I know this is a topic that's done to death, but man, it's still a serious issue and I have to rant. Via Salon comes this story of a teenaged girl whose purse created a massive fuss at airport security because it looked like this: 

Yep. It had a picture of a gun on it. Not a gun, but a picture of it. The fuss caused the girl to miss her flight, and even though the TSA officials could see what is blatantly obvious---which is you cannot shoot or even threaten to shoot someone with a picture of a gun---they refused to let her have her purse, insisting she either check it or relinquish it. Security theater has literally become superstitious, as if merely thinking about guns behind the holy TSA security line is going to conjure them into being, along with terrorists to use them against people. 

I'm also mad because this is so stupid that any joke I can think of to make about it fails to live up to the absurdity of the situation. 

I don't fly all the time, but I fly pretty frequently, and I've gotten to the point where I can predict with about 90% certainty whether or not they're going to tear up my bag in security. I refuse to check bags if I can help it, not just because of the cost, but because it's such a pain picking them up at the baggage carousel. That means that I have basically everything in my carry-on suitcase, and it's pretty much impossible to have everything you travel with, especially if you're female, not be a beacon to overzealous TSA agents. You probably have a bottle that has 3.2 ounces of fluid, or maybe today they feel your zipper bag isn't clear enough. Or, in one case, I was yelled at for having a zipper bag---a clear one, mind you, which the TSA says is fine---because the agent got it into his head that it has to be a Ziploc bag. Sorry I try to avoid generating unnecessary trash, America! Anyway, it means if they're going to tear up someone's shit, I'm going to get it. So it depends on if they're in the mood for tearing up people's shit. 

So how do I predict with 90% certainty if I'm going to get my shit torn up that day? Is it because there's a whiff of terror in the air? Does it have to do with the likelihood of a terrorist attack starting in the airport I'm in? Does it reflect some orders from on high?

No. None of that. My nearly-foolproof system is to look at the TSA agents. If they are busy and/or having a good time joshing each other, then you won't get searched. If they're bored or in a bad mood, you're getting searched. Works, like I said, 9 out of 10 times. It's so predictable that I can guess often before I even see security lines if I'm going to get searched by looking at how big and busy the airport is. Slow or small airports usually mean bored and grumpy TSA agents, making the risk of searching high. With this excellent system, I have accurately predicted getting heavily searched in the following cities with small, slow airports: El Paso, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Midland. I got spared in Lubbock, which genuinely surprised me. In Midland, they didn't tear up my bag. No, what they did was even sillier. I had already taken my laptop, per TSA instructions, and they got it in their heads that this wasn't good enough and put it in the bomb detection machine. Of course, about 4 people came through security in about 15 minutes, so they were really bored, and they had that bomb detecting machine on hand, so it's almost hard to blame them for their boredom-relieving techniques. In St. Louis, they made a solid 5-6 minute fuss over my portable iPod player, which was treated like an inscrutable device that required at least three passes through the machine and a complete rearranging of my suitcase that I had carefully packed that morning.

The one city I've never been searched in? New York City. Even though, statistically speaking, half of my flights go through a busy, New York area airport. 

It's theater, pure and simple. The message is: be afraid. Not of terrorists, of course. Those are protected against much more by secured pilot doors and passengers who now know to fight back. The message is to be afraid of the TSA. Make sure not to laugh too loudly while in line or look too peeved when they search your shit, or they may decide you really look dangerous and need extra searching. They have the power to make you miss your flight, and that danger is immediate and very real, unlike the vague threats of terrorism that all this security is supposedly there to prevent. 

I agree with most of this excellent post trying to put 9/11 into historical perspective by Erik and LGM, but one of his throwaway comments I have to quarrel with:

Of course, 9/11 also led to the Iraq War, the use of torture, and other events.....

Seriously, that's all I really disagree with.  And far be it for me to disagree with a historian on this sort of thing, but this comment---that 9/11 led to the Iraq War and to torture---is just a variation on a sentiment that I've seen trotted out in many forms.  I want to vehemently disagree.  I think the Iraq War became inevitable after the Supreme Court handed Bush the election.  In fact, I would argue that the strangest thing about the aftermath of 9/11 is how little it mattered beyond being a convenient rallying cry to rationalize all sorts of atrocities.  But conservatives being what they are, if it wasn't 9/11 that gave them a rallying point, it would have been something else.  

There's a few reasons I believe this.  The most important is the most obvious: Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.  The rationale for the Iraq War was made-up WMDs, and while 9/11 was invoked frequently to juice up American bloodlust, it wasn't actually the rationale.  The evidence points the Bush administration already having their roll out for the Iraq War laid out before 9/11, and Richard Clark's recollection that the first thing Bush told him after the attack was concoct a way to fit this attack into their pre-existing plans confirmed that.  Bush was going to have his war no matter what.  He had it in his head that ousting Saddam Hussein would be his legacy, and I don't imagine that much would have gotten in his way.  Americans were easy to whip into a frenzy for the first war against Iraq, and there was no national crisis to exploit in order to get that reaction.  We watch a lot of action movies.  It's easy to convince us we can blow some shit up and walk away victors with very little effort.

Honestly, I imagine even torture was inevitable.  The reason we tortured was that Bush's people find it exciting to do so, because it makes up for their failures as high school athletes or being virgins until their 20s or something.  Once you're willing to concoct an illegal, unnecessary war to shore up your manhood, there's a plodding inevitability to the war crimes that will follow.

The main things 9/11 caused that wouldn't have happened otherwise were the Afghanistan war and the survellaince state.  I imagine if Gore won, the former would have been more intense but hopefully shorter, and the latter would have been far more subdued and quite possibly restricted just to airports. And that's assuming that 9/11 would have happened under Gore. There's reason to believe it may not have; unlike Bush, Gore held national office during Bin Laden's prior attacks on our country and was probably more cognizant of the threat.  And because of that it's possible he would have run intelligence services better and taken warnings that Bush blew off far more seriously.  They may not have been enough to stop it, but it would have given us a fighting chance. 

