Molly rides again!-Bill of Wrongs: The Executive Branch's Assault on America's Fundamental Rights.

"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists; for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends."

Please, weigh into this claim my forty years of bearing with perpetually awful political news. Now, as the man said, "My hair is on fire." I am so freaked out by what is happening to freedom in this country, if I were anyone else but me, I'd be staging a pitched, shrieking, quivering, hysterical, rolling-on-the-ground, speaking-in-tongues fit.

Fortunately for you...instead of a pitched fit I have stories to tell, each of them about "an ordinary, certifiably normal" human bean. Too many of whom have blundered into a "phantom of liberty."

This has happened before in our history---in fact, it's a pretty predictable reaction to fear. We get so rattled by some Big Scary Thing---communism or crime or drugs or illegal aliens or terrorism---something that scares us so much, we think we can make ourselves safer by giving up some of our freedom. Now, not only does that not hold a drop of water as a logical proposition but it has consistently proved to be an illusion as a practical matter. Empirically, when you make yourself less free, you are not safer, you are just less free.