisfaction of the national security mandarins. For them, and to them, it's a personal insult and a criminal affront.