Guilt by Association

This link (http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=620534&category=NATIONAL&newsdate=9/9/2007) merely confirms our worst suspicions about the Bush Administration's surveillance of "suspicious" persons. Because their actual intelligence gathering skills are crap, they have to resort to fishing like this, which brings us closer to the criminalization of dissent against American foreign policy. To those who sneer that we only complain because it's a Republican regime, we won't bother denying it because you won't listen. In fact, we'll say that we are more suspicious of Republicans because they have a 60-year history (if not longer) of mistaking dissent for subversion, dating to Joe McCarthy's time and before. I doubt, however, whether Democrats will really shun such tools, even though the FBI claims to have put this one aside. Once you assume the existence of an internal enemy, a republic is on its way down the chute.