So I'm now a "socialist whore for terror"

I'm deeply disappointed in Confederate Yankee in reproducing garbage like this. I've supported the War on Terror inasmuch as I believed we had to destroy the Taliban and Saddam, who did much to support Islamic terrorism around the world. However, I will never accept the suspension of our inalienable rights because of vague threats, particularly when the means that require suspending our rights won't do a thing to make us safer.

Ronald Reagan said that he never left the Democratic Party -- the Democratic Party left him. Similarly, I never left conservatism, that is, real conservatism that championed limited government, maximized personal freedom, and government's subservience to the people instead of the other way around. Modern conservatives have left me behind, which is for the best, anyway, since their new journeys involve trampling all over the Constitution.

The authoritarian conservatives just don't get it. Try this quiz. You may glance at each picture for no more than five seconds, roughly the same amount of time that an NYPD would have to "profile" someone who's approaching subway turnstiles. That's even being generous: during rush hour it's more like one or two seconds. You can take my word for it. I work in Manhattan and take the subway all the time, and I know how large the crowds can be.

The single question: which of the following men would you stop on the basis of appearing Middle Eastern?






The top row, left to right: black, Hispanic, black. Bottom row: a Caucasian with a scraggly beard, a Caucasian who looks like he's been living on the street, and a definite Caucasian.

How many did you decide to stop? If you didn't already know who these faces belong to, and if you didn't guess this is sort of a trick question, you'd have stopped none of them. Perhaps you'd stop one or two, which still means the others would have slipped through your profiling net.

All six of the faces belong to known or alleged members of Islamic terrorist groups. If you miss one, you've still failed. That's enough to do some damage.

The top row, from left to right, are Richard Reid (the "shoe bomber"), Jose Padilla (accused of Al Qaeda ties and plotting to detonate a "dirty bomb") and Hussain Osman (accused of taking part in the second round of London bombings). I'm not saying anything about Padilla's guilt, only that he's Hispanic and just doesn't fit the profile of being Middle Eastern. Nor do the other two. And as I said before, most Americans still can't tell if someone's Chinese or Japanese, so what makes us think we know exactly what a "Middle Eastern" person look like? Odds are that police employing "racial profiling" would stop a Sikh man for his turban while letting Hussain Osman go through. I'm the last person who wants to give terrorists advice, but they already know to dress Western to blend in. Osman in a sports jersey, basketball shorts and basecall cap, carrying an iPod, would look like any other ballplayer.

Did anyone see that the three pictures in the bottom row are of the same person? If you did, you're probably familiar with John Walker Lindh, the traitor who joined Al Qaeda and was captured in Afghanistan. He's as Caucasian as can be, and while there's no evidence he ever intended to carry out terrorist activities on American soil, that's still exactly what the terrorists can and would do. Why should they send someone who only looks like a regular white American, when they can send someone who is a regular white American?

You cannot stop the terrorists -- not unless you search everybody. And that makes us a police state. Remember what I first said about the random searches?

If there's a serious, credible threat, then let's do the proper thing: Governor Pataki should call out the National Guard, suspend the writ of habeas corpus, and impose martial law on New York City. Let people see the full horror of the police state, not this veiled facade of liberty. Perhaps then they'll understand how precious personal liberty really is.

Here's an example of "racial profiling" at its worst. I can't believe I forgot to mention this.

Our new friend Mike at the No Angst zone had a great entry on an "incident" two Sundays ago in Times Square. The Daily News had good coverage.

A tour bus driver, to use the vernacular, freaked out at five "South Asian-looking men with British accents" who he thought were terrorists with explosives. The article doesn't give their names, but I wonder if they're Indian. Remember my recent anecdote about a few men who most Americans might fear are terrorists, but their Hindi accents said otherwise.

It's still unclear whether the bus driver called 911, or if he called a dispatcher who then called 911. Regardless, an NYPD SWAT team, sharpshooters and all, converged on the bus while it was at Times Square. After 30 minutes they ordered all passengers off at gunpoint, including women and children who were crying and screaming. Streets were closed, buildings evacuated, and it turned out the five suspicious passengers weren't terrorists at all.

The irony is that the threat of death came from the police, summoned because an overreacting person needs to learn the difference between vigilance and paranoia.

But here's the ultimate irony: the bus driver's name is Mohammed. He's probably more Muslim just by his name than the five poor men who must have thought they were going to die.