That was then, but how about those techniques applied to conservatives? Remember that after Timothy McVeigh in ‘95, the feds openly classified lots of conservative movements right alongside terrorist groups, and 9-11 did not change that one bit.
At no point did W. Bush tell them that conservatives were no threat to the US. So much of the Patriot Act is used today to spy on conservatives.
He's from Midland and has a great Texas wife. I don't know what his problem is with conservatives. His ma and pa and Yale faculty must have done a hell of a job convincing him that we are all Spawn of Satan, Kluxers in street clothes. (George Sr. has always hated, just hated, conservative Democrats for that reason -- they're all trailer-trash Kluxers to him.)
Now the Left wants to herd us into extermination camps, and the GOP-E looks on all this with cold eyes and holds Sarah Palin in contempt, one of the best women in American public life today, because she has a regional accent and has shot and cleaned big animals with her husband, whose children she bore for richer or poorer.