TSA and the Political Left Authority Tards

What a miserable comedown this is for the Democratic merit class. Reduced to the peckerwood perversions of the Republican Party…
Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Last week, I blogged about the relative silence of the Political Left regarding the new TSA security procedures. Since then, the crickets,to a certain extent, have stopped chirping. A near-unanimous noise that now emanates: Status Quo, bitch.

Here’s a brief rundown.

The Nation
The protests are nothing more than a Koch-funded libertarian plot. Polls show that 4 out of 5 Americans approve of the new procedures. Move along. Nothing more here to see.

Slate
Apparently, John Tyner reminds William Saletan of the underwear bomber. Writes Saletan:

Those words could just as easily have been written by the underwear bomber. Research the airports, look for the weak link, and pray that you don’t have to go through a scanner that can see what’s between your legs. So, yes, Mr. Tyner. Before you board my plane, I want the guys from TSA to look at your junk. And if you refuse, I want them to touch it.

Michael Kinsely
In Kinsely’s opinion, the TSA customer service experience puts the Post Office to shame. Stop your bitchin people, it could be worse…

But in my experience, the TSA people are unfailingly polite. I don’t mean almost always: I mean 100 percent of the time. Compare this with, say, the Postal Service. In five years, I’ve never had anything but a pleasant experience. (Well, you can’t honestly call the whole experience pleasant, but the TSA people have always — always, without exception — been pleasant and usually a bit apologetic.) And think of what they have to do and put up with all day: people’s smelly feet when they take off their shoes, repeating and repeating the same information about putting your cell phone in your carry-on and taking your laptop out, and then watching people get this simple instruction wrong, again and again.

Time Magazine
Same talking points as “The Nation,” just substitute Matt Drudge for the Koch brothers.

Wonkette
Left Authoritarian Porn.

Mother Jones
Yes, I hate some of these TSA security procedures, but because Obama is in charge, I now feel compelled to compose an anti- anti-TSA rant. The gist of this rant: Republicans are hypocrites.

Daily Kos
Kos can never pass up a good opportunity to exercise his cultural war bona fides. Yes groping is bad, but remember, the GOP is against abortion. And, we can’t forget, most of the noise is coming from white privileged males. Of course, Kos, being a white privileged male himself, pontificates that NSA wiretapping is actually far worse for white privileged males than groping. I’m not sure where that leaves females, children, people with disabilities, and non-white dudes, but I’m fairly certain he will grace us with a clarification at some point.

Think Progress
The TSA promises with right hand over bible and left-hand over dead mother’s grave to reform itself. Meanwhile, there is a sinister GOP plot afoot to introduce profiling. No other greater authority than Michael Chertoff debunks the danger of getting rid of these scanners.

Matt Welch at Reason has a scorecard on the TSA ass-kissing from our nation’s prestigious newspaper editorial boards. Damn, if only the radical center could figure out a way to subsidize these ass-kissers, sanity would surely follow.

Radley Balko digs up some historical dirt indicating that the LA Times is copying and pasting a way old editorial in favor of Japanese Interment with just a few modifications applicable to the current context.

Now, to be fair, the noise coming from the political left is not entirely unanimous¹. FireDogLake, for example, has been highly critical of TSA and Obama. Crooks and Liars published a piece that blasted Chris Matthews of Hardball for his faux outrage over any insinuation that Michael Chertoff is operating in anything but the public interest. Digby seems to have taken a break from the cultural war on this issue and writes something that resembles empirical sanity. ED Klain, it looks like, survived the attempted purge at Balloon Juice, to to try to beat some sense in the yokels over there. Roderick Long commented in my previous post that Keith Olbermann has been pretty good on this issue. So Keith is just a Partisan Tard and not an Authority Tard. Well, I suppose that’s saying something…

Now, with respect to the Political Right, there is no doubt that quite a bit of this recent bandwagon jumping over the TSA is in part motivated to crack Dem skulls over profiling. And the GOP stench of hypocrisy on this matter is certainly nauseating, just as the current partisan Dem hypocritical stench is nauseating; just as the left over stench of Dem hypocrisy from the Bush years when when they pretended to oppose Bush authoritarianism is nauseating; just as the left over stench of GOP hypocrisy from the 90s when they pretended to oppose Clinton Authoritarianism is still nauseating. And I would be remiss not to point out that quite a bit of the current federal security apparati that came into being after 9-11 had their genesis in the wet dreams of Clinton and Reno and in Dem Authority Tards like Biden and Lieberman.

As a final note, one can probably use this post as a part III, and the final part, of a little series I’ve been posting on “What happened to Liberaltarianism.” The final conclusion seems to be that actual liberals are about as rare of breed as libertarians. I’m not one of those who demand liberal mean “classical liberal,” but “liberalism” sure as hell isn’t a synonym for Paternalism. What happened to Liberals answers the question of what happened to Liberaltarianism.

¹ There is, of course, of sphere of the non-aligned left out there that is not libertarian and ranges from anti-authoritarian to highly political, that has been and remains fierce critics of Obama and the Dems. Think the writers over at Stop me before I vote again, Chris Floyd, Chris Hedges, Glen Ford, etc. By Political Left, I mean the “left” that is aligned with the Dems or institutions that are by and large subservient to the Dems.