In grand old political tradition, John Ashcroft provides our textbook logical fallacy of the week: The Straw Man.

In a speech to the American Restaurant Association (?), he took the opportunity to call civil liberties groups criticism of the Patriot Act "hysteria".

Ashcroft said people are being wrongly led to believe that libraries have been "surrounded by the FBI," with agents "dressed in raincoats, dark suits and sunglasses. They stop everyone and interrogate everyone like Joe Friday. Now, you may have thought with all this hysteria and hyperbole, something had to be wrong," Ashcroft said. "Do we at the Justice Department really care what you are reading? No."

Now, Ashcroft's comments are actually replete with fallacies, but we'll focus on just this one. A Straw Man is an argument which attacks a point that is different from or weaker than the opposition's best point. In this example, the Attorney General decides to not address the real problems with the law, instead referring to concerns over the feds knowing what we are reading. Yeah, that's the problem, Mr. Ashcroft. See also this, and the PDF link at the bottom of the article.

Despite the "hysteria" over Americans' civil liberties, the law is already being used to facilitate the prosecution of a man in possession of a pipe bomb that exploded in his lap (it was "terrorism using a weapon of mass destruction"), in charging a man running a meth lab (being that the law defines WMD as "any substance that is designed or has the capability to cause death or serious injury" and contains toxic chemicals), and even to recover $4.5 million from international telemarketers. Clearly, the State Department's assurance that the law "will only be used to go after terrorists" ("trust us!") is bull.

Of course, the real problem with the Patriot Act is this administration's post-9/11 contempt for due process. For example, using the term "enemy combatants" (not a part of the law) to excuse whatever the administration wants to do with Arabs abroad, and the forced immigration registrations of thousands of Arab-Americans.

But the problem is not Bush's desire to bypass judicial oversight. The problem is us:

"The hysteria is ridiculous. Our job is not," Ashcroft said.