SECURITY LINE PAYBACK. To add onto the chilling story Scott relates below, when the Bush administration uses airport harassment as a way to punish critics of the president, they degrade the actual effectiveness of putting individuals on watch lists at all. The more folks -- both travelers and airport workers -- who believe the lists are constructed in an arbitrary and vindictive fashion, the less seriously the warnings will be taken, the more likely exceptions will be made. By using federal security as a form of payback for criticism, they create normalcy around assuming that heightened security measures are useless and even counterproductive, and so they render the security less effective. I bet it's sure fun to see the looks on liberal's faces when they have their luggage searched, though! --Ezra Klein
