Who owns liberty? Republicans or Democrats? Tea Partiers or the ACLU?
Legislators in New Jersey this week came up with a novel response: All of the above. This video makes me want to stand up and cheer. Republicans and Democrats – and even an ACLU rep – all came together in opposing TSA abuses.
(Click here if you can’t view the clip.)
Privacy and liberty are basic American values. Nobody holds a monopoly on them. We all have a stake. We all have common ground here, irrespective of our other differences.
That’s why I’m dismayed when I see journalists, bloggers, and commenters pinning the TSA abuses on
- solely Obama or Bush (they share responsibility)
- solely Napolitano or her predecessors (ditto, though as far as I know only Michael Chertoff is reaping direct financial profits from the scanners as a lobbyist for their manufacturers)
- undocumented Mexicans (huh?)
- unions (the TSA is not yet unionized, though a ruling last week will let them vote on unionization)
- Muslim women (c’mon guys!)
You can see that the blaming is almost a Rorschach test for people’s pet fears and favorite enemies.
So far, I don’t see the left playing the blame game with quite such zeal as the right. This is partly because Bush is off whacking shrubs somewhere and is no longer a convenient target, while our guy is now in office. It’s also due to the left having been slow to discover this story, while the Ron Paul faction of the Republican Party has been all over it for weeks and months, to their credit. The left simply hasn’t made much of a snail trail yet.
Look, there’s oodles of blame to go around. In addition to this administration and the last, our congresscritters are not crowning themselves with glory. Unlike the legislators in New Jersey, they are mostly kowtowing to the new procedures. Despite Claire McGaskill’s incredibly tone-deaf characterization of the grope-search as “love pats,” craven capitulation to the security state is a bipartisan failing. And then there’s Joe Lieberman, who has earned himself a daily grope-search for eternity in whatever afterlife awaits him.
This is where the creeping path toward fascism must end. Let’s make common cause until the TSA buckles. While the TSA has caved to the pilots’ demands, we ordinary passengers are going to have to be a lot more persistent. (Unions do have their advantages, y’know!) We need to get along – right, left, and center – until this TSA debacle is history. Once this incursion on liberty has been beaten back, we can go back to our regularly scheduled spats.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
Sign the petition:
http://www.stopthetsa.org
Lisa, I saw this petition and didn’t sign because it looked like it was aimed at New Jersey residents. Do you think non-residents are welcome to sign, too?
I was so happy I wanted to squeal when I saw that my facebook wall’s resident Tea Partier is outraged about this. Finally, something we can pretty much all agree on! (Of course, the celebration will be short-lived if we can’t get it changed…)
Facebook reveals all kind of weird stuff about people you’ve known for ages and lost track of. I’m “friends” with a guy I knew in college (both in band together), and honestly I don’t know why I didn’t just ignore his friend request; I guess that was back before I knew one could just quietly let a request die. Anyway, he was loathesome then and even more so now – big gun nut and totally full of himself to boot. But here we finally agree on something!
I suspect one problem is that people on both extremes of the political spectrum are suspicious of the power the TSA has arrogated to its self. People in the middle are less likely to be critical. This could be a problem in building the massive public support that will be needed to reverse this policy, because the folks in the middle are the biggest group. I’d like to hope I’m wrong on this!
I informed the TSA officer that it was the scar from my colon cancer operation that went from my crotch to my sternum. A day later the scar still hurts from the kneading and prodding. I was informed they were checking in order to determine if I had anything sewn into my stomach. I offered to lift my shirt to show the TSA officer the still rather graphic scar, but he refused.
-Andrew Ian Dodge
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/my-very-own-tsa-nightmare/2/
[...] done outstanding work following the controversy, each in a series of recent posts. In one, Sungold highlighted a New Jersey initiative in which conservatives and liberals joined together to call on their federal delegation to [...]