<...Near the bar I ran into Grover Norquist, one of the chief whips of the Reagan revolution...Norquist's question to me was, in effect, What happened to the liberals? In meetings in the House, the supposed "USA PATRIOT Act" had been somewhat declawed by conservatives like Bob Barr of Georgia, Darrell Issa (an Arab-American Republican from California) and Chris Cannon of Utah, ably assisted by Bobby Scott, a black Democrat from Virginia. Some of the most extreme proposals of the bill were either diluted or struck out or subjected to a four-year time limit related to the course of the war. But then the White House tried to resell the original bill to the Senate. "That's the Democrats, right?" said Norquist. "But we were assured there would be a fight up there. Instead all the liberals just rolled over." In my pocket was an article by one liberal hack journalist named Jonathan Alter, and another article by the rich thug's liberal loophole artist, Alan Dershowitz. Both men proposed that we should give torture a chance.

It gave me a vertiginous feeling, to be talking with a toughened conservative who had helped organize a struggle, in wartime, for the defense of civil and political liberties and the rights of unpopular minorities. A struggle in which the liberals had lost their nerve as well as (in the cases of Alter and Dershowitz) their decency...



I have, as most of you know, repeatedly put forth my thesis that the Democratic Party and the organized American left are the main repositories of the totalitarian socialist movement in our country.

And, as most of you know, this thesis is received with shocked incredulity by even the most intelligent and perceptive small-L liberals. It is a concept they simply cannot wrap their brains around, despite extensive evidence supporting it. One might have a similar mental disconnect if one were to see someone wearing both a yarmulke and a swastika.

"Vertigo" is a great way to describe their reaction. Hitchins too cannot seem to understand how this could be.

The idea that many Democrats would find draconian government control of the citizenry appealing is no surprise to me at all.