So, in the grand scheme of things, Bush v. Gore was far more important in terms of impact than 9/11 was.  But I think people tend to overrate the historical importance of great crimes in general.  9/11 proved more than anything that it's how we react when bad shit goes down that ends up mattering more than the bad shit did in the first place.  There was a lot of talk in the past decade and on this anniversary of how 9/11 was squandered, but I'm really unsure there's a productive response to such a thing beyond acknowledging the sadness and taking steps to prevent future tragedies.  Some things just aren't fixable. 

As a side note, I want to praise the memorial at the WTC that's opening to the public today.  I saw the pictures on TV and am impressed with its size and beauty.  It's not easy trying to concoct the proper response to a horrible crime that both acknowledges what happened but doesn't re-traumatize by being too literal, and I think the designers of the memorial did a really good job. For the first time since I've lived here, I'm actually considering making a special trip to the site on my own, because I want to see this beautiful memorial with my own eyes.  Prior to now, "visiting" a site of the murder of thousands of people seemed morbid.  

Update: I was alerted on Twitter to this Time magazine profile of Colin Powell from 9/10/01:

And as soon as Wolfowitz, a zealous advocate of "regime change" in Baghdad--backing dissidents to overthrow Saddam--settled into his office, he told European parliamentarians that Powell was not the last word on sanctions or Iraq policy. Enthusiasm is building inside the Administration to take down Saddam once and for all. Powell too would love to see Saddam unhorsed, says an official at State. "But you need a serious plan that's doable. The question is how many lives and resources you have to risk." Powell's unwillingness to fight any less-than-total war is legendary, and the particulars of launching a covert insurgency among the feuding Iraqi opposition factions would give any general pause. The proposition is still "hypothetical," he told TIME. But plenty of others on the Bush team are gung-ho.

The only real question is how hard it would have been to get it past Congress.  But Bush made it clear from day one that he wasn't even willing to entertain letting Congress declare war, precisely because he wanted this to be solely his baby.  So I don't imagine it would have mattered; the administration had a pro-executive Supreme Court behind them anyway.

David Brooks, 2009:

These are the realistic choices for America’s Afghanistan policy — all out or all in, surrender the place to the Taliban or do armed nation-building.

David Brooks, 2011:

Perhaps we don’t know enough, can’t plan enough, can’t implement effectively enough to coordinate nation building with national security objectives.

We eagerly await realistic choice three.

Looks like Fox News has really benefited from the small amount of time between Obama releasing his birth certificate and the death of Osama Bin Laden.  That's because they lost one conspiracy only to gain another: the inevitable claims that the Obama administration faked Osama Bin Laden's death.  Digby posted one example of them using a veneer of skepticism in order to float the claims, all with a textbook "just asking questions" excuse.

Media Matters has more.  It seems the narrative is, like with the birth certificate thing, that the conspiracy theorists aren't saying that Obama is lying, they're just, you know, asking questions.  They innocently want more proof.  That's all.  Who could have a problem with that, right?

In skepticism circles, we call this strategy of floating conspiracy theories while trying to front like you're the actual skeptic: JAQing off.  It stands for Just Asking Questions.  Definition: "JAQing off is the act of spouting accusations while cowardly hiding behind the claim of "Just Asking Questions".^[1] The strategy is to keep asking leading questions in an attempt to influence listeners' views; the term is derived from the frequent claim by the denialist that they are "just asking questions", albeit in a manner much the same as political push polls. It is often associated with denialism in general."

You see it with Holocaust denialists and global warming denialists a lot, as well as 9/11 Truthers, Trig Truthers, and anti-vaccination nuts.  "South Park" did an amusing parody of how Glenn Beck uses this technique.

As amusing as this is in its obviousness, this is a very serious problem.  We should be discussing what Bin Laden's death means going forward.  Already you're seeing many people call for this to be an end to the war on terror and a return to normal life.  But if right wingers are successful in redirecting the conversation to whether or not this actually happened, then the more important conversation about stopping the war will be forgotten.

In a jumble, What I went through last night---which I imagine was a typical experience of watching at home and following online---many of which were expressed in a flood of tweets: Relief, elation, concern about the future, urge to make dark jokes, rush of memories of 9/11, glee, concern about myself for being so bloodthirsty, telling myself that it doesn't count when the person killed was such a horrible piece of shit, a resurgence of grief about 9/11, more dark jokes, annoyance at people scolding those making jokes on Twitter for not seeing that humor has its place even in serious times, feeling bad for John King's obvious predicament of having to be pulled away from having a night on the town in order to report on this, schadenfreude watching wingnuts scramble to find a way to rationalize this so they can find anyone to credit but Obama (even though he clearly ordered it), amazement watching people pour into public spaces on TV to celebrate, mild concern that this could be a problem, realizing no one is actually going to care, trying to imagine what it must be like to be the guy who pulled the trigger, grief that this world can be so dark, irritation at being scolded by well-meaning folks for being glad, and finally some serious thoughts about what all this means.

Not for the future.  It was easy to predict what would happen after 9/11---right down to those of us who feared pretty immediately Bush would use it as an excuse to invade some random, unrelated country that would probably be Iraq---because there's a template for reactions to massive crimes.  Or more to the point, there are two templates to choose from and there was an inevitability to the Republican-controlled government picking the wrong one.  But I'll get back to that.  The difference between now and then is that the situation is infinitely more complex.  Anyone claiming they can predict the future is full of shit.  There are too many variables that weren't in place after 9/11.  Just as importantly, it's genuinely hard to react to justice.  Once the person who did this horrible thing has paid the price, victims---in this case, the American people, whose anger over 9/11 is clearly still raw---often find themselves standing around thinking, "Now what?" 

