Washington Post: Heroic Defender of the First Amendment

I've said this before, I've said it more than once, but Zod help us all because it bears repeating: Government cock will not suck itself. That's what a free and independent media is for.

Far too many American news outlets seriously believe this, if their editorial output is any indication. For example, check out this propaganda gem from the Washington Post, the newspaper that presents itself as the scourge-of-corrupt-government, Nixonsbane, exposer of the Watergate scandal, and now it publishes gushing feel-good stories about how TSA is "Using social media to improve airport security."

WaPo published the article -- a Valentine's day love letter to American freedom -- in conjunction with the "Partnership for public service," according to the subheadline. The story is a nauseating cheerleading routine praising the efforts of Lynn Dean, the propagandist who is paid very, very well (out of your tax dollars and mine) to praise the TSA and the freedom fingerbangs it regularly imposes on American fliers.

Dean, according to the story, is assistant to Gale Rossides, TSA's deputy administrator. Those of us who've made a point of following TSA crimes these past ten years will recognize Rossides as the odious author of the Christmas 2009 bathroom ban.

I wrote about it for the Guardian at the time:

[After discussing my unfortunate habit of forming kidney stones as readily as a teenage boy forms horny thoughts] So I must drink, which means I must go to the bathroom, yet the federal government – specifically Gale Rossides, the TSA administrator responsible for the Boxing Day flight restrictions – told me I couldn't do that because a wannabe terrorist set his thigh on fire during the last hour of a flight?

And that "last hour" of a flight could easily stretch out for two or more, if the plane falls into a holding pattern before landing. During that final hour, or two, or three, Rossides wanted passengers to keep their hands visible at all times, refrain from holding anything in their laps, never reach into their carry-on bags, and obey a variety of other humiliating and pointless regulations that would make great spirit-breakers for serial-killer inmates in a supermax prison, but do nothing to stop a prepared terrorist from damaging a plane. ... how did America go that wrong, where someone so prone to authoritarian overreaction got legal authority over any life form more advanced than toilet-bowl mold? Why wasn't anybody fired over this?

In retrospect, that was a silly question. When I wrote that column, I was furious over the odious ban, yet relieved to know it was rescinded two days later. I had no idea that in ten months the TSA would step further over the line and impose its mandatory molestation policies, and not back down this time: I can't fly unless I let some TSA twat squeeze my own (if you're a man, make that "You can't fly unless some TSA dick tugs on yours"). Which I refuse to do, thus I cannot fly.

I have been unable to find these links despite a 20-minute Google search-a-thon, but: back around the start of the Iraq war, I read anecdotes about Russian immigrants -- those who came of age in the Communist Soviet Union before moving here to the Land of the Free -- amazed by the overwhelming media support for our upcoming invasion of a sovereign nation: "How does that happen? In the USSR, the media always supported the government, because the media was the government. But why does it happen in the USA?"

At the time I did not know, because I was still naive enough to believe a different form of propaganda: "America is great in part because of a press free to expose evil, corruption and venality." But now I -- like everyone who can remember the days before the Iraq war -- am nine years older and nine years wiser, and cringe to recall my earlier naivete. Boy, is my face red! But that still beats "dripping white from tyrant bukkake." If Lynn Dean and Gale Rossides had an active working conscience, they would feel ashamed of what they are doing to their fellow Americans, as would the nameless editor who decided to praise them in the pages of the Washington Post.