Compare and contrast this:
"Are we losing our lodestar, which is the Bill of Rights?" [Bob] Barr beseeched the several hundred conservatives at the Omni Shoreham in Woodley Park. "Are we in danger of putting allegiance to party ahead of allegiance to principle?"
Barr answered in the affirmative. "Do we truly remain a society that believes that . . . every president must abide by the law of this country?" he posed. "I, as a conservative, say yes. I hope you as conservatives say yes."
But nobody said anything in the deathly quiet audience. Barr merited only polite applause when he finished, and one man, Richard Sorcinelli, booed him loudly. "I can't believe I'm in a conservative hall listening to him say [Bush] is off course trying to defend the United States," Sorcinelli fumed.
Far more to this crowd's liking was Vice President Cheney, who stopped by CPAC late Thursday and suggested the surveillance program as a 2006 campaign issue. "With an important election coming up, people need to know just how we view the most critical questions of national security," he told the cheering crowd.
[Viet] Dinh, [principal author of the USA PATRIOT Act,] now a Georgetown law professor, urged the CPAC faithful to carve out a Bush exception to their ideological principle of limited government. "The conservative movement has a healthy skepticism of governmental power, but at times, unfortunately, that healthy skepticism needs to yield," Dinh explained, invoking Osama bin Laden.
Dinh brought the crowd to a raucous ovation when he judged: "The threat to Americans' liberty today comes from al Qaeda and its associates and the people who would destroy America and her people, not the brave men and women who work to defend this country!"
With this:
Mueller was a forty-year-old man of the world, a Rhodes scholar from the days before Britain's wartime suspension of those prestigious grants to Germans, but he had never sensed what he felt now in this hall. As Hitler spoke and the audience reacted, it prompted these thoughts in Mueller: "Was it the crowd, which inspired him with this mysterious power? Was it floating from him to them?" His note said, "Fantasizing hysterical romanticism, with a brutal core of will."
[...]
Taunting the government, Hitler said that when the day came, the Nazi Party would not have to stage a Putsch. It was growing steadily stronger, the government was growing weaker, and all that would be needed when the right time came would be a little "horn-blowing," and the Bavarian government would fall. .... Hitler gave everyone in the hall the opportunity to consider themselves martyrs. [...]
[W]e'll come unarmed - but we will come! (frenzied applause). And then you can shoot into our midst, if you can find German soldiers who will shoot German men who want nothing more than to confess to being Germans on German soil! (frenzied applause).
[...]
Later that night, at home working on his notes, Mueller reflected on what he called Hitler's "fanaticism for its own sake." Thinking of the manner in which Hitler was putting forward only himself and his party at a time when Germany was engulfed by the crisis in the Ruhr and the failure of the mark, he later observed, "What blatant selfishness, what brutal simplification! ... Hitler is only interested in the future of his party, the future of his own will to power; but he succeeds in convincing his listeners that that is the only thing that matters, for the future of Germany."
- Hitler: The Path to Power, Charles Bracelen Flood, pp 350-1, Houghton Mifflin, 1989.
Emphasis supplied. My edits in brackets. Just who does Dinh believe are the "people who would destroy America", separate from al Qaeda and its associates? Names?
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