Let’s pretend for a minute.

“Now today as you prepare to leave your Alma Mater, you go into a world in which, due to our carelessness and apathy, a great many of our freedoms have been lost. It isn’t that an outside enemy has taken them. It’s just that there is something inherent in government which makes it, when it isn’t controlled, continue to grow.”

- Ronald Reagan, 1957 commencement address to Eureka College

That was back when being a conservative meant small government and low taxes. Now conservative means imposition of evangelical and/or fundamental Christian morality, and low taxes while fighting unwinnable wars against vague nouns like terror, drugs, and civil liberties. Oh, and but torture’s legal now — if you’re in the executive branch at least.

According to a 2003 Telegraph article, “As Cofer Black, the former head of the CIA’s counter-intelligence centre, says: ‘ . . . Let’s just say this. There was before 9/11 and there is after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves came off.’” We know — we’ve seen the safe for American television post-Janet Jackson’s breast pictures. What horrors haven’t been uncovered yet?