Weigel has the backstory of how Republicans suddenly got in touch with their rage over the TSA as soon as the Obama administration took over, calling it a ” lagging reaction to the fact that Republicans no longer have to toe the party line on homeland security.” Adam Serwer enlarges on the same theme, making this key point:
But conservatives bear a lot of blame for their current predicament. This comprehensive assault on individual freedom didn’t occur in a vacuum; it occurred because conservatives were successful in frightening Americans into choosing security over liberty every time the choice was before them, and because America’s elected officials take being blamed for a terrorist attack more seriously than their oath to protect the Constitution. While the scanners have been in development for years, their deployment was rapidly accelerated in the aftermath of last year’s attempted underwear bombing, as the TSA became even more concerned about the threat of nonmetallic objects. Conservatives must now face the Frankenstein they created by breathlessly hyping the threat of terrorism for political gain: A recent CBS poll found that 81 percent of Americans support the new machines.
That last sentence is laughably naive. Conservatives will not have to “face the Frankenstein they created” because they’ve already convinced themselves that this is all Obama’s fault. Obama’s contractually obligated defenses of the TSA don’t help, because acknowledging “frustration” doesn’t address the real anger people feel when hearing stories of bladder cancer patients who exit TSA pat-downs covered in their own urine.
Conservatives will face this Frankenstein by pushing out the TSA and hiring private contractors to do the same work, even though the contractors will have to hew to the same standards as the TSA. And, they’ll embrace the following option, proposed by Weigel as a clarifying hypothetical, with gusto:
What if we were being honest about this, and proposed this option: “The TSA will end pat-downs and let you keep your shoes on and your bottles of water intact, but it will single out every Muslim who attempts to get on a plane for special screening.”
aimai
Good thing we can always tell who is muslim by how they look–and the categories muslim and American Citizen never overlap! I guess when in doubt we could institute an internal system of identification like, I don’t know…hm…a yellow star?
aimai
Svensker
Krauthammer, Coulter and Hannity have already said that’s what needs to be done and it is only the freedom hating liberals who are making real Americans go through the screenings by not allowing Muslim profiling.
Linda Featheringill
@Svensker:
These guys have a point. After all, we have never had a terrorist attack committed by a member of the greater Christian community, have we?
Chris
Frankly, that last sentence scares me more than anything the TSA’s doing right now. I don’t think the current program’ll last, but I could easily see the Republicans pushing for Israelification.
(Which means most of us will be better off, but the Muslim community will be worse than anyone even now).
Sly
Right response, wrong reason. What conservatives imagine is irrelevant. What matters is what they can sell to the electorate, who subsist on narratives that appeal to cultivated instincts and are triggered by the right dog-whistles.
That, and it is impossible to have political accountability when the attention span of the electorate lasts less than six months.
Southern Beale
I’ve been saying this ALL WEEK LONG. Thank you.
mai name
If the rules are changed and some caucasian christian blue eyed blonde bimbo got in and created some kind of terrorist attack, it would be Obama’s fault the MSM will have forgotten about kkkonservatives going on about how they don’t want their junk touched. BTW, how much has Michael Chertoff made off the full body scans? How come I haven’t seen any interviews with Chertoff. Also too, have any women having their menstrual cycle using a tampon been asked to remove the tampon because it looks like a bomb with a string?
OT, Huff Post had a pic of Megan Kelly in a GQ spread. She totally looks like a call girl in the pic. She’s a news anchor or reporter or whatever term Fox uses. I seriously cannot imagine Katie Couricr Tamron Hall,Savannah Guthrie or Kat Katty or any other news personality doing that kind of spread.
sal
No, they’ll target brown & black people. They don’t know who’s Muslim. And after all, what’s the difference? If they’re not Muslim they’re probably illegal, or at least uppity.
J.W. Hamner
I remember wondering this summer why the TSA hadn’t replaced the Post Office and DMV in conservative rhetoric about how terrible government is. I suspected we were still ruled too heavily by OMGWTF911, but I guess after the election conservatives are more willing to admit we’re not all in constant blood curdling danger. This is good I guess.
The problem with using this an effective political tool is that almost nobody flies. We “elites” do it a lot, but regular peeps just don’t… so who is this campaign reaching?
David
Isn’t the American way of dealing with this to employ racial profiling but pretend we’re not? And when caught employing racial profiling deny it and just pay individuals off. At any rate, it can’t be our stated policy.
cmorenc
@Svensker:
Krauthammer devoted an entire column to pushing this exact theme this week: a) all the intrusive TSA screening measures are laughably ineffective, and were instituted more to make the public perceive that air travel was safe again after 9/11 than to actually make it safer; b) we could do without all the screening nonsense of grandmothers (who we know wouldn’t blow up a plane) and do really effective screening by profiling for exactly the small demographic who actually poses a risk: muslims, and muslim-looking men in particular.
uila
mistermix,
I’m not one to fuss over typos, but I expect Adam wants his R back.
@Linda Featheringill: Not according to Fox News.
Svensker
@cmorenc:
My hubster is one of the latter and it’s not so fun. (Well, it IS, but not vis a vis the TSA…)
Nate
I still don’t understand why we’re not training dogs for the TSA to sniff out potentially explosive materials.
