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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Jonah Goldberg
During the 2004 Democratic convention I was on a train heading to Boston's Fleet Center. While straining to contain my excitement over the prospect of hearing presidential nominee John Kerry's soaring oratory (and seeing vice presidential candidate John Edwards' hair), I was distracted by a woman standing in front of me. She was part of a big group of very excited Democrats, convinced that their man was going to lift the dark, evil cloud that hung over George Bush's America like the shadow of Sauron over Mordor. It was, of course, not to be. It turned out that the Human Toothache and the Silky Pony were not what the American people were looking for in 2004.
Anyway, back to that woman. Her demeanor and appearance suggested that the used bookstore/macrobiotic-aromatherapy café she worked for had given her as much time off as she needed to attend the convention and save the country. And she came prepared. Adorning what appeared to be her
I gathered this was a reference to the Patriot Act, a piece of legislation that consumed the minds of the American left, the
The Patriot Act, considerably weaker than similar laws in Europe, allowed the FBI to ask a judge for a warrant to seek third-party business records and search suspected terrorists' homes without notifying them right away. (The alternative is to tip off the next Mohammed Atta prematurely.)
Leading left-wing civil libertarians went crazy. The
My favorite response came from Jan O'Rourke, a Pennsylvania librarian who destroyed the records of all library visitors so she could prevent the G-men from finding out who borrowed "Catcher in the Rye" or surfed the Web for adoptable kittens.
Why do I bring all of this up? It's not just to point out how demented, partisan and dishonest so much of this nonsense was. But I will note that President Obama and the
No, the real point of this trip down memory lane is to put the conservative reaction to the health-care bill in some context. Patriot Act hysteria consumed American politics for years, even though the bill was reasonable and the number of those affected by it comparatively miniscule. No libraries were searched. Terrorists were caught. Inconveniences and mistakes surely transpired, but not on some grand scale. American privacy endured.
Now consider what the left-wing magazine Salon calls the conservative "freakout" over the health-care legislation passed by
Lots of liberals opposed the Patriot Act on slippery-slope grounds, but it's worth noting that very few conservatives said the Patriot Act was just a "first step" or a "down payment" toward an even more aggressive police state, while many hoped it would be a temporary measure. Lots of liberals insist health-care reform merely begins the process of pushing for full governmentalization of health care.
And yet the woman on that train, and those like her, were treated by the mainstream press as not merely sane and serious, but as the conscience of the nation. Those of us justifiably freaking out about this far more massive and far more outrageous expansion of the government into our lives are treated like crackpots.
Better to be a called a crackpot than be one, I say.
Jonah Goldberg is an editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the
Available at Amazon.com:
Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court
The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House
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Definition of Political 'Freakout' | Jonah Goldberg - Politics Today
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