There will be many answers to that question.  Republicans have predictably gone straight to claiming that the war on terror must go on. Obama, however, has been wisely if quietly winding it down, except for the clusterfuck situation at Gitmo.  Liberals like myself are suggesting this can be used as an opportunity to reassess our presence in Afghanistan and move to actually getting the hell out.  The ugly fact of the matter is that one major reason the Obama administration hasn't been able to fulfill promises about bringing the war on terror---and the war on our civil liberties and the war on our system of justice that came with it---to an end is that Democrats don't have enough (perceived) political capital on this issue.  There's a strong possibility that changed overnight.  But whether or not that means anything is not for us to know.  It depends on the savvy with which that capital is deployed, the limits of the wingnut imagination, and all sorts factors that are variable as all fuck.  Anyone who claims to see the future on this is just fronting.

But what this does sharpen up is the past.  The details are still coming in, but what we do know---what the President outlined---is that it was a strategic action conducted after careful study.  Only four people were killed besides Bin Laden in the firefight.  This is a good time to point out that while wingnuts screamed and bellyached that liberals who opposed going to war were cowards and pacifists who don't want to do anything to stop Bin Laden, realistically  most of us said that this was a situation better dealt with by having these kind of targeted raids that didn't involve many civilians.  And we were right.  We didn't need to go to war in Iraq, and we probably didn't need to go to war in Afghanistan. 

The two possible reactions to 9/11 were to exploit the situation to start conducting a bunch of fruitless wars that would only instigate more hatred towards the U.S. as we racked up civilian casualties, and to limit our response to police actions to nab important terrorist leaders while supporting democratic movements throughout the Middle East.  Liberals have always supported the latter (except for a few featherheads who really did suggest a do-nothing strategy, but they were always a teeny tiny minority), and we were right.  We told you so.  We were right.  And I'm not going to let pointless scolding about "civility" stop me from saying so.  We were right.  Our preferred strategy got Bin Laden.  Our preferred strategy is what is causing change in the Middle East.  We're not getting what we want by conquering nations, but by recognizing the autonomous desires and abilities of people all around the world.  We were right.

My hope is going forward, this knowledge that we were right all along will matter in future decision-making.  Perhaps our leaders will be bolder when choosing to do the right thing.  Maybe they will still be cowed by the howling mob of wingnuts who prefer to maximize violence, no matter what the consequences.  We can't know that right now.  But we can think about the fact that we were right and use that knowledge to move forward.

I’ve been asked about this a couple of times, and Obama’s powerful speech last night creates an opportunity to talk about it:  The military action in Libya.  I hope Juan Cole is right and I’m wrong on this, but my skepticism is firm.  There’s always a chance this could become more Bosnia, less Iraq or Afghanistan.  But there’s reasons to be suspicious, and I agree with Roy Edroso here:

But for all its advantages, this approach still leads back to the same place we’ve been stuck for nine years—and, seen a certain way, for much longer than that. I can believe Obama is very different from the imperialist Westerners who’ve been fucking over small states for generations, and still believe that the best way for him to show his difference is to stay out of their affairs insofar as possible. We don’t have a great track record since World War II, and while Obama appears to think that the best way to fix that is to do foreign intervention right this time, I would prefer a cooling-off period. Always leave ‘em wanting more.

Here are my concerns: Obama, rightfully, wants to right our relationships with the broadly-named Muslim world by demonstrating that we’ve grown past our imperialist tendencies.  Great goal!  But his strategy, as Roy as noted, is less “show them that we really mean it by not interfering” and more “make this a competition between you and your predecessor over who can do it right”.  The latter urge, by the way, is why wars are so hard to extract yourself when you get into them.  Cutting your losses is hard.  Letting the other guy get you into a situation and then failing to finish the job correctly is even harder.  Never, ever underestimate the ego of a politician, even those with good intentions. 

My problem with this strategy is it falls right into one of the worst liberal traps, which is thinking politics works on an intellectual, nuanced level when it in fact works on a broad, emotion-based level.  This is true here, there, everywhere.  It’s a universal problem.  So if you say, “We really don’t want to be imperialists,” people who are suspicious of you are going to say, “Then why are you still firing guns in nations where your noses don’t belong?”  They’re probably not interested in your nuanced rationalizations.  This is doubly true of people who are highly motivated to rally people against you.  Every bullet fired can be assumed to be money donated to their propaganda.  Obama’s hope is that successfully putting down Qaddafi will take the knees off of these arguments, and it very well might—-if this goes exactly as planned.  Does it ever, though?  That’s my concern. 

My broader concern has little, honestly, to do with this latest war adventure and more my frustrations with the U.S. and its defense program in general.  It’s fucking ridiculous that we are perpetually at war with someone, but we’ve completely abandoned the Constitutional requirement to declare war before going to war.  I’m not an absolutist on this or anything.  If troops are attacked or our country is invaded, feel free to self-defend before a formal declaration.  But the fact that no President, Democratic or Republican, even bothers to pay tribute to this legal restraint on what has become a tyrannical power bothers me.

And I think the reason is simply that our military is ridiculously large.  When you spend as much money as we do on a military year after year, I think it starts to seem criminal not to use it.  It’s like as if you spent twice as much on a big house and then only use two rooms in it.  You’re going to start to feel guilty.  Seriously, we spend so much money on our military it’s ridiculous.  It becomes a self-rationalizing thing.  If you don’t use it regularly, people are going to start talking about—-gasp!—-cutting defense spending.  Can’t have that. 

Because we spend an obscene amount of money on defense, we will always end up paying for and leading these actions.  I find it especially ironic that Republicans always bitch about the leadership role that the U.S. takes on these peacekeeping missions.  That’s like being the guy who insists, over your spouse’s protests, that you’re going to buy that ginormous SUV that seats ten people, claiming that if you don’t, everyone in the neighborhood will think you’re a pussy.  And then you complain when it’s always on you to drive when you get together with your 9 closest friends for a road trip.  Sensible people look at this situation, and buy a smaller car if they don’t like being the driver everywhere.  A two-seater is an especially good way to avoid driving duty.  But we are always driving, which Obama alluded to when he described our “unique” role in the world. 

