In any case, it’s worth remembering that the idea that your daughter or whoever strikes you as your most inviolable kin is having a ‘nude’ picture taken of them is just nonsense. Whatever else you can say about the backscatter scans, they usually reveal about as much as you do walking around the pool in a tight bathing suit. (Note: A number of the more revealing ‘backscatter’ pics you find on Google are actually fakes.) Of all the issues I’ve seen raised in this story, the invasiveness of the backscatter imaging strikes me as by far the weakest. And a poll out today shows that the public overwhelming approves of the use of the scanners as a tool to combat airliner terrorism. The pat-downs are another matter. And I’ve heard enough to make me wonder about the longterm risks of repeated exposure to these scans.

Next up was a clip from Mike Huckabee in a really gutter-minded, scurrilous voice daring President Obama to take his wife and two daughters to National Airport and have them get an aggressive pat-down in full view of the public if he wants ‘our’ wives and daughters to submit to the same. The mix of race and sex and populist demagoguery packed into Huckabee’s verbal slash was enough to bring you back to one of a hundred or a thousand rants below the Mason-Dixon line fifty or sixty or seventy years ago.