John Cole’s description is pretty accurate:

The right wing of the Republican party has sold the libertarian/centrist wing of the party a bill of goods, and the modern ‘conservatives’ are clearly nothing more than statists who, rather than redistributing wealth like their brethern on the left, instead have decided that the state must have excessive rights in order to ‘protect’ us all from whatever the imagined fear du jour might be. Meanwhile, no one is left protecting us from the religionists and the the state itself.
In the new Republican era, only fetuses , tax shelters, and ‘traditional’ marriage deserve protection. According to the actions of the current Republican party, the rest of us need to be wiretapped, monitored, have our homes inspected for whatever reason without warrants, and are incapable of making decisions on our own.

He does give the left more of a break than deserved as they would like to control and protect us from every imagined ill that repugs haven’t latched on to and, sadly, both are strongly vested in many areas.

For example, the drug war. The case which kicked off John’s post was a 4th amendment case, Georgia V Randolph, in which the Georgia Supreme Court had ruled that the seizure of some cocaine was unconstitutional. Lawyers and pundits have spending many words over the privacy and search issues involved in the case. In a free country, one not proctored by the above mentioned dems and reps, this case would never happen. Unless, say, Randolph stole his cocaine. Otherwise there is no legitmate crime here.