Meanwhile, we’re funding this giant SUV and its ridiculous gas bill, and telling our starving family we don’t have money to pay the mortgage or for food, and they’ll just have to pick through garbage and sleep on the street (and certainly not in the SUV, because they’re dirty and will fuck up the interior).  Like Bob Herbert said in his last column:

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

I realize this is a problem that should have been fixed before Libya started to erupt into civil war, but the fact that it continues not to be fixed is being highlighted by our role in this military action compared to the other nations that are involved.

Via Digby, this video is just so awesome:

I think my favorite is how some conservatives have decided that a “clever” dodge when challenged about their beliefs on Obama’s religion is to say that his religion is “liberalism”.  Which is a way of saying, “Look, I think he’s a Muslim, but I’m smart enough to know that I can’t say that in certain company, so I’m going to elide the issue.” Sean Hannity is really perturbed by the base’s unwillingness to stick to what he considers a safer way to use religion as a cover to float racist attacks, which is to drop the words “Reverend Wright” a lot.  Any way you slice it, however, the Muslim/radical Christian/religion is “liberalism” thing is basically a way to express the belief that black Americans aren’t Real Americans®, though there’s a cultural equivalent of a green card offered for black conservatives. 

But I think the panic in Hannity’s eyes is probably about more than just his concerns that his audience is visibly stupid (and therefore not really so great at launching suitably subtle racist attacks on the President) and that makes Republicans look bad.  It’s also that this focus group demonstrates that Glenn Beck has hijacked the entire narrative, and the results are that it works to keep pushing the envelope further and further into conspiracy theory direction.  Particularly with this Egypt stuff, Beck has decided the most fruitful way to exploit this is to ratchet up hysteria about Muslims.  He basically decided, correctly I think, that conservative viewers don’t give a shit about the nuances of this situation.  They want to hear that crazy Muslims are rising up and demanding that the world be turned into a Muslim theocracy and that Obama is in on it, and that the main reason this is alarming is that it’s a threat not to secularism (which vast swaths of conservatives, including Beck, object to), but to Christian dominance.  And even Hannity can probably grasp that if there’s no limits on the conspiracy theory nuttiness, then that’s genuinely dangerous.  And not just to liberals or Democrats anymore, but even to folks like him who have even just 5% of them that says, “Hey, there should be some kind of limit on this stuff.” 

Luckily for him and for the rest of us, the one limit is that most Americans are lazy slobs.  (I include myself in this.)  The chance that people whipped up into a frenzy of paranoia are going to hit the streets in large numbers is pretty low.  They’re mostly just going to stew at home, going down their rabbit hole of nuttiness.  The real threat here is that the nuts are taking over the Republican party.  Teh traditional business interests who control the party and simply exploit the nuts for votes are going to have an harder time keeping a lid on this shit.  Paranoia is like The Blob; it just keeps growing and feeding on everything in sight until it completely takes over.

It’ll be interesting seeing how this battle plays out.  As Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon today suggests, the only real consistent line throughout conservative reaction to the Egyptian protests has been a need to be loud and insistent that this is all about America without doing anything so quaint as educating yourself about the issues, but beyond that it’s been a struggle between the natural conservative inclination to support oppressive dictators and the occasional pro-democracy pose conservatives take to justify themselves to themselves (and their desire to wear tricorn hats).  Plus, there’s the ugly fact of the matter that we don’t actually have any real idea how this is going to turn out, and that loss of control is somehting that’s hard for most Americans to accept, but especially for conservatives. 

Egypt may be unpredictable, but I feel somewhat assured I can predict who is going to win in the battle between Team Beckian Paranoids and Team Let’s Not Sound Like We’re Stark Raving Mad, M’kay? My money’s on Beck, definitely.  Sure, his theory that the protesters are in league with liberal America and the mainstream media to promote a sort of socialist hedonistic fundamentalist theocracy that features free abortions and orgies in the streets but also mandatory burquas and prayer five times a day sounds like the sort of thing that shouldn’t really catch on in the marketplace of ideas.  But is it really more crazy than a lot of the crap that Beck and the rest of the right wing noise machine pumps out day in and day out?  No, not really.  The people who are complaining about Beck now were and are only too happy to lie the vast majority of the time for political gain.  Bill Kristol, for instance, isn’t one to talk, since he backed every single paranoid lie imaginable to get us into war with Iraq.  Plus, as Media Matters demonstrates, even some people complaining about Beck, such as John Fund, are too in love with the “sharia law” paranoia to give it up completely.  They simply have the very silly, childish belief that they can lie and spread paranoia to keep their base fearful and voting as instructed, but that they can keep that paranoia under control once it’s been unleashed.  And I don’t think you can do that.

See, Glenn Beck gets it. And, to an extent, he has a different motivation than a lot of conservative pundits who see themselves mainly as shills for the GOP and the right wing agenda.  Beck’s down with that motivation, but making money and accumulating popularity matters more to him, and if the goals clash, he’ll pick money and popularity over shilling for the conservative agenda every time.  Plus, he can shape the conservative agenda to fit his goals at this point.  And he knows his audience isn’t interested in niceties like nuance or imagining that Egyptians are human beings who deserve to be listened to.  He understands on a gut level that the images of a bunch of Egyptians in the street looking angry inspires fear in his audience, regardless of the context, and he’s going to stoke it, because fearful followers spend more and are more obedient.  See, Kristol and Fund and company see racism as something that can be manipulated depending on their needs.  Beck grasps that racism doesn’t respond to that kind of nuance, and chooses instead to feed it on the assumption that it will pay dividends down the road.  Same story with paranoia.  Beck grasps that balls-out paranoia is much better for him than moderated paranoia.  Once you start telling people, “Hey, it’s cool to be paranoid, but don’t get all crazy about it,” you’ve already conceded that most of the shit you say is irrational.  But if you’re paranoid all the time, you can make a clean break with reality.  It ceases to be a reference point anymore, and the seed of an idea that one shouldn’t be a paranoid nut job won’t be planted.  And that’s where he needs his audience: completely disconnected, constantly fearful, with no relationship to the real world outside of their homes. 

