After all, the United States were founded by a terrorist insurrection against the legitimate authority. One man's terrorist is the next man's freedom fighter.
Not quite. In the United States, we defeated a tyrant and rejected the king. Hardly terrorist. We simply soundly defeated an undesireable oppressive force and chose freedom over subservient domination. A terrorist wages a campain of fear against the general populace. In the United States we simply kicked mother Britain's butt. There is a certain distinction, with no bearing on the activities of Sinn Fein, the IRA, or Al Qaeda, for that matter.
The boston tea party...that was simply a tax protest.
But whatever the terrorists have already won big time.
Not yet, but in the lily-skinned protected world in which many live, it must seem so. Visit Lagos, Bagdhad, or Johannesburg to see about terror in your daily life. A security check point and simple precautions to make society safer, and to feel safer, are not signs the terrorists have won. Not yet.
The US has a great history of this, from McCarthyism to today. It is no way to run a country. We are at risk of becoming as bad.
You're already there, mate. You apparently just don't know it yet. Your flying freedoms are not nearly what they are in the US, nor is your aviation. Your ability to own firearms, what we call a constitutional right, is so severely curtailed it's pathetic, with recent descents into the abyss wherein travelers in the UK have been banned for having a picture of a toy gun on their shirt, and what's this we hear of rumblings of knife bans, too? Then again, the US was made independent by citizens who owned firearms, so we do take it as a personal god-given right and responsibility. Fear of the government, with the government, something not heard of in Britain, you say? Hardly.
The Bush administration know this, and play to it openly.
The bush administration is a laughing stock and not taken seriously by most US citizens. Play to it openly? About as much as Jim Carrey playing openly to a theater full of Shakespeare afficianados. Fear wrought on by the bush administration? Only fear of his next blunder or embarassment. That's enough.