Downsize Big Sis
The insane new TSA screening protocols are a PR response to that one airline passenger who had something nasty in his underpants — and he didn’t even board his plane in the US. That’s it. End of story. Trillions of passenger miles, one incident, and a bureaucracy goes crazy.
That awful and incompetent Homeland Security woman wanted to shut the barn door after the horse left, even though the horse was on a different continent. Since rational thought is not PC-compliant, according to the illustrious dunderheads of this administration, she went with the next best thing, which is to infuriate almost everyone in America who flies regularly.
The US has over 800,000,000 airline passengers in a year, and so far, no domestic underwear bombers. So the ratio of tears, assault charges, humorous blog posts and lawsuits to attacks is going to be pretty large. Arrogance times incompetence equals outrage — the Obama administration pretty much has the market cornered on that equation.
There are glaring flaws to the “X-ray or patdown” protocol. The first is that the system, as designed, does not work. As we pointed out the other day, all the bad guy has to do is put the C4 or PETN up his bum like a cocaine mule, and all the intrusive patdowns in the world aren’t going to find it.
Second, the airports where full-body scanners are not operative aren’t doing the patdowns at all, and even if an airport has a few, you won’t qualify for a patdown unless you’re in the line that has the scanner. (You only get the patdown if you opt out of the X-ray machine.) There were no patdowns this week before our flights at JFK and LAX, for example. All a hypothetical bad guy has to do is choose his flight with care.
The US has created a billion dollar system for a non-existent problem that doesn’t even solve the problem it was meant to address. A lot of people should be fired for this, starting with Big Sis.
November 21st, 2010 at 4:37 am
They will push until we push back. I’m driving. I’m voting.