I’ve been angry for days about what we won’t hear from the President tonight. Together, Talib Kweli and Thom Yorke say everything he won’t:

You can download the mashup by popping the little down arrow at Soundcloud.

I’ve been told that Chris Christie is too imperious and too much of a bully to win the Republican nomination, and my feeling on that is that Republicans like imperious bullies (see: John McCain), so I don’t see how that could hurt him. I mean, it will in the general, but not so much in the primary.  But he hasn’t learned the most important lesson of being a Republican favorite, which is that no matter how sure of yourself you may be, if you refuse to pander to bigots, you’re screwed.  McCain knew this; he changed his position on immigration to the one that most appealed to people who flip out if they hear someone speaking in Spanish in public.  But Christie’s gone and appointed a Muslim to the state bench of New Jersey, and the wingnuts are freaking out, sure this is a sign that sharia law is imminent.  Adam Serwer:

The case against Mohammed—if you care to tumble down that rabbit hole—is that he’s represented people accused of ties to terrorism. The “stealth jihad” crew, despite ostensibly being concerned about the secular rule of law being subverted by Islamic fundamentalists, don’t actually believe in the presumption of innocence, or in providing legal representation to Muslims accused of crimes.

Sohail Mohammed defended some men who were caught up in post-9/11 secret sweeps looking for potential terrorists, and most of them were innocent of the accusation of having ties to terrorism.  “Innocent” is a key word here when understanding how completely ridiculous the wingnut reaction is, though grown-ups have to also point out that even if they’re not innocent, they have a right to a legal defense, like anyone else accused of a crime.  Basically, the tattered remains of the once-powerful 101st Fighting Keyboardists don’t believe that there is a difference between “Muslim” and “terrorist”. 

So now, according to the warbloggers, New Jersey is about to turn into Iran.

  – In a widely linked post, “Governor Christie’s Dirty Islamist Ties,” blogger Daniel Greenfield writes that “New Jersey, the Garden State, has just taken its first step toward becoming the Sharia State,” and criticized Christie for being “willing to stand up to the teacher’s union, but not to the terrorist’s union.”

  – Hate blogger Pamela Gellar, in a post titled “Governor Christie’s Hamas Pick for Superior Judgeship,” declared Christie’s political career over: “Governor Christie looked and sounded like he could be presidential. He’s not. He’s in bed with the enemy. All the other stuff doesn’t matter if you don’t have your freedom.”

  – At Commentary magazine, Jonathan S. Tobin wrote a post about Christie’s “troubling appointment,” and charged that Christie’s “appointment of Sohail Mohammed to the court shows that his judgment on the issue of support for terrorism is highly questionable.”

  – The Investigative Project on Terrorism warned Christie’s appointment of an “Islamist” to a judgeship “betrays either naivete or calculation. Either is troubling.”

  – PowerLine blog took extra pains to note that “The attorney’s name is Mohammed, first name Sohail — Sohail Mohammed.”

I, for one, cannot wait for the farmer’s market to have the crescents to indicate which tomatoes are sharia tomatoes.  All that radical juiciness!

I think it’s time to start a Republican nomination index.  Measure all the potential candidates against each other, see who is ahead which week, etc.  My money is still on Christie getting it, but this has weakened the case, and I feel Pawlenty is now ahead.  But watch out for dark horse Huckabee.

Who should be on such an index?  Maybe creating a graphic for it would be a good idea.

With the recent TSA controversy, many right wingers who got full of themselves as warriors for liberty and justice, fighting the battle for white people’s civil rights to demand that only other people get man-handled at airport security.  They would prove that they totally love liberty, and all that Tea Party shit was about revolution, not about them wishing that they could live when women couldn’t vote and slavery was legal.  The only problem with this is that liberals were there first—-all these freedom fighters who wanted to complain and perhaps sue had to go to the ACLU, that organization they usually condemn with all their liberty-loving ways.  Liberals were there first, they believe those rights belong to everyone, they are always fighting for them no matter who is President, and they tend to care about civil liberties even when Fox News isn’t pointing their nose in a certain direction.  Which means that even with the TSA uproar in their pockets, conservatives really sound stupid when they wail about liberty, since they’re usually the people pushing back against liberals of various stripes who actually fight for it. 

But that doesn’t mean that they’re going to give up, oh no!  They are simply going to whip out the weapon they always whip out, which is being full of shit.  Mission: accuse liberals of doing what you yourself are doing, and hope that the lie gets legs. 

Exhibit #1, Ross Douthat, liar extraordinaire.

Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been president when the Transportation Security Administration decided to let Thanksgiving travelers choose between exposing their nether regions to a body scanner or enduring a private security massage. Democrats would have been outraged at yet another Bush-era assault on civil liberties. Liberal pundits would have outdone one another comparing the T.S.A. to this or that police state. (“In an outrage worthy of Enver Hoxha’s Albania ...”) And Republicans would have leaped to the Bush administration’s defense, while accusing liberals of going soft on terrorism.

But Barack Obama is our president instead, so the body-scanner debate played out rather differently. True, some conservatives invoked 9/11 to defend the T.S.A., and some liberals denounced the measures as an affront to American liberties. Such ideological consistency, though, was the exception; mostly, the Bush-era script was read in reverse. It was the populist right that raged against body scans, and the Republican Party that moved briskly to exploit the furor. It was a Democratic administration that labored to justify the intrusive procedures, and the liberal commentariat that leaped to their defense.

Except, as the sleazy little liar knows very well, most liberal commentators did not leap to the defense of the Obama administration.  On the contrary, this became one more issue where the Obama administration found itself at odds with its liberal/progressive base.  Douthat’s examples aren’t typical.  More typical is the ACLU’s reaction.  Or Glenn Greenwald’s.  Or Chris Hayes and Adam Serwer claiming they’re on team “don’t touch my junk”. Even the Ames and Levine piece that was rightly criticized for spending time attacking citizen activists instead of focusing their guns strictly on big money people?  Well, in that piece they declare that they’re against the TSA protocols. 

