If memory serves, the Patriot Act passed 98-1 in the Senate and 357-66 in the House. You would never know that today. I did a long piece more than a year ago on the Act, with very amusing quotes from people like Senators Kennedy and Leahy praising it as they were voting for it (I’ll find the link when I get a chance).

Today, of course, the Patriot Act is like second-hand smoke: always around the corner, invisible, deadly, and, most of all, offensive to sensible people. Only, in reality, second-hand smoke doesn’t kill, and the Patriot Act touches the lives of almost zero Americans.

Roger Simon has a nice post on the Patriot Act with some helpful links to speeches by a primary author of the Act and to the Act itself. Here are a couple more potentially useful tidbits as you try to convince your friends that the Patriot Act is harmless. Good luck!

First, here is a link to the DOJ’s complaint tracking report for the Patriot Act, which can be accessed from the Justice Department website if you type “Patriot Act complaint” in the search field. Of the first 783 complaints alleging Patriot Act violations, only 33 actually referred to a possible violation of the Patriot Act, and most of them were trivialities, hogwash, or both.

Here is the famous Dianne Feinstein defense of the Patriot Act from fifteen months ago, as quoted in the Weekly Standard:

“I’ve tried to see what has happened in the complaints that have come in,” she said, “and I’ve received to date 21,434 complaints about the Patriot Act.” Except these turned out to be unrelated civil liberties gripes, or complaints about a “Patriot Act II” that doesn’t yet exist. “I have never had a single [verified] abuse of the Patriot Act reported to me. My staff emailed the ACLU and asked them for instances of actual abuses. They emailed back and said they had none.”

The widespread hullabaloo over the Patriot Act, Senator Feinstein concluded, proceeds from “substantial uncertainty . . . about what this bill actually does do.” And “perhaps some ignorance,” she added.

Long ago the debate about second-hand smoke ceased to be about health risks, which are trivial. It is now about how the opponents of second-hand smoke feel about themselves. That is why the opponents of second-hand smoke are so passionate about their cause — it has very little to do with smoke and an awful lot about telling you who they are as people, what they believe, how good and caring they are, and, if you are a smoker, how much better they are than you.

This same narcissism is now at work in any discussion of the Patriot Act. Unfortunately, this is the kind of narcissism that can get you killed.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 18th, 2005 at 10:04 am and is filed under General, Left of Left, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.