Now I lay me down to sleep

Daniel Pipes has a sobering column in the Chicago Sun-Times arguing we have returned to our pre-9/11 slumber. He lists some ominous warning signs. I won't list them all, but here are a few:

*The USA Patriot Act, a landmark of post-9/11 cooperation between the military and law enforcement, passed the Senate 98-1 in October 2001. Last week, the same bill stalled in the Senate and was only temporarily extended.

*The mainstream media do not take Islamist aspirations seriously and see the war on terror basically as over, as shown by Maureen Dowd's comment that the Bush administration is trying "to frighten people with talk of al-Qaida's dream of a new Islamic caliphate."

*Harvard and Georgetown universities each accepted $20 million for Islamic studies from Alwaleed bin Talaa, a Saudi prince who overtly promotes his government's Wahhabi outlook.

*A Florida jury somehow managed to overlook the massive evidence of Sami Al-Arian's leading role in Palestinian Islamic Jihad and acquitted him on this charge.

Then U.S. foreign policy:

*Fixated on the goal of perfecting Iraq, where no major danger remains, the Bush administration seems to be allowing the Iranian regime to build nuclear weapons, stipulating only that the Russians carry out the uranium enrichment, an ineffectual safeguard.

The radical Left refuses to participate in our self-defense. Instead, they attack the ones responsible for defending us. Instead of a mature attitude that surveillance of the enemy is necessary in a time of war, they wave library books claiming Big Brother is on the march.

A couple weeks ago there was a report that Homeland Security had visited a student at UMass-Dartmouth who had checked out Mao's Little Red Book. The story had all kinds of red flags. And yet, the story raced around the Left side of the blogosphere with nary a discerning mind to stop and ask a few obvious questions. The single source of the story was an anonymous student. There was no comment from the Homeland Security Dept on the charge. Apparently the bloggers spreading the story thought agents really have nothing better to do than check up on who's checking out a book that's been available for 50 years. And so on.

Well, not surprisingly, the story is a hoax. The student got caught up in his own lies.

The story, first reported in last Saturday's New Bedford Standard-Times, was picked up by other news organizations, prompted diatribes on left-wing and right-wing blogs, and even turned up in an op-ed piece written by Senator Edward M. Kennedy in the Globe.

But yesterday, the student confessed that he had made it up after being confronted by the professor who had repeated the story to a Standard-Times reporter.

The professor, Brian Glyn Williams, said he went to his former student's house and asked about inconsistencies in his story. The 22-year-old student admitted it was a hoax, Williams said.

My point in bringing this up is the far Left is so eager to believe their government is a slavering slobbering fascist monster roaming around devouring what little freedoms we have left that they willingly believe stories like this without question.

Put another way, they are far more eager to believe we are our own enemy, rather than acknowledging our true enemy, the Islamofascists.

I guess the one advantage of being asleep is we won't feel the next blow. It will be over quick, nice and painless.