From the LRC blog
US House votes to reauthorise ‘Patriot Act’

More from CNN via John Boyden.

Despicable. If these people were anything resembling real conservatives or "patriots" they would have eviscerated the clearly unconstitutional provisions of this thing.

Of course, when those who should know better fail to act as they should, then the only voices of opposition -- by default -- come from the wretched left. The result of this is particularly insidious: the Fox news-watching lumpenconservative general public sees this and then promptly tell themselves that the so-called Patriot act (which, by the way, is actually called the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act -- an acronym for some tortured, Orwellian wordplay) really MUST, therefore, be a good thing... seeing as its perceptibly few opponents are a bunch of miserable Commie so-and-so's like the ACLU. (Who really are, for the most part, actually a bunch of miserable Commie so-and-so's.)

Of course, there are many opponents of stuff like the P-Act, except that they're from mostly underfunded, scrappy, low-profile paleoconservative and libertarian groups who wield neither the clout nor the working capital to manipulate popular opinion the way the Heritages, AEI's and RNC's of the world can. Of course, it always helps greatly -- to paraphrase Lyndon Johnson -- to have the other guy's private parts in your figurative pocket, as in the case of the incestuous relationship between the Neocon right and outfits like Fox/Newscorp.

- archangelmr