After nearly a year of inactivity, the TMV Get A Life Club proudly inducts the ACLU into its ranks, offering it a highly coveted chair — actually, for this we’ll give it a sofa — for its reaction to President Barack Obama’s pat down joke.
Hailing the benefits of high-speed rail, the president jested that it would allow travelers to avoid being subject to the controversial airport pat-downs policy.
“Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail, which could allow you go places in half the time it takes to travel by car,” Obama said. “For some trips, it will be faster than flying – without the pat-down.”
Awkward laughter and a scattered applause followed as Obama smiled and chuckled.
Moments after the president made the remark, the American Civil Liberties Union fired out a Tweet that read: “President Obama makes funny about TSA pat-downs, but the violations of the Constitution are NO JOKE!”
It was accompanied by a link to a scathing report on the ACLU’s Web site, which noted complaints “from men, women and children who reported feeling humiliated and traumatized by these searches, and, in some cases, comparing their psychological impact to sexual assaults.”
But wait! Aren’t there a TON of pat down jokes on the Internet — done by comedians, writers, officials and people who might not normally make jokes? Wasn’t this the classic set up line for a joke? (“Pat down”…unpopular…awkward imagery)? Did even websites as totally dignified as TMV (don’t choke on your breakfast) even do a few posts on this that had some couldn’t resist jokes? Didn’t cartoonists have a field day?
If this is such a no-no as the Tweet suggests, does this mean the ACLU will now taking people off cases to lecture websites, comedians, officials that it is now taboo to joke about pat downs?
In effect, even if this reaction was just one more quick Tweet or merely seen as a chance to get some quick publicity (which has happened) someone at the ACLU acting in its name has now added pat down jokes to the list of no-no, politically incorrect topics. It’s truly an impressive achievement.
Memberships to TMV’s Get A Life Club are not awarded easily. Awards go to groups or individuals who blow something small into something big, fight mega-PC wars, or display breathtaking partisan or ideological hackery.
Congratulations for the ACLU for earning this award.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.