Yesterday, in defending DHS’s critical Automated Targeting Screening system against the privacy police (who appear to be on a candy-cane sugar high), assistant secretary for policy Stewart Baker quoted Rockwell:
I’ll start with a song from the 1980s called “Somebody’s Watching Me.”
When I come home at night, I bolt the door real tight.
People call me on the phone, I’m trying to avoid.
Well, can the people on TV see me or am I just paranoid?
We’ve all heard that sometimes “even paranoids have enemies.” That’s true, but the corollary is that much of the time, they are just paranoid. Certainly that’s true in the case of ATS.
This is a beautiful thing — both the program, which helped keep Raed al-Banna (who would go on to be a homicide bomber in Hilla, killing 132 people) out of the U.S, and Baker’s Hard Habit to Break of working Reagan-era music into his speeches.