Douthat is trying to conflate liberals with Democrats, to create a false equivalence because you can more easily equate conservatives with Republicans.  He needs for people to believe that liberals are infantile culture warriors like conservatives are, because then conservatives “get” to be infantile culture warriors.  The people who benefit when the standard of discourse is lowered are conservatives, and Douthat knows this, so he’s doing his part.  But of course, he’s lying.  He’s not wrong that liberal outrage would be turned up if this happened under Bush—-human nature and all—-but only by a decibel point.  For conservatives, that it’s under Obama means it’s turned up to 11, as it were, and if it was under Bush, it would be exactly like it was before, occasional grousing that they don’t racially profile.  And even that would be blamed on liberals, as it was before.  Meanwhile, liberal outrage would be even more muted by quisling Democrats who don’t want to seem “soft on terror”.  How do I know all this?  Well, it’s not like the TSA wasn’t up in your business before the Obama administration, and so I have actual real world evidence of how people react.  And the evidence shows that liberal outrage has grown in volume right along with the invasiveness of the procedures.  It’s conservative outrage that’s dependent on who is President.  It’s conservatives who need their outrage fueled by ridiculous partisan lies, such as the one floating around about how Muslim women are exempted. 

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Why is all this happening with the TSA searches?  Why now? It’s a good question.  There’s some confusion about whether or not the body scan or the invasive pat downs are separate issues, which is giving Will Saletan an excuse to say that people should just acquiesce to the scanner and stop throwing fits. But the problem is that they escalated the amount of groping you have to endure if you say you don’t want to be scanned.  Plus, there’s a problem with framing this as a choice, as Lindsay notes.

Saletan purports to be an expert on applied ethics, yet he is blind to the sexualized coercion implicit in the “choice” between allowing a stranger in another room to see your naked body vs. having your junk touched.

She expresses a concern that a National Opt-Out Day would be used not to stop the searches, but to privatize the searches.  That’s a distinct possibility, but I think it’s true regardless of how people protest.  If opt-out days actually are organized effectively, they can be used as protests against whoever the hell is groping people in airports, so I’m coming around to the idea that it might be a good idea.  My main concern is that opt-outers will be seen by non-opting-out passengers as the enemy, and the point of the protest could be lost.  But the problem of backlash is true of any protest.

Anyway, more Lindsay:

Ostensibly giving passengers a choice between a scan and a pat-down makes the invasion of privacy seem more acceptable. It gives the passenger the illusion of control. We’re so busy playing “scan or grope?” that we forget to ask why we’re paying for scanners the TSA can’t even justify with a cost-benefit analysis.

This is the way it works.  Invasions of basic privacy are tied to “choice”, to make it easier for people to blame the victim.  You’re seeing this in action here with some people saying, “Well, you don’t have to fly,” and certainly with the “choice” between the scanner and the groping.  But, as Lindsay explains, that doesn’t quite work, since sometimes you’re groped after the scan, and some airports don’t have scanners, making the grope mandatory.  The “you don’t have to fly” thing is also bullshit, but it’s precisely the kind of bullshit women have been putting up with for millenia when it comes to restraints put on our freedom of movement and association.  If you get raped, well, it was your choice to go out without supervision/and drink/wearing that.  Obviously, restrictions on woman’s access to abortion and contraception are justified by saying you had the choice to keep your legs shut.  And so on.  This is why “women’s issues” are inseparable from police state issues, or letting a bunch of assholes work as a voluntary police abuse force of rapists.

So why now?  There’s another reason for the false choice.  Lindsay again:

My theory is that the agency wants to bully people into submitting to their very expensive and unpopular new toys…..

The new body search procedure seems designed to make the scanners look attractive by comparison.

When you tell people, get the scan or we’ll grab your genitals, you’ll take the former.  Why is it so important that people take the former?  To save time, for one, which is why the protest being suggested is to jam up the works by having people in large groups demand the pat down.  But I suspect there’s another reason, as well.  (Via.)

The companies with multimillion-dollar contracts to supply American airports with body-scanning machines more than doubled their spending on lobbying in the past five years and hired several high-profile former government officials to advance their causes in Washington, government records show.

L-3 Communications, which has sold $39.7 million worth of the machines to the federal government, spent $4.3 million trying to influence Congress and federal agencies during the first nine months of this year, up from $2.1 million in 2005, lobbying data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics show. Its lobbyists include Linda Daschle, a former Federal Aviation Administration official.

Rapiscan Systems, meanwhile, has spent $271,500 on lobbying so far this year, compared with $80,000 five years earlier. It has faced criticism for hiring Michael Chertoff, the former Homeland Security secretary, last year. Chertoff has been a prominent proponent of using scanners to foil terrorism. The government has spent $41.2 million with Rapiscan.

You know you’ve fucked with privileged people when USA Today suddenly starts engaging in the investigative journalism of government corruption that you usually only find in places like The Nation.

Point is, there’s a lot of money to be made by selling scanners to airports.  And there’s a revolving door between people who work in high levels of government and those profiting off selling these devices.  It’s in the financial interest of these corporations that are lobbying the hell out of this to have you told that you use their products or you have your junk touched. 

Yep, we seem to have reached that stage of capitalism where sexual abuse is being used as a threat to get people (taxpayers in this case) to spend money to pad corporate profits. I wonder, once wingnut America figures that one out, if they’ll calm down with the outrage?  I mean, the free market is why you have to submit to the groping!  Suggesting your privacy comes before their profits is just as good as saying that you’re a dirty commie, didn’t you know?

