Liberals Lead Us to the Sour Spot

Not for nothing is Dan Henninger a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, but one wonders how hard he had to exercise those Pulitzer worthy chops to spot and elucidate this obvious dissonance:  America was going to descend into tyranny at the hands of George W. Bush's warrantless wiretaps, and yet famously blue Bostonians cheered that their city was transformed into a locked-down police state. 

 In contrast to the Bush era fight over how many judges had to approve surveillance of terrorism suspects, we had the transfixing spectacle last week of Bostonians okay with having their city transformed into a state of virtual martial law after the bombs went off.

The citizens of Boston and its suburbs allowed massively armed SWAT teams to enter their homes, order residents out and eventually find the bullet-riddled Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lying half-dead in a boat. When it was over, people lined the streets to cheer the police army. You'd need more than a roving wiretap to find a peep of objection from the old Bush critics.

And they weren't even spared the terrorism.  Bush, at least, wanted to prevent terrorism, and I don't recall any de facto martial law in any major city under Bush.  In the end, we got the terrorism and the police state, if only momentarily.  This is what Walter Russell Mead calls, the "sour spot" where, while seeking to negotiate a tricky trade-off, one fails on both counts.  I wouldn't necessarily pin this one on Obama, although he is a walking talking symptom of the problem rather than the actual problem - this hitting of the sour spot is the result of the massive yet phony anti-ChimpyBushHitler hissy fit that the nation had from 9/11/01 through roughly the first week of November 2008.

On another note, this is not the only time recently that a WSJ columnist has illuminated how our society has hit the sour spot.  James Taranto pointed out the hollowness of abortion advocates' phony desire for abortion to be "safe, legal, and rare."  Well, it's legal all right, but it sure ain't rare and it ain't safe, as the details of the Gosnell trial reveal.  So we tempted sliding down the slippery slope of life-demeaning sexualization in order to end back-alley abortions. And now we are at the bottom of said slope with 7 year olds able to get the morning after pill at Walgreen's, and we have the back-alley abortions anyway.