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try to think what you're trying to do here, you're trying to excuse sacrificing our freedom in order to save it.

There's a lot of hyperbole going on here. "You've lost your freedom! The terrorists have won!"

Well, not exactly. Nobody is stopping me on the way to work each morning to check my papers. I don't have to file forms with the state in order to drive outside the county. Nobody pats me down when I walk into the grocery store. There's no dawn-to-dusk curfew in which I'll get shot if I step outside.

Now think about what's going to change if a cell of four or five people pulls some stunt that kills 600,000 Americans. Will there suddenly be troops checking our papers at roadside check points? You bet. Will long-distance travel require advance notice to the state? Probably. Guys with wands patting you down at Costco? Yep, that too.

I'm not ignoring your rhetoric about preferring to die of inhalation anthrax before you'll agree that we probably need to sneak some FBI agents into the mosques. That's your preference, and you're sticking to it. I think it's principled, but I also think it abandons the future of the country in return for principled martyrdom today.

What I think I'm doing is taking a longer view. I want the Constitution to still be here when I'm gone. I know, from many years' experience, that I'm living in a country where I get outvoted at least half the time. It stuns me that something like Al Gore could come within a hair's breadth of being elected president. But it's reality, and I have to live with it.

I see the challenge here as navigating through a very narrow passage, so as to get to the other side without sinking. You think we're already sunk, but I'm not ready to give up yet. I think we will probably take a few more Constitutional hits, and get some more scrapes and some more dents. We will not get to the other side intact; that's already clear. But we can always hammer out the dents, if we get to the other side. The question for me is whether we'll get there at all, and I don't see that happening if the Atta Boys manage to pull off an attack with WMDs. My fellow citizens, the ones who voted for Gore, will happily vote in Vlad the Impaler if that happens.

This is glib, but there's a lot of wisdom in it:

The foreign policy of the American people is simple.

1. The American people do not want to be blown up. 2. The American people do not want to send their sons overseas where they might get killed, unless it is the only possible way to keep from being blown up.

Note that not being blown up is sufficiently high on that scale that people will sacrifice their children to keep it from happening. You think your plea is going to score higher with these people than their own kids? It's not. That's the reality we have to deal with as we try to figure a way out of this mess.

The problem with that thought, is if you don't put the brakes on now, when an Al Gore or Bill Clinton or anybody else that's a statist/left-leaning type gets in office, the tools are going to be there for their use.

It's much easier to not do something now, than it is in the future to reverse it.

I've got to side with the ACLU, Ron Paul Supporters, ultra-conservatives, etc. Things are going to far too fast. sure, it's only the mosques today, but tomorrow it will be the churches, etc.

My chances of dying from anthrax/terrorists/etc. are much less than when I step off of a curb to cross the street or drive down to the grocery store. I don't need the government giving itself more power than it already has. I don't want to reach the point where I am questioned about where I'm going, etc.