Minimally invasive. Equally effective . And it’s generally more acceptable when they go for your crotch.
mistermix
@uila: Thanks, his r is back.
Mr. Prosser
This whole push is to make security a private enterprise, then the private TSA will be as good as the Arizona prison system which allowed the escape of three prisoners because the system was so shoddy.
Jinchi
They’ve been embracing that hypothetical for years, now. I saw several Republican candidates campaign on that very idea just last month.
JPL
Thirty five percent of muslims in America are black. The conservatives have been pushing for racial profiling for some time. First they came after the blacks, then they came after the mexicans, then the arabs…while the Timothy McVeigh’s of the world get a pass.
Jinchi
Of course, racial profiling wouldn’t catch John Walker Lindh or Adam Gadahn or Timothy McVeigh, but I guess conservatives are willing to live with that level of risk.
Citizen Alan
This really hits the heart of the matter. There are no security practices that conservatives are complaining about vis a vis the TSA that they would not be perfectly happy with if said practices were not limited exclusively to minorities.
martha
@Jinchi: so then of course after the TSA implements the cons’ preferred racial profiling, we know exactly who will blow up the next plane. A lovely blond white kid. Well duh.
Tim
…I’m fairly certain all of the alleged 9/11 hijackers were, ummm…Muslim.
So wouldn’t it make a tad bit of sense to at least take that factoid into consideration while formulating security procedure plans for airline travel?
Just maybe…?
befuggled
Anybody who isn’t searched as often as other people is a potential attack vector. If I wanted to smuggle something onto a plane, using my (or somebody else’s) grandmother would be a nice way to do it if I knew that she wouldn’t be searched.
lol
@Linda Featheringill:
It’s also pretty funny because they’ve been railing against terrorist mastermind and noted white guy Bill Ayers for a few years now.
Jinchi
Okay, let’s ignore the Oklahoma city bombing, the anthrax attacks and the attack on the Holocaust museum by a (grandfatherly, 88 year-old) white supremacist.
Maybe you could let us in on your magical technique for figuring out who’s a Muslim and who isn’t.
Bill Murray
I would imagine that, if profiling were instituted on Muslims, that terrorist Muslims with money could pay for a non-Muslim to execute the attack. My experience is that there are many Americans that would do pretty much anything if the pay is enough
jake the snake
It is interesting to note that 99+ % of those advocating profiling are those least likely to be profiled.
Except for a few outliers like Thomas Sowell or Clarence Thomas.
TooManyJens
@Nate:
Figure out a way for somebody to make a billion dollars in government contracts off of it, and we’ll see it.
Nick
and here I thought freedom wasn’t free.
Polish the Guillotines
This is more to the point.
befuggled
@Bill Murray: Or they’d just recruit people who didn’t, you know, look muslim. It’s really not that hard to do.
Mike G
@Southern Beale:
Because then the groping will be in the name of corporate profit, which is sacrosanct. They’re happy to be groped if a private company (no doubt run by Repukes and donating to the Repuke party) is making bucks out of it, but not by a (evul demoncrat) government employee. Because in their ideology corporations can’t be oppressors, only government.
Trueblood
@TooManyJens: Convert old human screening machines to test bomb-sniffing dogs for bomb-making materials, then when that doesn’t work, hire a bunch of slack-jaws to cop a feel on the dogs.
Frank
Conservatives are full of shit. It’s about race, not security. Just recall the incident involving Prof. Gates and the white Cambridge cop that arrested him in his own home, despite the fact that it had been established that Gates was not an intruder. Far from condemning the arrogant cop fror violating a mans liberty in his own home, the right rallied around the cop and attacked the famous, black, liberal academic. Shocking.
b-psycho
@mai name: A pity, as I could go for Tamron Hall doing so.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
I don’t understand why they don’t let President Obama try to do something about this or even speak out against it.
Judas Escargot
@Jinchi:
Maybe you could let us in on your magical technique for figuring out who’s a Muslim and who isn’t.
He trusts his feelings.
Nick
@Tim:
Oh, how do you point out the Muslims? Do they wear giant Ms on their heads?
ricky
What on earth happened to the simpler solution of killing their leaders and converting them to Christianity?
Hurling Dervish
It also occurred because when Michael Chertoff was Homeland Security chief, he authorized the purchase of the full body scanners. What was the first thing he did when he got out of office? Why, get hired by the company that makes the machines, of course.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/01/02/group_slams_chertoff_on_scanner_promotion/
Ah, the free market system. The cure for all our ills.
PanurgeATL
@Jinchi:
It’ll catch John Walker Lindh if they add “hippies” to it.
Lit3Bolt
The main laughable thing about airline security is that randomly dying instantly at 36,000 ft is apparently much more scarier than randomly dying instantly on the ground. No scanners for malls, churches, buses, subways, shipping, cargo, trains, skyscrapers, bridges, dams, tourist attractions, schools, stadiums, concert venues, civic centers, hotels, but OMGWTF airplanes soooo scary!
Marc McKenzie
@Sly:
Agreed. And let’s not forget that it sadly applies to our side of the fence as well.
I mean, when are we going to start hearing from GG and Moore that this is all Obama’s fault?