The Patriot Scam

When I watched Bill Maher's Real Time a few days ago, this particular conversation caught my attention. In fact, when I scanned the transcript for this particular show almost everything else seemed irrelevant compared to it:

MAHER:...But, what I’m interested in is this: apparently, they got Spitzer by the Patriot Act. You know, when Bush brought up the Patriot Act after 9/11, he said, “You know what? We want powers to go after your personal records; but, trust us, we won’t use it to do anything but go after the terrorists.”

But, it turns out that what they really go after is everything but the terrorists. I mean, maybe terrorists and terrorism also, but “suspicious activity reports” – have you ever heard of this? This is what they got Eliot Spitzer with. Suspicious Activity Reports. SARs. Not the disease, SARS. That’s what they call it. That banks have to alert the federal government if there’s anything suspicious. I mean, he was only taking out a few thousand dollars at a time from his ATM machine to pay for his whore. But, this gets registered.

This is not a free country. I’m sorry, if you can’t pay for a whore from you ATM machine without the federal government knowing about it—[laughter] [applause]—that is not a free country. And—

WRIGHT: What’s so shocking. No, I said, what’s so shocking is that the number of SARs there are. There are 1.2 million Suspicious Activity Reports last year.

MAHER: Right.

WRIGHT: Up six-fold from when they started. It’s shocking.

MAHER: [overlapping] Yes.

...SMILEY: The sad part about this is, though, that the Bush Administration, I think, has abused its Patriot Act. But, it troubles me – and I remember when this came up, Bill, and we talked about this – there are so many Democrats who were spineless, quite frankly, during that vote, and voted for it. This conversation goes full circle now. They did not want to stand on their own definition of what it means to be a patriot, which mean to tell the truth—

MAHER: [overlapping] Right.

(More.)