I don't understand why conservatives are mad about the liberals; they both support the republic and each contributed to the growth of the state today. Now that the gun in the room is being used against them, only then do they have a problem? This is their Frankenstein's monster, and waggling the finger at each other, as though one or the other is to blame for their tactics, only hides the fact that the monster is indeed a monster.
I think that conservatives are the new liberals, and the old liberals are the fascist totalitarians.
It does not seem plausible that one can blame the direction and the specific actions of the current administration on the prior ones at this point. Not saying the Patriot Act was "good", and I'm not saying that the NSA was angelic prior to Obama. Only that it's useful to look directly at what IS today, and assign responsibility for it to people that ARE.