[T]he most dishonest argument about security cameras, searches, profiling, etc....is that they won't stop terrorism. Well, no one thing will stop terrorism. But to conclude, therefore, that we shouldn't do anything -- that's not an argument, it's an excuse. And a bad one.

Much of today's security measures are little more than a panicked response to terrorism and not likely to ever go away because Americans are coming to accept it as normal.

Editors exist [because] most people don't have time to rummage through vast piles of hay for the specific needles they're looking for; we want professional needle-finders.

Everyone moralizes. The suggestion that liberals aren't moralizers is so preposterous it makes it hard for me to take any of them seriously when they wax indignant about "moralizers." Almost every day, they tell us what is moral or immoral to think... In short, they think moralizing is fine. They just want to have a monopoly on the franchise

It was in the 1960s that the left convinced itself that there is something fascistic about patriotism and something perversely "patriotic" about running down America. Anti-Americanism -- a stand-in for hatred of Western civilization -- became the stuff of sophisticates and intellectuals as never before. Flag burners became the truest "patriots" because dissent -- not just from partisan politics, but the American project itself -- became the highest virtue

If power made one evil, then God would be the Devil.