Patriot Act debated at Front Page magazine

Why liberalist resistance?

Why is the Left waging a ferocious war on the Patriot Act when terrorists are trying to perpetrate more 9/11s on our territory?

Perhaps because the lunatic left is aware of a number of issues the reactionary right is wholly blind to.

For one thing, USAPA is a case of doing to yourself what terrorists want to do you. It assists in the implementation of a police state. What the reactionary right does not and will not understand is:

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
–Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President (1809-1865)

Then to, the reactionary right dogmatically refuses to understand that you can have both security of one’s person and security of civil liberties at one the same time, and that giving up liberty in favour of personal security has only ever left a people at the mercry of their dictator and tyrants.

People who are willing to give up freedom for the sake of short term security, deserve neither freedom nor security.

–Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Aside from which, USAPA proponents seem to think that the survival of each and every individual is some kind of be all end all. An attitude that is downright perverse. The destruction of the WTC was a terrible tragedy, and there is no denying the sorrow and loss of some three thousand families, but despite the disaster, the country survived, and life did and does go on.

I suppose another factor is the wholesale propagandism behind USAPA. I surmise that more and more people are subjecting USAPA to the smell test, and they are finding out that it smells the same way the proclamations about Nuclear, Biological, Chemical Weapons in Iraq do. Just like bullshit. They also recognize that it is one more tool in the arsenal of Bush adminstration erosions:

The fact that the Patriot Act should have become this locus of resistance may at first seem puzzling. True, its legislative history is sordid: it was rushed through Congress in several days; no hearings were held; it went largely unread; only a few of its many egregious provisions were modified. But at least it was passed by Congress: many other blows have been delivered to the people of the United States in the form of unmodified executive edicts, such as the formation of military tribunals and the nullification of attorney-client privilege. True, the Patriot Act severed words from their meanings (beginning with the letters U.S.A.). But executive statements outside the Patriot Act–statements associating Iraq with nuclear weapons and with al Qaeda–have severed words from their basis in material fact, at the very great cost of a war that continues to be materially and mortally destructive. True, the Patriot Act has degraded the legal stature of the United States by permitting the executive branch to bypass constitutional law. But what is our level of legal degradation? In an area outside the Patriot Act, we appear to have reached rock bottom. Evidence indicates that the Bush administration has created off-shore torture centers in Bagram, Afghanistan (where one prisoner has died of pulmonary embolism, another of a heart attack), and on the British island of Diego Garcia, and has sent prisoners to interrogation centers with documented histories of physical torture in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.
–Elaine Scarry, Resolving to Resist, Feb/Mar 2004 issue of Boston Review

The difference being that We The People can do something about USAPA, whereas there is nothing the citizenry can do about executive orders.

Re:Why liberalist resistance?

Yes, well, if insisting on the value of every human life

There is a difference between insisting on the value of life and trying to create a system where no one is allowed to die. Moreover, totalitarianism does not admit of any respect for one’s basic humanity. With totalitarian regimes, quantity is paramount to quality. Ant-hill America, where everything that is not compulsory is forbidden, is the vision of the Republican National Guard.