Janet Napolitano was just three months into her tenure as secretary of Homeland Security when Matt Drudge bestowed a nickname on her: "Big Sis." The nickname stuck, thanks to Drudge's perseverance. Since that first story in April 2009, the Big Sis brand has been trotted out for dozens of Napolitano stories, from the scary ("BIG SIS: Napolitano to Kill Spy-Satellite Program") to the silly ("BIG SIS: Napolitano enlists Girl Scouts in effort to combat hurricanes, pandemics, terror attacks") to—most important—the creepy sexual stuff about the Transportation Security Administration. In January 2010, Drudge linked to a story about the government acquiring body scanners by pressing the Caps-Lock key and breaking out a photo illustration of Napolitano eying a scan of a nude: "BIG SIS WANTS TO SEE UNDER YOUR CLOTHES." 
 
 Ten months later, there is a full-blown revolt against the TSA and body scanners (which are sold by a firm with the poetically unfortunate name of Rapiscan). The revolt will crest next Wednesday, with National Opt-Out Day on the busiest travel period of the year. The accidental guerilla heroico of the revolt is John Tyner, who refused a full-body scan at San Diego International Airport then refused to let TSA agents manually search him. "You touch my junk," he said, "and I'm going to have you arrested." 
 
 What does this have to do with Matt Drudge? The Tyner Mutiny went viral because the Drudge Report gave it the blaring-siren treatment. And the site gave it the blaring-siren treatment because conservatives have been ready for a very long time to return to a familiar and comfortable opinion of Homeland Security: It must be stopped. 
 
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 That opinion was in hibernation, then partial hibernation, for a long time. Before 9/11, the prevailing conservative/libertarian/Republican opinion of the national-security state—of any government effort to protect Americans at the point of a gun and the touch of a rubber glove—was mistrust. The second most common opinion was fear. And the return of those emotions is a lagging reaction to the fact that Republicans no longer have to toe the party line on homeland security. They can say what they think, which is that the state can't be trusted. 
 
 It's worth remembering that the idea of a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security came from the Democratic Party just after the 9/11 attacks. (Just after 9/11, President Bush created an Office of Homeland Security within the White House.) It wasn't until 2002 that the Republican Party latched on to the concept and took ownership of it. As they pushed DHS through the House, however, Republicans made concessions that demonstrated just how ambivalent they were about the idea of a massive new national-security bureaucracy. Plans for national ID cards and a system to inform on possible terrorists were killed by Republicans like then majority leader and current Tea Party icon Dick Armey. Certain homeland security proposals, he said, were "not consistent with a free society." 
 
 At the time, only 12 Republicans voted against the House bill creating DHS. Most Republican candidates used their support of "a strong DHS," which quickly became a byword for "being serious about terrorism," to clobber Democrats who wanted the new federal workers hired to staff the new department to be unionized. This was not something conservatives believed in deeply. It was a useful—and, if you ask Max Cleland, successful—campaign issue. 
 
 There were always critics of the strategy. They simply didn't have much pull while Bush was president. Angry criticism of the TSA, DHS, and the surveillance state came out of a rump of congressional Republicans, from think tanks and from talk radio hosts like Alex Jones and pundits like Andrew Napolitano. But none of this challenged Republicans' strategic thinking. The first victories of the conservative civil liberties crowd came in 2007 and 2008, when they successfully beat back a plan for a national ID card—technically, nationally compatible state IDs—that had been scrapped from the first DHS bill. 
 
 Tea Party activists like to date the backlash to big government to the 2008 passage of TARP. But the backlash against the TSA started a little earlier. According to Tom Blank, the deputy administrator of TSA in the post-9/11 years, the agency was always cognizant of how unpopular scanning could be. 
 
 "I used to sit around and look at these images, dial them back, and ask myself how do I take this to Capitol Hill and not be thrown out on my head?" said Blank. "When [Bush's second TSA administrator] Kip Hawley came in [in 2005], he changed that. He saw the politics of it and deep-sixed the program. He deep-sixed it. It got revived after the Christmas bomber." 
 
 The point about how full-body scanning got restarted is essential—it was the Obama administration picking up an idea that Republicans had cooled on. Republicans accused the administration of degrading security by dialing back war-on-terror prosecutions in the name of human rights; the response was a security measure that would affect all travelers randomly. So maybe the Drudge Report didn't really invent a backlash against Napolitano. The backlash was inevitable. Republican trust in a sprawling and invasive security apparatus was always precarious. Its collapse leaves the TSA and the Obama administration with yet another libertarian, anti-state riot on their hands. 
 
 They have the media, too, for what that's worth. Alex Altman's take on the "hysteria" in Time dismissed the backlash as "tailor-made for the Internet's ephemeral obsessions" and at odds with a Pew poll showing 81 percent of people accepting full-body scans. "Sometimes the screams of an aggrieved minority drowns out the rest of the public," said Altman, "and this may be one of those cases." 
 
 Which may be true. Or not. In 2009, the smart take on the rage against health-care reform was that it was ephemeral, tailor-made for the aggrieved minority, a bunch of anti-government yokels screaming about a policy they didn't understand. Yet that rage clearly lasted long enough to hurt the Democrats at the polls this month. And health care reform at least had a cheering section in the liberal press. That press isn't cheering on the TSA. Democrats aren't particularly fond of the way the TSA operates. Pilots aren't happy. In an age of right-wing backlashes to the state, the only surprise is that this took so long. 
 
