It's the latest Talking Point in The War Against Terror (TWAT), so all the Reight-Wingers are pushing it--but Krauthammer's version is just so deliciously silly. He even manages to fit the word "backward" into his own illogic...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/28/AR2005072801786.htmlThis is not a stereotype. It is a simple statistical fact. Yes, you have your shoe-bomber, a mixed-race Muslim convert, who would not fit the profile. But the overwhelming odds are that the guy bent on blowing up your train traces his origins to the Islamic belt stretching from Mauritania to Indonesia.
Yet we recoil from concentrating bag checks on men who might fit this description. Well, if that is impossible for us to do, then let's work backward. Eliminate classes of people who are obviously not suspects.
We could start with a little age pruning -- no one under, say, 13, and no one over, say, 60. Then we could exempt whole ethnic populations, a list that could immediately start with Hispanics, Scandinavians and East Asians. Then we could have a huge saving, a 50 percent elimination of waste, by giving a pass to women, except perhaps the most fidgety, sweaty, suspicious-looking, overcoat-wearing, knapsack-bearing young woman, to be identified by the presiding officer.
You object that with these shortcuts, we might not catch everybody. True. But how many do we catch now with the billions spent patting down grandmothers from Poughkeepsie?
You object that either plan -- giving special scrutiny to young Islamic men, or, more sensitively, just eliminating certain demographic categories from scrutiny -- will simply encourage the jihadists to start recruiting elderly Norwegian women.
In the end, it's the same selfish bullshit:
I'm White, lemme through. But work that dark feller over real good while I stand and watch and laugh.And he wonders why they want to blow us up...
Outside The Tent deals with more from John Leo, another Reight-Wingnut at Town Hall.
http://www.outsidethetent.com/wp/archives/search-muslims-not-baptists/Mayor Michael Bloomberg, normally a sane fellow, has ordered that the searches be entirely random, to avoid singling out any one ethnic or religious group. So if someone fits the suicide bomber profile—young Muslim male, short hair, recently shaved beard or mustache, smelling of flower water (a preparation for entering paradise)—the police must look away and search the nun or the Boy Scout behind him.
What utter nonsense. Yet so typical of the whole "White-People-Are-The-Ultimate-And-Sole-Victims" horseshit that is the soul of the NeoCon.