One difference between being a senator and being the rest of us? If you get stopped by an airport security scanner, it's all part of the price for our Enhanced Security Nation. If an archconservative senator gets stopped by the exact same scanner, it is quickly seen as
evidence of a probable conspiracy:
Paul walked into the main terminal at Reagan National hours behind schedule, thanks to an incident at the airport in Nashville he said included him being “detained” by TSA agents for refusing a pat down after a scanner went off as he went through it. Paul said he was held “in a cubicle” at the Nashville airport and told he was not allowed to make any phone calls. Eventually, he told a gaggle of reporters at the DC airport, he left the screening area and was allowed to be re-scanned. The machine didn’t go off, and Paul caught his flight to DC.
The difference between those two scans — one triggering an alarm and one not — will lead to a formal Senate inquiry, Paul (who has been a strong critic of the TSA’s pat down policy) told me in the airport.
Paul questioned why the machine would go off once and then not a second time. He said he suspects the equipment is rigged to set off false positives that then allow the TSA to conduct random pat downs without having to pull a passenger aside.
Two different scanners gave different results? It must be a secret government conspiracy, says the conservative member of that same government. Couldn't be differences in calibration, or the likelihood that the machines might kinda suck. No, it must be a secret Detain This Person button.
Well, go figure: I never thought a member of the Paul family would be so keen on anti-government conspiracy theories, but there we are. We're going to get a formal government inquiry because a sitting senator, as opposed to any other member of the vast American public that has to put up with this crap on a daily basis, was momentarily delayed at an airport. We'll call it Airportgategate. We'll figure out some possible connection to ACORN. This invasion of a (politically powerful) person's privacy will not stand.
As was pointed out previously, Rand Paul was detained because he refused to be patted down by a government-paid stranger after the first scanner triggered. Apparently he felt strongly about this government-sanctioned invasion of his privacy, which led to him being delayed while traveling to give a speech on how government should have expanded powers to take people's privacy away from them.
It's not clear if the scanners have a "detain this person" button. It is clear, however, that they are carefully calibrated for irony.