Due to traveling, I haven’t had much time to comment on the uproar over the TSA upping the game on security theater, to the point where people who are generally supportive of security theater—-aka, conservatives—-are getting upset.  So upset, in fact, that some of the dumber ones were taunting me over Twitter, having convinced themselves that I support the pat downs, on the grounds that I’m obviously Satan.  Of course, grown adults realize that someone like myself who wrote an entire chapter in my book denouncing security theater is unlikely to suddenly think that penis-fondling at the gate is great.  My main objection to conservatives getting involved is that they’re mostly acting out of racism—-they aren’t upset at junk touching, per se.  They just think the junk fondled should be excused if it passes some modern paper bag test, except the paper bag should be super white. 

Since I did my time in security lines this weekend, you may be wondering if I saw anything out of the ordinary.  Answer: no.  By the way, the choice between scanners and searches isn’t anything new.  I was pulled for a random search in El Paso in August, and I chose the full body scan, because I’ve been patted down with the old procedures before, and if you’re a woman you still feel pretty molested by that.  The shift that’s created all the anger is that the procedures have gotten invasive to the point where men might feel molested.  Don’t fuck with the privileged, man.  The procedures already had a heightened humiliation factor for women, which I’ve experienced myself*, but it took making white men feel like women and people of color often do for this to be pushed into the next zone of full blown anger.

This makes me want to join in the outrage, with concerns that the TSA is simply going to readjust the protocols to the standards set by conservatives flipping out—-which is to say, if you do it to women and non-white men, okay, but leave the white guys alone.  Of course, you could argue effectively that this is a good first step.  If they simply introduce discrimination into the system, you can sue and then it brings a complete end to the assaulting searches.  But what I worry about is that rarely do people introducing discrimination into the system do it in a straightforward manner that makes them vulnerable to lawsuit.  Instead, a bunch of complex rules evolve that just so happen to have the desired results, where white guys get a pass but no one else does. Then they get to have their cake (creating unnecessary security theater to cow the populace) while eating it too (keeping the most privileged out of the loop so that the complaints go ignored by the mainstream media). 

Early signs show my concerns are valid.  For instance, the TSA allowed the pilot union to get an exemption for their staff, but disallowed this for the flight attendants.  This creates a nifty system where a predominantly male group doesn’t have to have the pat downs, but a predominantly female group does.  Now, I’m not saying women are being targeted because everyone enjoys groping women or anything.  I’m annoyed by the people who are acting like your average TSA agent is dying to touch your junk.  I’m saying that women are an easier target because they get less attention and empathy than men when they complain.  The fact that “don’t touch my junk!” has become the rallying cry shows how much male privilege is wrapped up in people’s understanding of why this is wrong.  Not that I’m saying junk-touching is good!  I’m saying no one deserves to have junk touched, even if they have junk—-as women do—-that tends not to be called “junk”. 

My understanding of the police state is such: it exists in order to increase government power and decrease civil liberties.  Highly theatrical security theater in particular functions to increase people’s tolerance of privacy invasions.  As such, it’s wise for those instituting a police state to prefer vulnerable victims over privileged ones.  Their first instinct when they’ve gone too far is not to roll back the invasions of privacy, but to find a way to make sure the people whose voices are heard aren’t affected, and therefore the complaints stop.  Notice that “keeping the public safe” plays no role in my understanding of this, because I seriously doubt that it does.  Most of these searches are more about “sending a message” than anything else. 

Of course, the pragmatic side of me says that even if the TSA just tries to rewrite the rules so that vulnerable people are getting the most invasive searches, you still have an opportunity to sue and bring the whole thing down.  And there’s a possibility that the TSA can’t find a way to stop the searches of white men without stopping the searches of everyone else.  (Yes, I’m aware many of the examples upsetting people are women.  I’m glad for that, but wonder if the pile-on would be as all-encompassing if it was only women feeling horribly humiliated.)  While I’m cynical that the outrage would stop the second the privileged decided that it was someone else’s problem, I’m super glad there is outrage.  It’s a reminder that the objections to civil liberties violations are a matter far beyond the way conservatives portray those objections when it’s someone else’s liberties at stake—-as some intellectual exercise instead of a serious humiliation for the targets. 

And hey, there’s always a possibility that we can use the anger about these TSA searches and start directing it to all the other ways the highly invasive police state works in our culture.  That would be awesome, even if it’s a long shot. 

*Mainly because certain items of women’s clothing were more of a problem, plus they touched your boobs if they did the pat down. And my feeling in terms of the old leg pat down is they might as well have touched my junk on the outside of my pants, they got so close.  Thank god I was wearing pants.

For today’s entry in the “it doesn’t matter how evil/stupid/intellectually dishonest it is, if it pisses off the liberals, it’s gold” genre, I bring you Tucker Carlson defending the nutbar-dominated Texas School Board for their particular spin on the “everyone let’s hate Muslims now” frenzy.  Some school board members are claiming, and this is so loony that I’m having trouble typing it, that the textbook industry is being taken over by a cabal of “Middle Easterners” that are using the textbooks to push Islam and denounce Christianity.  (Please no one tell them that there are even more religions than these two in the world; they’ll lose it completely.)  They claim that there’s bias against the Crusaders (!) and that the books spend more time detailing Islam than Christianity (probably because they assume the audience is familiar with Christianity).  To make it even worse, what little “evidence” they have is from textbooks that aren’t in use. 

Obviously, the real concern the members have is that boring old social studies textbooks that document world history might have factual information in them that might incline astute readers to wonder if Muslims aren’t human beings, or that Middle Eastern history is more complex than “a bunch of people sat in caves eating babies for thousands of years”, as right wingers might have you believe.  They may even learn disturbingly humanizing information about the cultural innovations and traditions of many Muslim countries that might incline them to be (gasp!) less racist.  After all, one of the most common habits of white supremacists it to pretend to be the member of a ill-defined tribe of white people that they claim invented pretty much everything.  That way, even though they themselves are dumb fucks, they can believe that they’re superior just by being a member of this distinguished tribe.  Learning that much of the Middle East was going through a cultural renaissance while Europe was still stuck in medieval thinking is the sort of information that can destabilize pat white supremacist beliefs about how Europeans are better at everything by virtue of genetics.  They may even learn why we call our number notation system “Arabic numerals”, or why their math class after history has that awfully Arabic-sounding name “algebra”. 

