From Popehat, on the federal gropefest:
The purpose of Security Theater is not only to prevent actual security threats. The purpose of Security Theater is to convince us that the government can do something and is doing something, and most importantly to make us accept “unquestioning compliance†with government as an American value. The purpose of Security Theater is to normalize submission. But “unquestioning compliance†is not an American value.
And he continues:
Throughout my career — both as a prosecutor and as a defense attorney — I’ve observed a consistent inverse relationship: the more petty a government officer’s authority, the more that officer will feel a need to swagger and demand that you RESPECT HIS AUTHORITAH. Your average FBI agent might search your house based on a crappy perjured warrant, invade your attorney-client emails, and flush your life down the toilet by lying on the stand at your mail fraud trial. But he doesn’t feel a need to vogue and posture to prove anything in the process. He’s the FBI. But God above help you when you run into the guy with a badge from some obscure and puny government agency with a narrow fiefdom. He and his Napoleon syndrome have got something to prove.
Read the whole thing.
100% wrong. Exhibit A: President Obama is the most powerful man in the world. His pettiness is restrained only by the limits on his time and attention, you dangerous bitter hateful backward slurpee-drinking easily-led tea bagger.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
-H. L. Mencken
There’s this thing I don’t understand, that keeps on getting brought up in comments to articles like the one that Sebastian linked to. People keep on saying things like “flying is a privilege”, or “driving is a privilege”. What are these “privileges”, and where are they listed in the Constitution?
It seems to me that everyone has forgotten the 9th Amendment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.