Meanwhile, the TSA Frisks Grandma

Pragmatic people that we Americans are, we told Cornell University pollsters (here) that many of us would like to see restrictions on the people most likely to be terrorists. (Disclaimer: Generalization is bad; not all Muslims are terrorists; not all ACLU lawyers are hopeless jerks, there's reportedly one nice one in Cleveland.)

Some survey participants are pretty darn tough:

• 27 percent of respondents support requiring all Muslim Americans to register where they lived with the federal government. (Sorry, that's a bit too much like Star of David arm bands for me.)
• 22 percetn favored racial profiling to identify potential terrorist threats. (Count me in!)
• 29 percent thought undercover agents should infiltrate Muslim civic and volunteer organizations to keep tabs on their activities and fund-raising. (Sounds reasonable.)

The most surprising finding in the survey,though, is that more respondants (48%) think Muslim Americans should face no restrictions of any kind, while only 44 percent favored at least some kind of restrictions. (Arabs are less than one-half of one percent of the US population, so the "no restrictions" group would have won with or without Arab-Americans respondents -- and we can't assume all Arab-Americans polled would say "no restrictions.")

Who are these people? After 9/11, Madrid and the bin Laden tapes, it is hard to imagine that people would think that all Muslims are above suspicion. Certainly, there are many who see America as a completely hassle-free zone where individual rights far outweigh society's safety. They're called the ACLU.

It's obvious that you can't ask these questions without a lot of people getting the topic confused with Iraq, Abu Ghraib and the Patriot Act. Political compartmentalization, combined with PC thinking has led half of our country down a trail where they would rather by shredded by shrapnel than be judgmental.

So if you're travelling this Christmas, just remember that you're in the minority if you think it's incredibly stupid to frisk four year old blue-eyed blondes and just say "Happy Holidays!" to the young Muslim males as they pass through.