IT WAS A TOUGH AND TRICKY CROWD. When Joe Lieberman took the stage, on October 17, and politely reaffirmed his commitment to the security of a Jewish state in Israel, he was booed and heckled for it. Yet the next day, when it was his turn to address the Dearborn, Michigan, candidates' forum sponsored by James Zogby's Arab American Institute, Howard Dean went over like gangbusters. Not because his message on the Middle East was so much better received, mind you. Dean's condemnation of deliberate, violent assaults on civilian innocents--"the vast majority of Arab Americans and Arabs in general do not think that terrorism is appropriate, and we need to be clear about that"--fell noticeably flat, in fact, winning only "scattered applause," as the session's official transcript recounts. Dean's lusty attacks on the Bush administration, however, were a great deal more successful. Particularly when he went after the Justice Department for its implementation of domestic counterterrorism measures authorized by the USA Patriot Act of 2001, a law which is "shameful" and "morally wrong" and "unconstitutional." For this, Howard Dean got a standing ovation.
It never fails. Democrats running for office think attacking the Patriot Act is a winner. Wesley Clark, Dean's leading rival for the presidential nomination in every national poll, says the Patriot Act has "essentially suspended habeas corpus," and nobody seems to mind that Clark's charge is "essentially" baseless. Senator John Edwards says he's "horrified" by what the Patriot Act has wrought and wants a fair chunk of it canceled--this,
barely two years after Edwards, along with every other Democratic senator but one, voted to enact the thing to begin with. Edwards, too, routinely denounces the Patriot Act for producing law enforcement "excesses" that, truth be told, long predate that law, lie far outside its purview, or are entirely imaginary. And Edwards, too, routinely gets standing ovations in the process.
So who'll defend the Patriot Act? Unfortunately, there's hardly a single Republican who can do the job effectively.
A fair number of Republicans don't want to defend the Patriot Act, of course. Patrick Leahy of Vermont--yet another Democratic senator who was only recently proud to vote yes on the question--now boasts that opposition to the law exists "across the political spectrum, from the far right to the far left." And he is right about that, though his inadvertently suggestive "far" speaks more to a certain irritable, anti-government reflex than to any coherent ideological impulse, conservative or liberal.
Former Republican congressman Bob Barr has lately joined forces with the ACLU to campaign against a Patriot Act ("Mr. Barr? Mr. Barr votes 'aye.'") that represents "an official step into the Brave New World of 1984." Longtime Republican activists Grover Norquist and David Keene are pleased to appear, with the likes of Alec Baldwin and People for the American Way's Ralph Neas, at anti-Patriot Act teach-ins. Pretty much the entire, all-Republican Idaho congressional delegation is now leading a forceful legislative charge to repeal certain key sections of the Patriot Act, and they are winning bipartisan support even from senators and representatives whose home states don't--yet--have a black helicopter problem.
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