A business-class patdown

The Middle, so long as it was struggling for power, had always made use of such terms as freedom, justice, and fraternity.

George Orwell, 1984.

Via Kevin Drum, via Andrew Sullivan, we find this:

Passengers are not being hauled out of their homes or tortured or placed in prison without access to legal counsel — things that actually have happened to American citizens in recent years in the name of security. Nor are people being turned away from the polls or told they can’t unionize or being beaten by police officers — also things that have happened to real live Americans in recent years. What’s going on in the airports is simply a form of government humiliation that has hit the professional class.

I have been similarly struck by the outrage attendant on the TSA’s new airport-terminal peep-shows. The last decade has been a tragedy show of civil liberties annulled, security intrusions justified on the vague specter of terrorism, and legal arguments that testicles may be crushed, not merely hazily photographed by a scanner. But since the invitees to these more serious patdowns have rarely paid $300 for the privilege, we have heard comparatively little of it.