In the old days, if you want to get on an airplane, you just buy a ticket and get in the plane!
Now, you have to go through all sorts of inspections. You get inspected to make sure you got no sharp objects because the 9/11 hijackers threatened passengers and airline staff with box cutters. Your shoe get inspected because Richard Reid tried to blow up an explosive under his shoe! You can't bring certain liquids because someone tried to blow up a plane using liquid explosives.
But now that someone tried to blow up a plane by lighting liquid explosives that he hid in his underwear, guess what? We got to go through a scanner that see what's under our clothes.
You can still opt-out of that, but that means you have to allow a TSA worker to pat you down! Ewwwww! I'd rather just go through the scanner rather than have some authority person touching all over me!
Some far-right conservatives are outraged at President Obama over this! Yet, when Bush was president, those same far-right conservatives were mocking anyone who didn't like airport security policies! Very hypocritical!
Well not all conservative pundits showed such hypocrisy. For example, Jonah Goldberg is a well-known right-wing pundit, but he refuse to play the "blame it all on the Democrat" game
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/jonah112510.php3
Obviously, the first people to blame for this mess are the murderers. Without them, flying wouldn't be the soul-killing experience it is.
(skipped paragraphs)
But Obama is not to blame. Osama bin Laden is.
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2) Profiling and Privacy Invasions
Arnold Ahlert on the other hand, is typical of what I consider "Conservative Correctness". Meaning, he says a bunch of far-right cliches and gets bent of shape if you don't automatically fall for such cliches. Pay close attention to what I highlighted and notice a pattern!
Americans, quite rightly, are outraged by such an unseemly invasion of one's personal space. Not merely because such an invasion itself is uncomfortable and best and demeaning at worst, but because government-enforced gropes and peeps are the triumph of political correctness over common sense and common decency. Even more importantly, the ultimate destination of political correctness itself is also revealed: American airports are well on their way to becoming de facto totalitarian states.
Such an assessment is no longer arguable. When the state commands the power to subject citizens to a full-body search without the slightest concern for reasonable suspicion or probable cause, they are effectively obliterating one of the bedrock principals of our Constitution, aka the presumption of innocence. They do this because political correctness demands a subjugation of reality to a preconceived — and utterly misguided — notion of "fairness."
[Pablo's note: so that guy sounds like he hates government bullying airplane passengers, but pay attention to his statements that I'll highlight in this color]
In other words, despite over three decades of terrorist attacks perpetrated almost exclusively by Muslims, and of those Muslims, a subset of males between the ages of 17 and 45, government is determined to remain "equally suspicious" of everybody. Thus, grandmothers and four year olds are compelled to submit in equal proportions, lest charges of "Islamophobia" or "bigotry" and the inevitable litigation those charges would engender arise.
Notice a pattern. Look at the colors I highlighted the statements with! He wants government to respect HIS rights, but not of those who "look Muslims"
Many with the Conservative Correctness like yell slogans like "Live Free or Die", "Get Big Government Off Our Backs", and complain about an intrusive government that invades our privacy. But, yet many of those same people demand that government single out certain people for special scrutiny and privacy invasions if those people "look Middle Eastern". The mentality of many in the Conservative Correctness Crowd is "No Government Intrusions for the White Person, Tons of Government Intrusions for the Brown Person"
This "profile anyone if they look Muslim" is so lame, because Muslims aren't a race, they're a religious group. Yes, Islam started in the Middle East, but it spread to other areas in the world, to people who don't even look Arab. And some Arabs aren't even Muslims, some are Christians or atheists!
That aside, some still scream for more racial profiling of those who look Middle Eastern. They scream "look what they did to us on 9/11!" But racially profiling Arabs would NOT have stop the underpants bomber, because he did NOT look Middle Eastern! He was a very dark-skinned man from Nigeria!
More examples of terrorist actions involving people who would NEVER got caught if our security policy is "profile the Arabs" or "profile those from Muslim lands"
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/charen112610.php3
Colleen Renee LaRose, aka Jihad Jane, and Jamie Paulin-Ramirez were both blond, blue-eyed American converts to Islam who were arrested in October 2009 in Ireland and charged with plotting to kill a Swedish cartoonist who had drawn Mohammad's head on the body of a dog.
In 1972, members of the Japanese Red Army opened fire in Tel Aviv's airport, killing 24 people. In 1986, a pregnant Irish woman was attempting to fly from Heathrow to Tel Aviv. A check of her luggage revealed that her fiance, a Palestinian, had planted Semtex explosive in her carry-on bag. If not discovered, it would have brought down the plane. In the early 1980s, a German national recently released from prison was befriended by Palestinians. His new friends bought him an airline ticket to Tel Aviv. He thought he was smuggling drugs. But in fact, his bags contained 10 pounds of explosives.
