Georgia10 nails it

I'm trying to avoid "great post" posts, but this is a great post @ dKos:

As the President said the day the towers fell, "our way of life, our very freedom" was attacked. And how have we responded in the past five years? Not by preserving our way of life, not by zealously gaurding our freedom, but by surrendering.

We have surrendered the idea of a limited government. We have surrendered the spirit, if not the letter, of the First and Fourth Amendments. We have surrendered our position in the world as the beacon of human rights. We have surrendered the bedrock principle that in time of chaos, the rule of law is paramount.

We have been intimidated. Intimidated into acting out in the most unAmerican manner.

This is post-9/11 America: a nation that asserts the unquestionable authority to torture detainees, to launch a pre-emptive war, to keep humans locked up for years without trial, to force citizens to exercise their First Amendment rights in "free speech zones" the size of postage stamps, to ignore 750 laws, to ignore the civil liberty protections enacted in the wake of Watergate, to conduct surveillance on Americans without a warrant, to eternally preserve a record of every domestic call, to pry into the privacy of a free press, and to gag the mouths of whistleblowers with threats of reprisal.

But we haven't been attacked again, right? Despite all of these attacks against American identity from within?

The terrorists' most dangerous weapon isn't anthrax or planes or dirty bombs; it's fear. Fear is their most destructive weapon because it operates in a stealth manner. Fear is what has caused our government to turn on its citizens and brag that it does so out of courage in the fight against evil. And in that sense, by goading the greatest democracy on earth to view 300 million citizens as the potential enemy, fear has proved to be the most effective weapon of mass destruction of all.

It has been obvious for some time that Bush has been Osama's greatest ally on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. But G10 is right: bush as done Osama's bidding here as well.