My Washington Examiner column this week covers two developments last week that may make you somewhat less likely to “Give Thanks for the TSA” as former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen urged on National Review’s website.

The first is the viral video of a TSA agent at New Orleans airport giving the “freedom fondle” to a six-year-old girl. The second is Friday’s revelation that among the “behavioral indicators” TSA uses to scope out travelers who deserve extra manhandling is the “arrogant” expression of “contempt against airport passenger procedures.”

Because, clearly, making a scene on an airport security line is sound strategy for anyone trying to sneak a bomb onto a plane.

Is it possible that anyone with an IQ above room temperature buys that logic?
A lot of Al Qaeda terrorists are pretty dumb. But it seems doubtful that they’re that dumb.

The column looks at what our willingness to submit to this sort of thing says about “American Exceptionalism”:

There’s been a lot of talk lately about “American Exceptionalism,” and whether President Obama understands what makes America stand out among the family of nations.

I’ve always thought that what makes Americans exceptional is our ornery resistance to being bossed around….

Neoconservatives see America’s uniqueness as an excuse to bomb any country that looks at us crosswise. But the original idea was somewhat less aggressive. With “every spot of the old world… overrun with oppression,” America would be freedom’s home — an “asylum for mankind” — as Thomas Paine put it in Common Sense.

In the 1992 film adaptation of “Last of the Mohicans,” James Fenimore Cooper’s novel about the Seven Years War, there’s an exchange that illustrates American Exceptionalism at its best. An effete British officer berates the rough-hewn colonial “Hawkeye”: “You call yourself a loyal subject to the Crown?”

“Don’t call myself ‘subject’ to much at all,” Hawkeye replies.

You have to wonder how long that spirit can survive in a world where official federal policy requires you to stand by placidly while agents of the state run their rubber gloves under your innocent 6-year-old daughter’s waistband. And it’s far from clear that these procedures are even making us any safer.

‘Give Thanks for the TSA’? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Listening to NPR on the way into work, I twice heard a reporter refer to Meredith McGehee, a champion of (ahem) campaign finance reform, as a “good-government lobbyist.”

Got that?  If you disagree with McGehee’s lobbying agenda — if, say, you think campaign finance reform is an unconstitutional attempt by the Left to restrict political speech that they don’t like — then you are against making government better.

But did you catch the more subtle form of bias?  I maintain there is no such thing as good government. (Call it Cannon’s First Law of Politics.)  And I’m not alone.  ”Government, even in its best state,” wrote Thomas Paine in Common Sense, “is but a necessary evil.”  Not good.  Less evil than the alternative, to be sure.  But still, evil.  Others disagree.  The reporter, like many others and probably without even realizing it, took sides in that long-standing debate too.

Why Some People Think NPR Exhibits Bias is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Obama delivered a commencement speech at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on Saturday.

He called on all Americans “to maintain a basic level of civility in our public debate.”  Who could argue? Yet the president apparently believes that civility means protecting his policies from valid criticism.

He instructed graduates that “the practice of listening to opposing views is essential for effective citizenship.”  Right again.  But the civics lesson rings hollow coming from a president who falsely claimed there was “no disagreement” over his massive “stimulus” bill, and that opponents of his health care takeover offered no proposals of their own.

He explained, “what we should be asking is not whether we need ‘big government’ or a ‘small government,’ but how we can create a smarter and better government.”  Which is pretty much what every politician says when he wants big government and voters want small government.

Most troubling was this: “What troubles me is when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad.”  That remark reminded me of this passage from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense: “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.” And it has me thinking that our president, a former constitutional law professor, who just received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Michigan, really doesn’t get the American idea of government. At all.

Obama vs. Common Sense is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Thomas Paine, one of the fathers of American freedom, died almost unmourned 200 years ago today. Brendan O’Neill remembers him at BBC.com:

In January 1776 he published a short pamphlet that earned him the title The Father of the American Revolution.

Titled simply, Common Sense, the work has been described by the Pulitzer-winning historian Gordon S Wood as “the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire [American] revolutionary period”. It put the case for democracy, against the monarchy, and for American independence from British rule.

Lefties like Harvey Kaye, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, like to say

He put the case for political democracy AND social democracy, arguing in The Rights of Man that young people and the elderly should be afforded financial security by their governments. These welfare ideals are under attack right now, in our era of recession.

He has a point, though I suspect that Paine would think that the American welfare state has exceeded the sort of minimal provision for the poor that he had in mind. As for me, I rather like the fact that he proposed to execute any legislator who so much as proposed a bill to issue paper money and make it legal tender. A bit too strong, I concede. But a healthy understanding of what fiat money can do to people who work hard and save their money.

Find some of Thomas Paine’s best writings in The Libertarian Reader.

A Tip of the Hat to Tom Paine is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A while back I noted that the administration had helpfully developed a special symbol to brand its wonderful stimulus program.  The purpose is to ensure that the people will be eternally grateful and thus will reward the president with their votes, er, no, that would be partisan and run contrary to everything the new administration stands for.  The purpose is to educate people about what the government is doing on their behalf.

As one would expect, with a symbol so ridiculous have come some wonderful parodies.  Several focus on what is being done to the taxpayers.  There’s even a funny poster to go along with some other entries.

The strongest defense of individual liberty today is going to come from entrepreneurial activists around the country like these, who have harnessed the power of ridicule, not politicians on Capitol Hill who, after voting for bloated federal budgets for years, now claim to realize that government spending is a bad thing.  The latter are “the summer soldier and sunshine patriot” who Thomas Paine spoke of back in 1776.  It is up to the rest of us to carry the heaviest burden of the battle for liberty.  The the fight is worth it as the price of freedom always has been high.  As Paine noted in “The Crisis”:   “it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.”

The Stimulus Bill, Rebranded is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog