Smackdown

Monday 29 November 2010 - Filed under Dumbassery + Journalism + War on Terror

Nice smackdown, Radley. Well done indeed. Radley Balko in rebuttal of The Nation’s libertarian blaming piece about the backlash against the TSA:

As Matt Welch has pointed out, if the accusation that anti-TSA backlash has a partisan aftertaste were directed at conservatives, vanden Heuvel would have a point. But it isn’t. Her awkwardly-structured hedge is specifically directed at libertarians. (The Ames/Levine follow-up post linked to this site, and named the Reason Foundation’s Bob Poole as part of the conspiracy.) Thing is, vanden Heuvel is factually and provably wrong.

A vanden Heuvel education might start with our February 2004 cover story, titled “Dominate. Intimidate. Control. The sorry record of the Transportation Security Administration.” She could continue with this 2007 cover story warning of the privacy implications of emerging search technologies. For further reading, a quick search of our archives turns up dozens of Bush-era TSA articles and blog posts. There are far too many to list them all, but she could get reading here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Of course, Reason isn’t the only libertarian outfit around. Let’s move on to the also Koch-funded Cato Institute. Here’s a white paper Cato published devoted solely to documenting Bush’s contempt for the Constitution, much of which addresses the security state. Or check here for countless studies and opinion pieces critical of Bush’s DHS, TSA, and counter-terrorism policy.

2010-11-29  »  madlibertarianguy