The American Spectator's Bob Tyrrell issues a sincere mea culpa for the other day challenging those across this liberty-loving land increasingly upset with the TSA's new airport security line procedures.
But that's not what this is about. Rather, it's about a great line he uses to describe the Left's routine and numerous hypocrisies. To highlight their workaday phoniness, I, like many others, typically refer to them simply as Limousine Liberals. Another, older, but less used, moniker is Champagne Socialists.
Tyrell provides an altogether catchy new phrase when, after conceding that the lack of targeted profiling is the most serious shortcoming of the TSA's procedures, he let's loose with this: "This hang-up about profiling is at the root of our problem. It is a false piety practiced by the ancien régime."
"A false piety practised by the ancien régime." Just think of the number of liberal bromides that phrase would accurately capture.
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There are some elements of this TSA saga that strike me as the Right mimicking the Left's 1960s "question authority" mantra.... There's something juvenile about making "don't touch my junk" a battle cry for freedom, and there's something unrealistic about thinking we can apply the Israeli practices in the United States. I've read that there are some 35,000 flights everyday in the U.S., compared to 7,000 a day in Israel. Having been through the Israeli screening I can tell you it's invasive and time consuming, and frequently leads to delays in luggage arrivals . Al Qaeda is obsessed with bringing down airliners, and they've already demonstrated that one can successfully kill people with weapons concealed where the sun don't shine. I'm not a fan of the nanny state, but these TSA policies strike me as a reasonable exercise of the government's national security powers, while the reaction to it would make Abbie Hoffman proud.
ReplyDeleteCheck out my post of a few day ago ("A Clearer Picture Maybe") where I kinda/sorta agree with you, but with an important exception. I suspect that the uproar from the Right is not so much about the invasiveness of the new procedures as it is about their increasingly arbitrary and capricious nature. A nature that appears all the more arbitrary and capricious when administered by those from the Left who are typically hyper-sensitive about the 4th and 5th Amendment rights of, well, everyone, but most especially of criminals and terrorists if, that is, they happen to have a skin color other than white and practice a religion other than Christianity.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, the reactions of the Right strike me as genuinely spontaneous, whether misguided or not. Those of the Left,by comparison, seem for the most part manufactured by the likes of people like, well, Abbie Hoffman.
Hope you're enjoying a great Thanksgiving weekend.