Randi Rhodes: Cashing-in on Terror

If you fly this Thanksgiving and start wondering how it got to the point where someone is ogling your junk on a scanner screen in a different room, you should know that the people who make the body scanners have doubled their lobbying expenditures over the past five years. How ironic—everyone can see right through what they’re doing! The people running the body scanner companies are almost as exposed as air travelers are.

Body scanner maker Rapiscan even hired former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff (pictured) last year. Michael Chertoff… how did we ever end up with a director of Homeland Security who looks that creepy in the first place? Chertoff looks like the host of a late night scary movie show on a local TV station. “Fright Theater,” with your host Michael “Chiller” Chertoff!

And while the body scanner companies are reaping a fortune, the workers at TSA are getting all the grief. They’re on the front line. Unfortunately for them, the front line is in my pants. It’s the TSA workers who have to come face to face with travelers’ frustrations. And face to face with their “junk” as well. Have a little sympathy with them. If you don’t like having your junk handled, just pause to think how much it would be to be on the other end of your junk. These people signed up for a job watching backpacks go through an x-ray machine, and suddenly their job description was changed to include giving genital massages. Poor TSA workers—they’ve gone from inspecting people’s laptops, to inspecting people’s laps. A lot of TSA employees are complaining that they’re being verbally abused while doing the pat-downs. I’m sure some of the people dishing out the verbal abuse are angry. And then there are people who just like to talk dirty when their junk is being handled. When faced with abuse, TSA employees are trained to turn the other cheek. And if that doesn’t work, they can always tell the passenger to turn the other cheek.

Incidentally, A survey shows that two-thirds of Americans support the use of full body scanners. That tells you one thing—at least two-thirds of Americans have no idea how bad they look naked. Happy Thanksgiving! Go ahead and have another piece of that pecan pie.

Today’s Homework | Discuss

Last night on Larry King, Barbara Bush pinned the now infamous jarred fetus on her housekeeper and "forgot" that she was pro-choice…