Claudia Winker, writing in The Weekly Standard, takes on Rep. Bernie Sanders (VT) and the ACLU, whose opposition to the PATRIOT Act, Winker argues, “propagates a caricature of the law as ‘setting the FBI loose on the American public.'”

To say the Patriot Act authorizes the FBI to spy on people because of their taste in reading is like saying that equipping beat cops with night sticks authorizes the police to bludgeon old ladies who annoy them. Sure, a rogue element at the FBI can run amok. It could before the Patriot Act. It can after the Patriot Act–not by doing what the law authorizes, but by breaking the law […]

[…] Britain’s longest serving prime minister of modern times, Margaret Thatcher, used words with flair. She once called it “wicked” to suggest that those who opposed some particular Labour party social-uplift measure ipso facto didn’t care about the poor. It is similarly wicked to suggest that those who see a need to provide the government with new investigative tools appropriate to the new security situation therefore are indifferent to the Constitution.

Perhaps, Claudia. But making that claim buys the “privocrats” (as Heather MacDonald calls them) a nice stockpile of libertarian sanctimony — all at the cost of a simple statistical wager that terror isn’t likely to strike them personally.

Call me a cynic, but I suspect that of those who protest the PATRIOT Act, only a tiny percentage do so out of any actual fear of eroding civil liberties. The rest are probably just trying to impress chicks.

Yes, chicks. Because I’m pretty sure there are no women libertarians.