So. Patriot II. Something to be worried about? Citizens could be placed in what the Washington Post calls a "kind of alternative legal world." Some could be expatriated if it can be "inferred" that their beliefs/affiliations amount to a renunciation of citizenship. The power to spy and detain without judicial oversight is enhanced. The administration insists all this is no big deal – just ideas being tossed around about how to execute a good cause more efficiently. Others disagree.
John Ashcroft's role in the administration is interesting. He seems to be there to remind us that no matter how much we may complain about Bush, there are worse characters, just waiting for further terrorist attacks to lend their ideas credence. There's the hardcore right. There are folks like Rep. Coble, who toy with reinterpreting a shameful moment in American history – the internment of Japanese-American citizens. The McCarthy admirers, who view him as a valiant soul, rather than as a career opportunist whose strongest commitment was to power, adulation and liquor. The anti-immigrant crowd – the ones obsessively charting birthrates and muttering about "the browning of America." The nuke-em crowd, which would like the U.S. to begin an orgy of wars, to be won by any expedient means.
The implication is, "you'd better line up behind us, or things could get really ugly."
Well, OK. But I still find this drive towards concentration of power troubling.
For one thing, there's the complicated interrelationship between the national interest and partisan politics. One of the Republican party's most significant accomplishments during the last three decades has been the pioneering of sophisticated means of emotional politicking. The Bush administration continues this trend – the propaganda backdrops, the skilfully canned rhetoric, the manipulation of imagery. The regulation of anxiety and release that seems to be part of what the terror alert system is about. The corporate model – Bush's model – is driven by utility. If it sells, you can do it. The temptation to use sweeping powers for political goals is there.
When you factor in technology, the powers available under the current Patriot Act (to say nothing of the proposed update) are unprecedented, well beyond what Richard Nixon had at his disposal.
No one with any common sense denies the urgency of stopping sleeper cells from planting dirty bombs or plotting suicide attacks. But, given its open-ended nature, the war on terrorism is likely to continue ad infinitum, shaping an entire era. We're talking not so much about temporary measures taken at a time of special need, as about the creation of a new paradigm. Patriot II, it appears, extends the extra-legal no-man's land – a zone of detentions without trial, possible torture, forced deportation -- to include citizens. We have a diminishment of legal safeguards combined with enhanced technologies of intrusion. Yuck.
7:12:57 PM 
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