Well, the airline employees' unions now have a choice. They can exit this whole debate because they got theirs, leaving passengers to their ugly fate... which is exactly what TSA wants. (Divide and conquer is right.) Or they can connect the dots between patdown outrage, cancelled travel, and their own job security, and advocate for all of us.

By the same token, I hope that if and when TSA tries to buy off FT-class frequent flyers with some kind of trusted-traveler biometric solution that keeps the blueshirts' fingers out of our shorts, we have the good political sense to reject that divide-and-conquer tactic and say: hell no.