Nine out of 14 articles that my Google Alert turned up on the TSA last night concern the agency’s claim that it may magnanimously exempt our grandparents from its sexual assault at airports. Sometimes. If the goons are in a good mood and have someone younger to grope. At 4 airports (though expanding to others if it “succeeds,” which we’ll assume means all those terrorists on Social Security stay put in their nursing homes rather than avail themselves of this loophole in the TSA’s security theater). Heck, TSA will even allow — the operative word for tyranny — seniors to retain their shoes and “light jackets.”
Naturally, the corporate media is frothing over this giddy largesse. Never mind that the TSA has completely and senselessly reversed course after a decade of insisting that everyone in an airport could be a terrorist and so must submit to humiliating, unconstitutional searches (everyone, that is, except the actual terrorists in blue shirts and filthy gloves). Never mind that there is absolutely no rational for drawing this line in the sand at 75 years of age instead of 65, 60, or even 50 (Where’s AARP when you need ‘em?). The media is obsessively impressed with the Gestapo’s newfound mercy.
To the point that it has completely dropped the very embarrassing story in which “scientist and blogger Jonathan Corbett” proved that the porno-scanners do not and cannot work.
Though the TSA usually hypes in advance any of its concessions to the public’s outrage, it never so much as peeped about this upcoming change in “protocol.” None of its customary propaganda and PR, no spokesliars blathering to their collaborators in the press. It’s almost as if the TSA’s Head Cheese, John “The Pervert” Pistole, mused to his henchmen, “Hmmm. How we gonna deflect attention away from our corruption in buying hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Chertoff’s porno-scanners when we knew they’re bogus? ‘Cause, dammit, our intimidation of reporters covering that little sh** Corbett ain’t workin’…”
10:02 am on March 15, 2012
