Jerry Falwell knows who caused the terrorist attack on America: the ACLU. “The ACLU’s got to take a lot of blame for this,” he declared on the 700 Cl… - Wendy Kaminer

Give the FBI unchecked domestic spying powers and instead of focusing on preventing terrorism, it will revert to doing what it does best — monitoring, harassing, and intimidating political dissidents and thousands of harmless immigrants.

To rationalize their lies, people — and the governments, churches, or terrorist cells they compose — are apt to regard their private interests and desires as just. Clinton may have lied to preserve his power while telling himself that he was lying to protect “the people” who benefited from his presidency. Liars — especially liars in power — often conflate their interest with the public interest. (What’s good for General Motors is good for the United States.) Or they consider their lies sanctified by the essential goodness they presume to embody, like terrorists who believe that murder is sanctified by the godliness of their aspirations. Sanctimony probably engenders at least as much lying as cynicism. We can’t condemn lying categorically, but we should categorically suspect it.

University of Delaware President Patrick Harker grudgungly terminated the ideological re-education program exposed by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (and reported here last week.) FIRE has the story, which includes troubling accounts of threatened retaliation against students who declined to defend the now defunct "residence life" program and to demonize FIRE as an ideologically biased, conservative organization. (In fact, FIRE is a civil liberties group that advocates for the rights of all students, regardless of ideology.) This is a victory for freedom of speech and thought, of course, and one that demonstrates why preserving free speech is so essential. University of Delaware officials did not terminate this program because they suddenly realized the wrongfulness of subjecting students to mandatory thought reform. They terminated the program because it was publicly exposed, and, outside the university’s ideological bubble, it was simply indefensible.