A liberal is a conservative who's been harassed by cops

Salon's Ask The Pilot columnist gets detained by cops at two different airports for the vague crime of taking photographs. Apparently there are some things you're "not supposed to" take pictures of -- but no one can say what those are.

Last night on MSNBC's "Countdown," there was this exchange:

Host Keith Olbermann: We have talked before, with deep sadness, about the politicizing of counterterror measures here. You have just put this into a political context. My stomach is queasy as I ask this. In the context of this today, and what you have seen, are we far enough removed from that component of the novel "1984," the part where the government turns a kind of terror faucet on and off to scare the public into acquiescing to whatever it wants to do?

Author Gerald Posner: Lookit, I'm afraid we are, unfortunately, at that point, where we are in a real war, there's no question about it. We have fundamentalists out there who would love to kill more innocent Americans in vast numbers. They'd love to pull off a weapon-of-mass-destruction attack. But at the same time, the government is also very effective, the Bush administration, at using terror as a political weapon and making sure that it does turn on the fear spigot when it wants to and turn it off at other times.

Countdown, Olbermann, Posner, security measures, airports, Ask the Pilot