It sickens me to have to consider How Far we have gone down the path leading to being the Evil Empire. It doesn't take a genius to see the markers along the path. Stolen elections, secret prisons, torture and removal of haebus corpus are not only obvious, they are lauded by the regime in power. They point at these things and tell the population that they need to be in great fear because the bad guys are very different from days of old. That these tactics are needed because they are the only way to deal with these horrible creatures.
The most troubling issue for me, is that people actually believe such nonsense. There have always been bad guys in the world. And, they have perpetrated horrible actions upon the populace both near and far. Ghengis Khan, Hitler, Idi Amin, and Pol Pot certainly have to rank high on any list of evil doers. But How Far do we go in diminishing ourselves to deal with these people?
It looks to me as though we, collectively, have decided that the old Constitution just isn't worth the effort any longer. That the high ideals that brought that document and this nation into being and sustained us for 200+ years is no longer relevant in our world. That the lowest common denominator should be our calling. And, that torture and suspending our rights is ok in the name of protecting ourselves from whatever evils.
Paraphrasing Ben Franklin, those would give up their freedom for security, deserve neither. I hope for our sake we have not gone That Far.
