[SunSetSam]

I know they are capable of killing us by the thousands. Civil Libertarians see this as acceptable losses to protect their selective opinion of what "civil liberties" are.

[JTN]

I know they are capable of killing us by the thousands. Civil Libertarians see this as acceptable losses to protect their selective opinion of what "civil liberties" are.

Selective opinion? I'm not selective about it.

BTW

If you could truly achieve one goal by removing emphasis from the other, then the least free states would be the most secure, and the most free would be on the brink of collapse, right?

Let's take nine of the countries that recently received the highest score (1) from Freedom House's annual survey of global civil liberties: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Mauritius, Taiwan, the United States, Uruguay.

Now let's take the nine countries that received the lowest score of 7: Burma, Cuba, Libya, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan. I dunno, which group looks more "secure" to you?

...

I would suggest that a fella can believe with perfect sincerity -- even without succumbing to libertarian panic -- that liberty and security are complementary, not mutually exclusive. The proverbial "challenge in the coming debate," or at least one of them, is to re-insert that idea back on the table when the Wise Men decide which Founding Principle to ignore next.