Something I just realized

But was at the back of my mind in the last day or so. Gov. Patrick did make the "failure of human understanding" remarks back at the commencement address for Mt. Wachusett Community College, as Dan Kennedy notes. (As does David Bernstein.)

Those remarks were actually made even earlier, at a May 3 bar association dinner that I popped in on and wrote up for the News Service:

Condemning the "politics of fear," Gov. Deval Patrick on Thursday night took aim at Bush administration policies and opponents of gay marriage, tighter gun control laws, and his plan to eliminate the tax exemption telecommunication companies receive in state. In a speech before 1,700 lawyers at the Boston Marriott in Copley Place, Patrick compared the lawyers who volunteered to take on the cases of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay as following in the tradition of John Adams, defending British soldiers implicated in the Boston Massacre. "It took real courage to take on those cases, because fear, fear as a device to manipulate and ultimately to govern is at large again in our times," Patrick, who was applauded several times, said. The September 11 attacks disrupted the nation's state of well being, but also represented "a catastrophic failure of human understanding," he said. "In its wake, I believe we have been governed by fear. Fear drove us to round up people of Arab descent, many of them American citizens and to hold hundreds without cause or charge. Fear led us to turn our attention from a known enemy in Afghanistan and invade Iraq instead. Fear justified what I believe to be the greatest assault on personal freedoms - the Patriot Act - and the greatest aggregation of presidential power in recent time." The use of fear isn't limited to national security, he added, drawing a connection to the debate over gay marriage. Four years after the Supreme Judicial Court signed off on gay marriage, "the institution of marriage has survived. But the fear-mongering persists, you see," he said...