WHICH IS MORE REPRESSIVE: FRANCE, THE UK, AND CANADA; OR THE USA?

THOMAS BRAY (via RealClearPolitics):

Spying on e-mail and cell phone traffic without a warrant. Searching offices and residences without a court order. Locking citizens away for weeks or months without filing charges.

Sound like your worst nightmare about the supposedly lawless Bush administration? Perhaps. But I refer to restrictions on civil liberties that are taking place not in the United States but, in the order in which I cited them, Canada, France and Great Britain.

All three countries are cited as moral superiors to the rogue regime in Washington, where the fascist leaders George Bush and Dick Cheney are said to be intent on fastening a reign of terror on the United States. But a brief scan of newspaper websites in those countries – something that the American mainstream media could easily have done before unleashing its own reign of terror on unsuspecting readers -- reveals that their governments have in many cases gone far beyond where the Bush-Cheney could ever dream of going.

WHERE'S THE OUTRAGE FROM THE LEFT!? WHERE ARE THE ACLU LAW SUITS AND THE THREATS TO DRAG THESE GOVERNMENTS INTO THE ICC!? Could there be a DOUBLE STANDARD, and a little HYPOCRISY, too, from the Left and the MSM they still dominate!?

Bray concludes:

The hysteria over Bush’s use of the National Security Agency to monitor international communications is thus likely to fade as an issue, much as the he-lied-us-into-war hysteria of prior months faded in significance as it became apparent that most of his congressional critics had interpreted the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in exactly the same fashion as the administration.

How to balance civil liberties and national security is a subject of legitimate dispute. But Americans deserve more perspective on the matter than they are getting from Bush’s critics and their megaphones in the liberal press.

Well said! RTWT.