Maybe it’s just luck that we haven’t been hit by terrorists on American soil in four years.

So if we trash the Patriot Act, stop targeting terrorists overseas and stop coercing those we capture to make them talk, if we make it more difficult for our spies to snoop, if we retreat from Iraq, leaving the battlefield to Saddam Hussein loyalists and al-Qaeda, maybe we’ll be just fine. What have we got to lose?

My Scripps Howard column this week <a href=”http://www.defenddemocracy.org/in_the_media/in_the_media_show.htm?doc_id=330149

“>asks that question.

This letter just arrived in response:

Cliff,
I find it interesting that common sense just doesn’t exist in many Americans and even in fewer Europeans. WE ARE AT WAR. Do any of these fools know what that means? It means you do any and everything you can to vanquish the people who are bent on killing you and your countrymen. It also means that you NEVER TIP YOUR HAND, the way the NY Times seems bent on doing for us. I don’t care if the methods of collection are “obvious”, you never state what they are–never.
Cliff, I’ve been associated with the military all my life and served in it during the decades of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Now, as a support contractor, I still work on DOD programs to this very day. I will never understand why you’d ever give any quarter to people who are galvanized in their resolve to kill you. Everyone in the Marines (the branch in which I served) understood the stakes. There was a time when other Americans did as well, but clearly Cindy Sheehan is not among them. The editors and writers at the NY Times are not among them. Harry Reid and his brain-dead colleagues are not among them. It’s unbelievable to me that politics is trumping the safety of the American people.
Have a good Christmas, Cliff. Hopefully, next year, a few more lights will come on in the cranial cavities of the American left.
Skip Parker