'Bureaucratic Opportunism' - the new threat

Mark Steyn suspects that false invocations of the Patriot Act are endangering our right to privacy.

I don't have a problem with the Patriot Act per se, so much as the awesome powers claimed on its behalf by everybody from car salesmen to the agriculture official who demanded proof from my maple-sugaring neighbor that his sap lines were secure against terrorism. Which is a hard thing to prove.

I'll say! Just ask Dubai Ports World.

My worry is that on the home front the war is falling prey to lack-of-mission creep -- that, in the absence of any real urgency and direction, the "long war" (to use the administration's new and unsatisfactory term) is degenerating into nothing but bureaucratic tedium, media doom-mongering and erratic ad hoc oppositionism. To be sure, all these have been present since Day One: The press have been insisting Iraq is teetering on the brink of civil war for three years and yet, despite the urgings of CNN and the BBC, those layabout Iraqis stubbornly refuse to get on with it.

Just as the Democrats have discovered national security as an issue for the coming elections, people may be so bored they can't be bothered to care. Damn George Bush!

Read the whole thing. I've quoted too much already. What I've said all along seems to fit Steyn's take. The opposition to the ports deal is pretty much racism. OK, call it cultural discrimination, instead. It may be justified by common sense, as so many people have argued about the stupidity of disallowing greater scrutiny of Arabs at airports, but we've pretty well made a policy decision that we won't just throw out all Arabs and keep out any more of them. Once we are at that point, which is rock solid Democrat dogma, (How can you keep the Black vote, once they realize that Arabs are brown too?) how do you justify blocking the UAE from buying the management company for our ports? You can't, especially not when the U.S. military trusts them implicitly and couldn't prosecute this war without them.

The Cartoon Riots have pushed our tolerance close to the brink, and a lot of Republicans are starting to think that, no matter what their previous support for the war, losing the majoritis in Congress is too high a price to pay, and they won't allow Democrats to outflank them on this, even if they have to throw George Bush to the wolves.

I don't think abandoning Bush will work. I would rather go on the offense over the willingness of the left to jeopardize our security by disclosing top secret spy operations out of purely political pique. It will be hard to pull this off, but it has the virtue of consistency. Michael Barone demonstrates what I mean. Make the case for Bush's policy. It's there and Republicans need to keep their nerve.