Okay, so I can’t say I’m thrilled about full body scans and pat-downs. It seems there are some safety and privacy concerns to be addressed before wide-spread implementation, and I know my ACLU purist friends will protest just as vehemently (albeit with actual principles and reasoned arguments behind them).

However, the right-wingers recent demagoguery of the issue — see www.drudgereport.com — is rich because they otherwise: hold up Israeli airport security as a model, don’t oppose water-boarding and warrant-less wire-tapping, and are generally just fine when its the rights of “others” being eroded. 

Now that THEY — in fact, US ALL — are being asked to give up some small amount of privacy in the name of safety and suddenly they raise civil liberty concerns? It seems the touting of shared sacrifice is really a one-way street.  (“Don’t tread on me, but feel free to trample the other guy.”)

They simply can’t have it both ways, or their boogey-straw-men won’t even have legs to stand on. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas put it this way: “A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left.”