bush: "Please touch my junk" Obama: "No Touch!!"

The TSA, the Right, and My Busted Watch

26 November 2010 - For the last several days, I have been trying to locate what would appear to be the appropriate and necessary level of angst and fury over the issue of heavy-handed TSA searches at American airports. I say "appropriate and necessary" because, well, all the noise surrounding the matter seems to suggest I have no alternative other than outrage, and if I fail to react that way, I am some sort of dupe, a fool who doesn't understand the Constitutional issues at hand or the dangers represented by what has been described as a glaring governmental over-reach.

Interestingly enough, this opinion is being clarioned from the far reaches of both sides of the left-right spectrum. The electronic left - blogs, online news and commentary sites (like Truthout) and message boards - is up in arms over the violations they see involved in the TSA screening process. On the right, the hue and cry is at an equal, if not higher decibel. For their part, the "mainstream" media is giving as much play as possible to the angry voices being raised against President Obama and the TSA.

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What I do know is that the leading voices of outrage over this issue are the likes of Charles Krauthammer of the Post, Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, incoming House Transportation Committee chairman John Mica (R-FL), a bunch of rabid right-wing websites which are also leading the "Obama is not a citizen" birther charge, and a "mainstream" media that continues to push messages that auger inexorably toward the claim that the "Tea Party" is right about everything even remotely related to government.

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Perfect. Right from the jump, the article highlights Krauthammer's "Don't touch my junk" article, which was pretty much the genesis of the public hollering over TSA screening procedures. It goes from there to underlining the "mainstream" media's favorite theme from 2010: government is inept. In essence, what we have here is one more instance of the media reinforcing the theme they hammered home over the last year through their cheerful re-branding of the GOP base into the "Tea Party." Government is wrong, government is bad, and from there it is an easy leap to "The Tea Party was right all along."

Bank on this: if the year was 2002, and President Bush declared these TSA measures to be absolutely necessary to the security of the nation, the same right-bent people currently screaming about the heavy-handed Obama TSA policy would be defending those exact same policies to the teeth, with the "mainstream" media right with them all the way down the party line. For the right, this is opposition simply for the sake of opposition itself, and thanks to the media, they have once again managed to shoehorn another "Government sucks" screaming match to the forefront of the national conversation. {read rest}