A week ago Sunday, Atrios posted a link to an editorial in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that read, in part:

The White House needs to tell the Pentagon promptly to destroy the records of protesters as required, within three months. It also needs promptly to tell the NSA to return to following the rules, to get the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before monitoring Americans' communications. The idea that all of this is being done to us in the name of national security doesn't wash; that is the language of a police state. Those are the unacceptable actions of a police state.

Finding similarities between the Bush administration's post-9/11 rhetoric and that of 20th Century police states seemed like an all-too-easy challenge (you can start, of course, with the very decision to name the new domestic security office the "Department of Homeland Security"), so I thought I would give it a go.