what you see that you hate the most is often that which is the most like you...

[acroyear]

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: Dover and the ACLU Slur:

The communist slur [against the ACLU by the right-wing pundits] was idiotic from the start, of course. What, after all, is the (entirely accurate) critique of communist governments? That they operate in secret, invade their citizens' lives with spying and wiretapping, practice arbitrary imprisonment, make dissent illegal, destroy due process and generally terrorize the people with a brutal law enforcement system whose job is to maintain the power of the state rather than secure justice.

What are the very things that the ACLU spends nearly all their time and effort fighting against? Each and every one of those practices. The irony is that many of the very same people who scream about the ACLU being communists support many of those items when done by their own government. They defend warrantless wiretapping, the arbitrary suspension of habeas corpus and a weakening of due process protections. All you just have to do is scare them enough, by talk of communists or terrorists, and they instinctively become the very thing they claim to despise.