On Junk Touching and Hypocrisy

I have no plans to enter the United States in the foreseeable future, but I might change my mind if I can get a reasonable assurance that someone will touch my cock during the trip. I have a somewhat Pavlovian response to such things.

As I'm sure everyone's heard, the entire United States is flipping the fuck out this week over new airport screening measures instituted by the Transport Safety Administration. Essentially, if you're looking to go to, say, lovely Fresno, California, the federal government has thoughtfully included a thorough finger-rape with the price of the ticket. It's a pretty choice deal for everyone concerned.

Of course, with everyone flipping the fuck out, it tends to be forgotten that half of America is being more than a little hypocritical. It wasn't too long ago, after all, that we heard the constant refrain of "We're at war! The government needs to do everything in it's power to keep us safe!" As a matter of fact, it was only last Christmas that the federal government was being accused of not doing enough to secure airliners.

I encourage everyone to read through some Republican-leaning blogs this week. Note the outrage over the sexy scanners and feel-coppers at an American airport near you. Then go back through the archives to last Christmas, through the middle of January. And, just for giggles, skip back to late 2005, when the National Security Agency's "wireless wiretapping" program was exposed. You'll likely notice a ... change of tone over the last five days or so.

One thing that I've noticed this week is that Republicans are using the phrase "privacy rights" quite a bit these days. That's special insofar as these people have spent most of the last forty years denying that such a right even exists, except in the special circumstance of Rush Limbaugh pretending to be Keith Richards.

The 2001 Patriot Act provided law enforcement the authority to conduct "sneek and peak" searches without notifying a suspect, which is a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment. The American people were told that this would only occur in sensitive terror-related cases. Guess what? A Senate investigation revealed that of the 763 Patriot Act searches in 2008, only three had anything at all to do with terrorism.

More troubling is this;

Sen. Feingold (D-WI) said that 65 percent of the cases for which sneak-and-peek warrants were used were drug investigations. And Assistant Attorney General David Kris told Feingold that, in most terrorism cases, surveillance methods are “generally covert altogether,” and do not use sneak-and-peek warrants.

… “That’s not how this was sold to the American people,” Feingold responded. “It was sold — as stated on the DoJ’s Web site in 2005 — as being necessary ‘to conduct investigations without tipping off terrorists.’”

Heard any Republicans complain about this gross, unconstitutional (And remember, the Fourth Amendment actually is in the Constitution) invasion of privacy? I haven't.

The NSA program is even more insidious. If you've read James Bamford's The Shadow Factory, you know that the physical "taps" the NSA uses are placed at the fiber-optic trunk stations where the lines enter the country from under the sea, primary in New Jersey, Miami and the San Fransisco Bay Area. Those taps don't discriminate between "terrorist communications" and any other kind. Every electronic communication in America necessarily has to go through the NSA's super computers to ferret out the naughty ones.

Heard any Republicans complain about that? I haven't.

This brings us to the strange case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the amusingly named "underwear bomber." Since the U.S government has spent the last nine years determined to prevent yesterday's attacks, it stands to reason that it might want to peek in your unmentionables. Besides, this is what fuckheads like Liz Cheney and the entire GOP congressional caucus has been agitating for since last Christmas, isn't it? If you're worried about 'splodey drawers, it's self-evident that you have little other choice but to somehow check the drawers in question.

Except the Republicans don't want the government doing that. More precisely, they don't want this government doing that. If Dick Cheney was feeling up your wife and kids, that would be one thing. But having Barack Obama doing it comes uncomfortably close to a scene from Mandingo that was left on the cutting-room floor.

These protests from "conservatives" are nothing if not curious. The GOP spent years demanding and justifying incredibly intrusive and unconstitutional powers for themselves to fight the War on Terror. The American people were told that they were necessary and specific to the purpose of combating terrorism, which we now know to be untrue. But when specific measures are employed to detect and deter a specific threat ('splodey unmentionables), Republicans go batshit.

The Bush administration essentially stripped away Fourth Amendment guarantees from your home and communication, even though both are actually in it. But they really want to protect your crotch from an intrusive government. More exactly, they want to protect your crotch from a Democratic government.

That's what's happening here, teenagers. This is more partisan noise, nothing more and nothing less. It's exactly what I said would happen back in 2005-06. The GOP defended extra-constitutional powers when they had them, but excluded the possibility that they wouldn't be in power forever. Now they're putting on their "Defenders of Liberty" costumes, which is hilarious to anyone that has been paying attention.

I'm against all of these measures, if for no other reason than I'm adorably consistent. I think that the United States Constitution actually means something, and in all of my studies of the document, I have yet to see a "scary Muslim" exception. More importantly, Israel - which doesn't even have a written constitution - does a pretty good job of protecting her people's rights while preventing terrorism. Their airline security hasn't been breached in over eight years and they don't take naked pictures of you or even feel you up.

There are ways of addressing the problem that are more effective and constitutional than what's been employed since 9/11. Americans just don't want to explore them because they prefer having pointless stupid fights with one another. I hope that someone recognizes that before the next successful attack, but I'm kidding myself. Just like everyone else.


TSA logo cunningly hijacked from Girl on the Right, whose site appears to be down at the moment.