Anyway, reality, much less basic humanity, is no competition in Tucker Carlson’s eyes when there are liberals to piss off.  He claims that there’s “studies” showing that textbooks are promoting Islam and denouncing Christianity:

The whining about the Crusades is particularly egregious, because the concern here is that students are learning the truth.  And the truth is that Christians started it.  Right wingers want to nit pick and claim this number of casualties or that, and it’s all an attempt to distract from the larger, more important point, which is that European coalitions repeatedly invaded Muslim lands in order to conquer the Holy Land.  If the Christians had said, nah, we’re going to do our laundry instead, this wouldn’t have happened.  That those who were in the defensive crouch won a couple of battles doesn’t mean that they suddenly became the aggressors in this.  This is all dooking around in order to distract from basic realities.  In fact, I would argue that it’s a kind of denialism, much like Holocaust denialism, except that it doesn’t seem as awful because the events that the wingnuts are obsessing over denying happened so long ago. 

I’m not pointing this out to say that Christians are more or less bloodthirsty than Muslims.  I reject the term “bloodthirsty” when applied across the board to entire groups of people as a natural state of being.  Modern Christians didn’t conduct the Crusades any more than most Muslims support terrorism, and I don’t hold them responsible for them.  I don’t think a bunch of high school kids are going to read about the Crusades and think, “Oh my god, all modern Christians are evil people!” 

What this is about is a group of people who think the Crusades were a great thing and that we should still be fighting them, because they hate Muslims.  Full stop.  They want to rewrite history so that the Crusades seem more appealing in order to get more people to buy into that premise, because right now, most rational people tend to think of the Crusades and they think “unjust war of aggression”.  You know, the truth.  The wingnuts also have a side order of wanting to pretend that Muslim terrorists are soldiers in a battle that hasn’t ever really ended, and are just as much Crusaders as the medieval people who ransacked Jerusalem.  Never mind that there’s no reason to believe that the 9/11 terrorists were yelling, “Remember 1099!”, or that’s widespread support for that sentiment.  This is all about establishing the notion that we can engage in an endless war against various Middle Eastern countries, because we’ve always been at war with Islam.  It’s very “1984”.

Like Atrios, I feel both surprised that Cal Thomas went there and sadly ashamed that I was surprised.  And by “there”, I mean that Thomas has gone ahead and come out against the First Amendment.

We are doing a poor job of fighting the terrorists at home if we continue to allow Muslim immigrants, especially from Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, into America. We won’t win this war if we permit the uncontrolled construction of mosques, as well as Islamic schools, some of which already have sown the seeds from which future terrorists will be cultivated. We won’t win this war if we continue to permit the large-scale conversion to Islam of prison inmates, many of whom become radicalized and upon release enlist in al-Qaida’s army.

He then suggests that we model ourselves after Syria when it comes to monitoring imams and Muslim congregations.  No word, of course, on whether or not we should extend that surveillance to Christians, even though Christian terrorists are an ongoing problem.  Ask any abortion provider. 

Of course, because some moron will inevitably accuse me of wanting to monitor all Christians, I am not saying that.  It’s a violation of basic human rights and not a good use of limited resources to monitor everyone.  Which is to say that Thomas manages, in a couple of paragraphs, to come out against the Fourth Amendment that protects against unwarranted search and seizure, as well as the First Amendment, that protects the freedom of religion.  My point is simply to draw attention to the wild double standard here.  Thomas would revolt if you proposed putting the same restrictions on Christians that he would have put on Muslims.  Which means, once again, that he and people like him are motivated by delineating who is and isn’t a “real” American, and only extending rights to those people who pass their arbitrary, unconstitutional standards. 

I also want to draw attention to how unabashedly fascist Thomas is, in his use of the term “purging” to describe his proposal to scrub Muslims and presumed Muslims out of our society through immigration restrictions, harassment, preventing prisoners to convert, and disallowing Muslims to build houses of worship. If you suggested that Muslims be pushed into ghettos and had their movements controlled through the use of a badge system, I have little doubt that Thomas and his buddies would be all over that, too.  Of course, we had idiots showing up in comments here and claiming that Islam is an “ideology” and so the concerns about racism are misplaced, as if restricting people’s basic human rights based on a cultural/religious/ethnic identity is so easily bracketed off from previous and similar assaults on Jews, African-Americans, the Irish, etc.  If you don’t think so, ask yourself this: How do you think Thomas and his buddies intend to tell who is Muslim and who isn’t?  Do you think that someone who, like Barack Obama, had a Muslim parent but isn’t Muslim himself would count?  What about someone who isn’t really faithful, but does participate in family occasions and holidays?  What about people who hail from predominantly Muslim countries but aren’t Muslim?  The haters have already made it clear that they don’t distinguish between Al Qaeda and a thoroughly integrated Muslim community center like Park 51, and if anything, they find the latter more threatening because it exposes the lie that is their black and white worldview.  This is about creating an “us” and a “them”, and then scapegoating the “them”.  Truth and basic decency get in the way of that project.

By the way, if it wasn’t true before, it’s now true that the word “balance” has come to mean “right wing propaganda”.  A Maine newspaper ran a fairly pedestrian story about the end of Ramadan on September 11th, and the date gave the bigots their in for freaking out.  And the paper apologized for not having “balance”.  What do they mean by “balance”?  If you show Muslims doing things that threaten to make readers ponder the possibility that they’re human beings, are you obliged to balance that with a story declaring that they aren’t human beings? 

This just reinforces the theory that what is really sending wingnuts around the bend is the understanding that the vast majority of Muslims aren’t terrorists.  They’re harder to scapegoat if the majority of Americans realize that they’re not scary, monstrous, or even particularly different.  And it’s clear that it’s really, really important to wingnut America that Muslims are available as scapegoats.  So any story that is humanizing or informative causes the wingnuts to lose their shit.