"I'd love to know how many of the participants in today's right-wing self-victim orgy uttered a peep of protest about any of this, from 2005"

What I'd love to know is how many of them didn't defend all of that on the grounds that "the left" is oh so dangerous. I know Michelle Malkin did, because I still remember my initial reaction of disgust when reading this

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/michelle/malkin072005.php3

Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Civil liberties activists, anti-war organizers, eco-militants, and animal rights operatives are in a fright over news that the nefarious FBI is watching them. Why on earth would the government be worried about harmless liberal grannies, innocent vegetarians, unassuming rainforest lovers and other "peaceful groups" simply exercising their First Amendment rights?

Let me remind you of some very good reasons ...

...

The FBI's job is to take threats to our domestic security seriously and act on them before catastrophe strikes. Given the suspect words and actions of left-wing groups over the last several years, "dissent is patriotic" is a bromide no responsible agent can swallow blindly. Tolerating the unfettered free speech of saboteurs has threatened enough lives already.

I saw this coming a mile away. Here's what I wrote after the St. Paul protests

http://dailydoubt.blogspot.com/2008/08/will-this-remind-anyone-in-malkin-verse.html

While conservative movement figures are busy being reminded of Hitler and Nazis by Barack Obama and the ominous figure of Dennis Kucinich, police and the FBI have been targeting leftist groups that are planning or may be planning to protest the Republican National Convention in St. Paul for armed police raids and detentions.

But heck, these folks must have deserved it right? They must have ... why else would they be targeted? That's what Lady of Liberty (and concentration camps) Michelle Malkin thinks when the government spies on peaceful leftist groups - that if any "leftist" does something wrong then every "leftist" can justifiably be made the target of surveillance. Of course, if an Obama administration were to start targeting Michelle Malkin for surveillance because of her opposition to abortion on the grounds that some abortion opponents bomb family planning clinics she'd understand, I'm sure. Principles are what Malkin and friends are about, after all.

By Michelle Malkin's own standards, the government should be spying on her without surveillance. Luckily for her, the liberal commie fascist ACLU would be one of the first organizations to stand up for her rights.

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2008/08/07/fox-news%E2%80%99-%E2%80%98free-speech-activist%E2%80%99-is-infamous-extremist/

While there are many individuals and groups that think the prosecution of Steyn harms free speech in Canada — including PEN Canada and the Canadian Association of Journalists — Fox News correspondent Steve Brown chose to interview a decidedly odd source: Paul Fromm, who was very sparingly identified on the broadcast as a “Free Speech Activist.” That’s a pretty weak, not to say completely misleading, description of Paul Fromm. As anyone who lives in Canada or who has access to Google should know, Fromm is Canada’s most notorious extremist, whose views form a trifecta of hate: he’s a white supremacist, a Holocaust denier and an anti-Semite. And he’s got a history of extremism a mile long.

“What we are seeing is an effort by minority groups, including in this case radical Muslims, to shut down criticism and that’s what it is,” Fromm, who habitually mocks Muslims, once calling a Muslim woman “a hag in a bag” while participating in a conference put on by former Klansman David Duke, told FOX about the Steyn investigations. At a 2007 meeting of racists and Holocaust deniers in Atlanta, Fromm pulled the Muslim hate card again, labeling Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama “a crypto-Moslem of mixed parentage.”

I don't know about you, but in my experience, cryto-fascists like Fromm aren't particularly interested in free speech.

I listened to a few minutes of Michael Savage this afternoon. A few minutes being the absolute maximum amount of time that I can subject myself to Savage in one sitting. He was extremely pleased that the Senate Democrats blocked all the ruthless pure evil terrorists from running wild in the United States. Obviously, Savage and his audience will now be voting for Democrats. I'm sure they will.

Seriously, how sick and perverted is it that despite historic electoral losses resulting -at the least - from the noxious psuedo-conservatism of the conservative movement we still have the Senate Majority leader opposing the end to Gitmo, giving reasons that are nearly indistinguishable from the very persons who are driving people out of the Republican party by their repugnant rhetoric.