CypherGhost wrote:

My favorite line on this comes from the chickenhawks who say that the Fourth Amendment was written before the All Powerful Threat of Terrorism. Sure thing. Ben Franklin and his pals couldn't possibly have foreseen a world in which the very idea of America was under some kind of military threat. Those candyasses didn't understand what war was about. They were armchair theorists, civilians who'd never anticipated foreign soldiers on American soil -- surely if they'd known that America might some day face an actual existential risk, they would have put a little asterisk next to each clause of the Bill of Rights leading to a footnote that said, "Unless the king president really, really needs to do it."

I posted on this here. I don't read as much into this as Doctorow... Its election year positioning. McCain is still generally more principled on these issues than Bush, but supporting Bush has taught his party to bitterly oppose numerous kinds of moderate positioning.