Just Because We're Paranoid Doesn't Mean We're Wrong

Within a few screen inches of each other on Instapundit are these two items:

“Increasingly, the US government’s many police forces (often state and local ones as well) operate militarily and are trained to treat ordinary citizens as enemies. At the same time, the people from whom the government personnel take their cues routinely describe those who differ from them socially and politically as illegitimate, criminal, even terrorists. Though these developments have separate roots, the post-9/11 state of no-win war against anonymous enemies has given them momentum. The longer it goes on, the more they converge and set in motion a spiral of civil strife all too well known in history, a spiral ever more difficult to stop short of civil war. Even now ordinary Americans are liable to being disadvantaged, hurt or even killed by their government as never before. Government’s violent treatment of citizens has become generalized and unremarkable.”

and

21ST CENTURY LAW ENFORCEMENT: Police smell meth, raid home, kill 80-year-old man, find no meth.

Yup.