A Junk Grab Too Far:
Well, welcome to the privacy party, motherfuckers. Come on in to the constitutional protections rave. What took you so long to get here? Oh, yeah. Holding people indefinitely without charges? Who the fuck cares. Wiretapping Americans without a warrant? Oh, blow us. Torturing confessions out of innocent people? Sometimes ya gotta spill a little blood to make security stew. Strangers looking at your little dicks for no reason other than you bought a plane ticket? Oh, shit, that's an outrage akin to raping Mother Theresa's corpse with her own femur.
Yep, all it took for some of the citizens of this country to actually make a stink about civil rights was a black president, a Democratic-controlled Department of Homeland Security, and the fear that barely-trained, underpaid airport security people will see what your Mama's tits look like in a government-ordered x-ray body scan. Or, even worse, that if you refuse having your dick or slit on display, you'll get an "enhanced pat down," as it's being called, just like the extra-special interrogation techniques used at Gitmo or a special new cereal, like corn flakes but now with nuts.
But, you may ask, what has changed about our attitude towards our safety that right wingers would all of a sudden get upset about the government treating us all like criminals and not citizens? Good god, don't you understand that you must have your taint fingered by a TSA agent because you might be keeping a derringer under your scrotum? You must allow your infant daughter to have her vagina probed because you might have bred her specifically to be a baby bomb. It's what al-Qaeda would do.
While the right wants to blame President Obama, Janet Napolitano, or, fer fuck's sake, George Soros for all of this, remember that the testing of body scanners at airports and the implementation of widespread use began during the Bush administration. Yep, something else we can conveniently forget about that bastard. The Rapiscan backscatters (a shitty name) were first put into use in 2005: "Homeland Security has not identified the airports that will test backscatters. More than a dozen have been selected to test various new technologies." The first tests were done in Orlando in 2002 (the machines had been used in England already). In fact, discussions of the use of body scanners at airports went back to October 2001, according to the Washington Post then. Yup - it was Bush who wanted to see some bush. The enhanced pat-down is a new procedure, but you can bet the study on how to do it began before Janet Napolitano stepped foot in the HSA office.
Of course, if something idiotic and vaguely related to sex is occurring, the repressed right is gonna get all fucktarded about it. Peter LaBarbara of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (motto: "Yes, this organization actually exists") is afraid that the gays will get off on fondling people of the same sex: "The reality is, most traveling men would not want Barney Frank to pat them down at the airport security checkpoint...Neither would it be fair to assign Ellen DeGeneres to pat down female travelers." Yes, because women would much prefer to have Angelina Jolie finger their labia because that's not homoerotic at all. Seriously, is there any issue that the homophobic right can't contort to fit their demonizing agenda?
But topping the list of creepy shit is the creepy shithead himself, Rush Limbaugh. On his radio show yesterday, Limbaugh mused on what one might be able to tell from the x-rays: "Will these scans be able to tell whether or not a woman's had an abortion? And if so, will these naked body scans be able to tell how many?" He continued, "A woman has breast implants, will this be known? How large? Will we be able to tell if a woman has had an abortion or a few?"
Limbaugh would not let it go. He had a caller on the phone and asked, "Can you tell if anybody's had an abortion...if they've had breast implants?" When the woman said that you couldn't tell about the abortion, Limbaugh concluded the segment by saying, "Of course piercings you're gonna be able to see...If they find a metal object, did you say down there like a piercing, what are they gonna do? Well, I don't know, I'm not a trained agent. I don't know what I would do if I found a metal piercing on a scanner. I don't know what I would do." How filthy do you feel right now thinking about Rush Limbaugh looking at your clit post?
Oh, good Americans, if you submit and submit and submit to authority, authority is going to keep making you submit more. The point here is that we shouldn't have gotten to this point. We shouldn't have allowed them to think they could do this. Now, you can avoid taking JetBlue to visit your sister at Thanksgiving or you can submit. Again.
Tell you what, though. If the Rude Pundit is told to go through the scan when he flies next, he'll do it. But he'll make sure that the middle fingers on both of his hands are proudly pointing up. That won't be for the TSA personnel who are, indeed, just doing their jobs, most of them as best they can. It's for the policy makers. And it's for the rest of you assholes who got us here, terrorists all.