News Flash: The Koch Brothers Have Co-opted Kittywampus!

Did you know that this blog is a minion in the Koch brothers’ astroturfing? I was shocked to hear it, myself! According to Mark Ames and Yasha Levine at Alternet, all of us progressives who got outraged about the TSA naked bodyscanners and grope-downs were mere pawns in a right-wing game – dupes to an anti-union conspiracy.

Ames and Levine’s argument is basically as follows:

1) John “don’t touch my junk” Tyner was a phony who plotted his confrontation with TSA agents. They cite an apology he wrote on his blog for taking down a post in which he contemplated how he would react if subjected to an intrusive patdown – but they take it completely out of context.

What Tyner actually wrote:

To those of you who feel duped, I apologize. There is no reason to feel that way, though. I stand by my assertion that the encounter was not planned or staged.

Ames and Levine quote only the first line of this, making it sound as if Tyner admitted he’d staged the confrontation. This is especially nasty given that they’d already scurrilously attacked him last fall in The Nation as a plant of the Koch brothers, and Glenn Greenwald had debunked it as dishonest innuendo.

The Nation’s editors had to apologize for this smear. While Ames and Levine’s latest doesn’t go quite as far as the first, they’re still imputing guilt-by-association to Tyner. Alternet’s editors should never have published this unethical crap, and they too ought to apologize. Tyner has defended himself in a new post, and Alternet ought to link to it.

2) Republicans such as Dick Armey and Jim DeMint are virulently anti-union.

Yep, can’t deny that. But they have no sway over the TSA and didn’t have any demonstrable influence over the roll-out of the intrusive new searches. So, your point is …?

3) Charles Krauthammer and his ilk seized on the new TSA procedures and whipped the public up into a frenzy. This “hysteria” was manufactured so that the TSA leadership could squelch a union drive for TSA employees. Therefore we can conclude that all the progressives who objected to the virtual strip-searches and grope-downs were mere patsies, duped by the right.

This is horseshit. Most of us progressive bloggers and journalists were onto the new TSA tricks before Krauthammer and Glenn Beck started fulminateing. Yes, Krauthammer and his ilk seized upon our outrage to press a right-wing agenda. That doesn’t make our anger manufactured, nor does it make us dupes.

The “logic” behind this article is stunningly stupid. The authors act as though they’d never heard of the distinction between correlation and causation. Just because a lot of people who are normally political adversaries got mad about the same thing at the same time doesn’t mean we were manipulated by the righties. You know what explains the timing of it? Not the TSA unionization effort, but the fact that the TSA rolled out its scanners and new grope-down procedures last October. The right-wingers tried to use it opportunistically, but as Ames and Levine admit, they didn’t fully succeed in halting the TSA union drive. (Granted, the powers the union gained are pathetically paltry, but the Dems in charge of the agency share in the blame.) Oh, and nowhere in the article do the authors trace a direct link from the Koch brothers to the anti-TSA activism of last fall. (They claimed to have done this in their Nation article, but even there the evidence was sketchy.)

I don’t know what axe Ames and Levine have to grind, but they are such apologists for the TSA that you’ve got to wonder if they might be on its payroll. Recently, the TSA-critical We Won’t Fly blog busted one or more TSA agents engaged in sockpuppetry, trolling their comment section and slinging invective at the site’s owners. Ames and Levine’s ethics – as shown by their defamation of John Tyner – are no more impressive.

Ames and Levine scoff at the idea that there were real issues here – issues of privacy, bodily autonomy, and civil liberties in general. Instead, they reduce the outrage over TSA violations to con job that took “valid criticisms” and transformed them into “hysteria”:

The strategy: 1) concoct and magnify fake government oppression at the hands of the TSA;  2) Demonize and blame the crisis on your political target, TSA screeners, so that the public turns against them; 3) Push and PR the message, focusing on valid but largely trivial aspects of the problem; and 4) Now you can appear, not as cruel union-buster, but as a hero defending the public.

This is not “fake government oppression.” This is the real thing, targeting vulnerable people. And while our ire might be most easily roused by concerns about how children, sexual abuse survivors, and people with disabilities are harmed, even the distress of a young, middle-class white male like John Tyner counts.

And it continues. Just this week, a former Miss USA, Susie Castillo, posted her account of being groped on YouTube:

Within recent weeks, the mother of an eight-year-old boy complained about his treatment …

… as did the parents of a six-year-old girl.

So what hoax, exactly, are Ames and Levine pointing to when they ask in their article’s title, “Did You Fall for It?” There’s nothing faux about the abuse that these people describe. Where’s their empathy for the elderly and disabled who are singled out for intrusive searches? Where do Ames and Levine stand on the use of genital patdowns on preschoolers? Is that, too, trivial and “fake”?

That the Republicans foam at the mouth against unions isn’t news. Right-wing interference with unions predates Scotty Walker by decades. For the record, I support a strong union for the TSA, as I do for all workers. This isn’t just rhetoric; I was working on a union drive until Ohio’s SB 5 shut down the chance for university faculty to exercise the human right of collective bargaining. If the TSA enjoyed real collective bargaining rights, it might attract better-qualified applicants and become a more professional force. Perhaps it could even engage in real behind-the-scenes security work and intelligence gathering, rather than just security theater.

The problem here is not that progressive yelled too loudly about TSA abuses. It’s that we didn’t yell loudly enough. It’s that we were too few in number. If progressives – and moderates, too – had rallied against the loss of our civil liberties, our voices could have swamped those of the right wing. Shame on those progressives who silently watched our liberties erode. Ames and Levine have done them one worse, becoming active apologists for the dismantling of our privacy and basic human dignity.