Yes, most aspiring airline suicide bombers are young Muslim men. But not all of them are from the 14 countries listed by the Obama administration. Richard Reid was British. Zacarias Moussaoui was French. One of the terrorists who hijacked an Air France jet in the 1970s on behalf of the Palestinians was a German woman. The suicide bombers who struck the Moscow subway in March were women. And women suicide bombers have struck at checkpoints in the West Bank.
The whole point is, even though the 9/11 hijackers were of Arab ancestry, other people who are mad at the world, could blow stuff up, for whatever reason they can claim. It doesn't have to be related to Islam! The Oklahoma City bomber and the Columbine killers were definitely NOT Arabs, and definitely NOT Muslims, but they still caused mass murder and a national trauma. They might not have blown up an airplane, but don't be surprised if someone of their cultural background and who share similar grievances might want to blow up an airplane.
Either way, it wouldn't matter if I was killed by a Middle Eastern, European or whatever! Either way, I still would be dead!
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3) Juan Williams controversy
Juan Williams, who used to be a reporter with National Public Radio (NPR), was fired from NPR earlier this year, for mentioning that he gets nervous when he sees someone "in Muslim garb" while riding an airplane!
Williams later emphasized that it is still no excuse to be discriminating against people who are Muslims or who are of Middle Eastern ancestry.
But the damage was done!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/21/AR2010102101474_pf.html
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Some right-wing conservatives were saying stuff like "how dare NPR fire him for saying what many people think".
Their mentality is that whole "Arabs attacked us on 9/11, so I'm nervous when I see them on an airplane" nonsense
But an Arab/Mexican/African/etc could EASILY say something like this: "I grew up in a white neighborhood, got bullied by big white kids, and I still get nervous when I see a group of young white males".
Would the far-right conservatives defend that person the same way they defended Juan Williams for admitting being nervous while "seeing Muslims on a plane"?
OFF COURSE NOT!
The Conservative Correctness Crowd would be ridiculing any non-white who expresses nervousness about seeing a group of young white males. Glenn Beck would be whining about that non-white person's "deep-seated hatred of white people". Michelle Maglalang Malkin would write a sarcastic editorial about person and mocking his grievances as a "sob story". And Ann Coulter would demand that non-white person to be racially profiled some more!
So yeah, the Conservative Correctness Crowd likes other ethnic groups to be mocked, racially profiled, and face privacy invasions, as long as it's not their ethnic group facing all that! Hypocrites!
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After the whole Juan Williams controversy, some right-wing conservatives were demanding the government stop funding NPR and PBS!
NPR and PBS are already mostly privately funded, though it still accepts government subsidises!
I do believe NPR and PBS should be totally privatized, but for a totally different reason from those Conservative Correctness Crowd!
Government shouldn't be owning any TV or radio stations. Government shouldn't be in charge of any journalism organization!
Jeff Jacoby made some following great points on the issue of government funding of NPR!
http://jewishworldreview.com/jeff/jacoby112410.php3
1. They aren't fair. Other radio stations and networks, from Air America to Clear Channel to Univision to Westwood One, must sink or swim in a competitive market. They survive only if listeners and advertisers value what they do. Uncle Sam doesn't keep them afloat with tens of millions of dollars annually in direct and indirect subsidies. If they can operate without corporate welfare, NPR can too.
2. They aren't appropriate. In a free society, especially one with a robust tradition of press freedom, the very idea of government-underwritten media should be anathema. When news organizations depend on largesse from the treasury, there is inevitably a price paid in objectivity, fairness, and journalistic independence.
3. They aren't necessary. NPR's partisans claim that public broadcasting provides valuable news and educational content that listeners can't get anywhere else. That may have been a plausible argument in 1970. It is utterly implausible today, when audio programming of every description can be found amid a vast and dizzying array of outlets: terrestrial and satellite radio, internet broadcasting, podcasts and audio downloads.
4. They aren't affordable. At a time of trillion-dollar federal deficits and a national debt of nearly $14 trillion, NPR's government subsidies cannot possibly be justified. All the more so when public broadcasting attracts a fortune in private funding, from the gifts of innumerable "listeners like you" to the $200 million bequeathed to NPR by the late Joan Kroc in 2003.
AMEN to all that!
