Hit me again, Stern Master

At last we know the source of the government’s failure to identify potential perpetrators of terrorist acts and stop them.

Labor unions.

It’s logical, you see. South Carolina senator Jim DeMint has been way ahead of the rest of us, demanding that Obama’s nominee to head the Transportation Security Administration, Erroll Southers, promise not to allow collective bargaining among TSA employees.

Without collective bargaining, DeMint explained, the TSA now has the ‘flexibility to make real-time decisions that allowed it to quickly improve security measures in response to this attempted attack’.

Of course, if the TSA had had a chief, that might have helped it ‘improve security measures’ too. But I digress, and meanwhile Senator DeMint is on a roll.

If organized labor got involved, he says, union bosses would have the power ‘to veto or delay future security improvements at our airports’. Whew, what a relief!

You gotta hand it to these Republican operatives—they’re shameless. Instead of worrying about whether someone might blame them for the fact that the TSA has been a headless horseman for a year due to DeMint’s anti-union crusade, they go right on the attack.

You have to scroll down to the 30th graf in news stories about DeMint’s obstructionism to see any hint of a robust counter-attack—from a lowly aide to Harry Reid, no less.

I’m constantly dumbfounded by the utter absence of political blood-lust on the Democratic side while their supposed opponents offer them platter after tray of juicy red meat to sink their fangs into.

Imagine if the sides had been reversed and Democrats had been holding up a Bush-era appointee to a security job just as an airplane bomber almost manages to blow up 200 people. Wouldn’t the White House have been out of the gate in seconds to point the finger at the offending legislator for getting in the way of executive power and ‘endangering American lives’?

But that would be asking Barack the Bipartisan to get angry for a moment.

The recently released Taylor Branch book based on conversations with Clinton hint at why the Republican/Democratic relationship is so consistently S&M. Branch relates how Clinton marveled at the wonderful antics of ‘old Jesse’ (Helms) and appreciated his political acumen—no matter how nefarious the outcome for the rest of us.

So it’s just a big game that you can shake your head at, if you’re a responsible Democrat, and laugh at how astutely demogogic your opponents are. No matter what the ultimate impact on the rest of us. The tea-baggers go crazy, call Obama a Nazi and bring guns; their targets look at all this and go ‘tut-tut’.