On TSA Groping – I Long for the Days of King George

Part of me wants to laugh at how this TSA Groping Scandal is playing out, and part of me wants to throw the bureaucrats who are behind this in jail.

This is an issue that crosses party and ideological lines, and my hope is that it will be one more thing that helps wake people up.

Say what you will about colonial America and English abuses of power – King George was never this bad.

Liberals – this is your thinking that got us here. Don’t tell me about Bush and Chertoff. I know they got this started. I know Chertoff is selling his naked body scanners and getting rich. But regardless of the faces behind it, this is Liberalism, or rather, as Mark Levin puts it, Statism. We have allowed the building up of this huge bureaucracy and we have empowered them because we wanted them to go after the rich and the corporations. Yes, this has been done by Republicans and Democrats. The Democrats have been in favor of doing it quickly. Republicans have wanted to do it slowly. But it has been done, nonetheless. And now we realize that they are turning from the corporations and turning on us. We conservatives knew all along that this would happen in one form or another. You can’t give people this much power and expect self-restraint in its exercise. It’s against human nature. But this is how this works. They demonize certain parts of the population, and you say, “Good. Get the rich. Get that guy over there.” So you give them power to do so. Then it gets to be your turn to be the target, and you can’t do anything about it.

They shoved the stimulus, the bailouts, and Obamacare down our throats. This much was okay with the Liberals. But now we see this same all-powerful bureaucracy ogling at our naked bodies and giving us what they themselves call “groin checks” and we realize that we are at their mercy. They have no inclination to change. And if you speak out as you suffer their indignities, the police will come and you will be treated like a common criminal.

It will be good that we’re going through this if it wakes us up. We have had too many people saying that a police state would never be possible in this country, and there is nothing to fear from government. But if they can get away with pulling our pants down and feeling us up, there will be nothing they can’t do. Yes, it’s good that we’re getting a taste of what a police state is like.

Channel 2 News in Chicago reports on the experience of 71-year-old Robert Perry, who has an artificial knee that set off the metal detector. They took him aside and asked him to remove his belt. He objected. They yelled at him, he says, to get the belt off. So he did. Then they patted down his leg and pulled his pants down in the process. Reporter Pam Zekman goes on:

“At that point, Perry was standing in his underwear, in public view. He asked to see a supervisor – that made things worse.”

Robert describes the supervisor’s comment thus: “She was yelling, I have power! I have power! I have power” He thumped his chest as he said this to illustrate the response of the supervisor. Check the clip yourself. You can hear about his experience from the 1:00 mark to the 2:02 mark.

She’s right. She does have the power to do this. The sad thing is, we gave it to her.

So how do you deal with these people? I hope this helps wake you up, America. We have empowered a massive bureaucracy. We have given unelected bureaucrats in places like the TSA, the EPA, the FCC, and on and on, power to make regulations like this and then to enforce them.

If the TSA were pursuing true security, I think the American people would cooperate. But those who think for themselves realize that they aren’t pursuing that. They aren’t looking for terrorists – they are looking for liquids, toothpaste, hair spray, pocket knives, and sometimes for things that they don’t even know. Mark Steyn calls it the bureaucratization of security.

I like how Charles Krauthammer puts it in his Friday column titled, “Don’t Touch My Junk:

“We pretend that we go through this nonsense as a small price paid to ensure the safety of air travel. Rubbish. This has nothing to do with safety – 95 percent of these inspections, searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary. The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling – when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known. So instead of seeking out terrorists, we seek out tubes of gel in stroller pouches.”

I created a post last Saturday on a history of this TSA abuse, which started with the federalization of the TSA. I got a comment from a guy named Mark who is promoting the boycotting of flying. I wrote then that he could go ahead and do that, but not to get his hopes up that Janet Napolitano or the head of the TSA would do anything. This administration is not a responsive administration. They don’t care if they throw people out of work, as they demonstrated with their Gulf oil drilling ban. They will ignore a protesting public, as they demonstrated in their response to the Town Hall rebellion over Obamacare. Obama could put an immediate stop to this, but he won’t.

Liberals are going to have a tough time, emotionally with this. They are emotionally invested in big government. Don’t tell me anything different – I know better. Check out the Government is Good blog – by liberal political science professor Dr. Douglas Amy of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. He has a post titled, The Case FOR Bureaucracy. This is typical Liberal thought.

People, the way to stop this is through the ballot box. I hope this is a big issue in the 2012 election.

I long for the good old days of King George. He was never THIS bad.

In the meantime, as I will come to face the choice of being ogled or groped, I think I’ll go for ogled. Thank you, sweet government, for giving me a choice. And I won’t talk back. But I am tempted to go through the line with a “Don’t Touch My Junk” t-shirt. In fact, I think I could recommend doing that. That would be a great uniform for “Opt-Out Day” next Wednesday.