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 Like Slate Politics on Facebook. Follow Slate on Twitter. ||||| Suppose that during the previous administration the Democrats had opposed President Bush's efforts to protect airplanes from would-be bombers and had blocked his strategy to keep nuclear weapons out of terrorists' hands. 
 
 It's a safe bet Bush would charge, as he did more than once during his presidency, that Democrats are "not interested in the security of the American people." Other Republicans would no doubt be running ads juxtaposing Democrats with Osama bin Laden, or alleging, as they did then, that Democrats are giving "comfort to America's enemies." 
 
 Yet right now, Republicans are providing the comfort. They are objecting loudly to new airport security measures designed to detect bombs hidden under clothing. And they are blocking a Senate vote on a treaty with Russia that is critical to securing loose nukes and keeping Iran from gaining the bomb. 
 
 For Democrats, the opposition's gamesmanship with the security should present an opportunity. Republicans seem to have entered a post-post-9/11 era, in which national security is no longer a higher priority than their interest in undermining President Obama. There's no need to resort to the demagoguery once used against Democrats, but neither would it hurt the White House and congressional Democrats to point out that their opponents are trying to weaken Americans' security. 
 
 Let's start with START, the proposed nuclear pact with Russia that Senate Republicans such as Jon Kyl (Ariz.) are attempting to derail, at least until the next Congress. Since the expiration of the previous START treaty last December, there have been no U.S. inspectors in Russia to keep an eye on the country's thousands of nuclear warheads. If the Senate doesn't come up with the 67 votes needed for ratification, says Travis Sharp of the Center for a New American Security, there's a risk Russia will retaliate by removing its logistical support for the U.S. war in Afghanistan, abandoning its cooperation in preventing nuclear proliferation, and thwarting U.S. efforts to keep Iran from gaining nuclear weapons. 
 
 But don't take his word for it. Listen to Richard Lugar, top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations committee and one man who still puts the national interest above political considerations. "We're talking today about the national security of the United States of America," he pleaded on Wednesday. "[T]his treaty must be ratified and be ratified in this session of the Congress.... We're talking about thousands of warheads that are still there, an existential problem for our country. To temporize at this point I think is inexcusable." 
 
 Or listen to Bob Gates, the Bush/Obama defense secretary. "The new START treaty has the unanimous support of America's military leadership," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal, calling for a strong bipartisan majority to support the treaty because of "the security it provides to the American people." 
 
 To borrow Bush's phrase, are Republicans not interested in the security of the American people? 
 
 Then there's the backlash over the new imaging and pat-downs being used to screen airport passengers for explosives. A CBS News poll found that 81 percent of Americans favor use of the new imaging machines, but Republican lawmakers feel otherwise. 
 
 In the House, Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) has already introduced legislation rescinding the new security. Meanwhile, Republican senators, rediscovering their inner civil libertarians, this week took turns criticizing Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole over the administration's tightened security. 
 
 "I wouldn't want my wife to be touched in the way that these folks are being touched. I wouldn't want to be touched that way," said Sen. George LeMieux (Fla.). "I think weve gone too far." 
 
 Sen. Mike Johanns (Neb.) warned of a "tipping point" against security screening. "Does that worry you, that maybe we're at a point here where... people just thing you've overstepped?" 
 
 Pistole reminded Johanns that "the threats are real." 
 
 "I'm thinking nothing's going to change," Johanns complained. 
 
 Pistole's response should shame Johanns and his colleagues. "If your question is, do I understand the sensitivities of people? Yes. If you're asking, am I going to change the policies? No, because I think that it is being informed by the latest intelligence, the latest efforts by terrorists to kill our people in the air. No, I'm not going to change those policies." 
 
 This may be the post-post-9/11 era, but Pistole, a career FBI guy, is still interested in the security of the American people. Are Republicans? 
 
 danamilbank@washpost.com 
 
 Dana Milbank was online to chat with Post readers at 11:30 a.m. Friday, Nov. 19. You can read a trasncript of the discussion here.
– If Democrats had opposed President George W. Bush’s efforts to protect airplanes, the former president likely would have accused them of not caring about national security, and “Republicans would no doubt be running ads juxtaposing Democrats with Osama bin Laden,” writes Dana Milbank in the Washington Post. But here we are nine years out from 9/11, and it’s the Republicans objecting—“loudly”—to the new TSA procedures. "National security is no longer a higher priority than their interest in undermining President Obama,” he writes in a column that also discusses their opposition to the new arms-control treaty with Russia. Last week on Slate, David Weigel made a similar point: “Before 9/11, the prevailing conservative/libertarian/Republican opinion of the national-security state—of any government effort to protect Americans at the point of a gun and the touch of a rubber glove—was mistrust.” But we’re now in, Milbank writes, “the post-post-9/11 era ,” and “for Democrats, the opposition's gamesmanship with the security should present an opportunity. There's no need to resort to the demagoguery once used against Democrats, but neither would it hurt the White House and congressional Democrats to point out that their opponents are trying to weaken Americans' security.”